Yalta

MALTA, THE CRIMEA 30 JANUARY - 15 FEBRUARY 1945

‘It was the best I could do’

ROOSEVELT

1

Getting There

The sun glistened on the waves and a light breeze blew as the President’s heavy cruiser, the Quincy, entered the harbour of Valetta on the island of Malta at 9.30 a. m. on 2 February. Spitfires flew overhead. Bands on British ships played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Roosevelt sat on the deck, his black cape draped on his shoulders, a cotton cap on his head, acknowledging the salutes from warships and the cheering from crowds on the quayside; all the island was out to greet him. Passing the British cruiser Orion, the American leader spotted Churchill. The two leaders waved to one another. Roosevelt held much of the world’s fate in his hands, Eden wrote in his diary.1

He had gone through his fourth inauguration on 20 January. He insisted on standing for the ceremony and, despite the bitter cold, did not wear a coat, hat or waistcoat. Before the lunch that day, he suffered an angina attack - to revive himself, he drained half a glass of whisky as if it was a soft drink. Passing his chair at the occasion, Frances Perkins said she would pray for him. ‘For God’s sake, do,’ he replied. ‘I need it.’

Two days later, he boarded the Quincy at the naval base at Newport

News. The big ship took him 4,883 miles across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean to stop at the British island on the way to the summit in the Crimea. He celebrated his sixty-third birthday at sea on 30 January - among the gifts was a package from Lucy Rutherfurd and Margaret Suckley containing useful gifts for the trip, such as thermometers, pocket combs and a cigarette lighter for use in the ocean wind.

Hopkins said later that most of those around Roosevelt opposed the journey and ‘could not understand why the President of the United States should cart himself all over the world to meet Stalin’. Suckley recorded that her cousin ‘doesn’t relish this trip at all—thinks it will be very wearing & feels that he will have to be so much on the alert in his conversations with Uncle Joe and WSC. The conversations will last interminably & will involve very complicated questions.’

Perkins recalled that his appearance veered sharply, with very brief fainting fits. ‘From looking badly and looking as if he were a ghost, in a couple of hours later, you’d see he’d be all right... he’d look fine again - his eyes bright,’ she wrote. ‘The change in appearance had to do with the incoming of a kind of glassy eye, and an extremely drawn look around the jaw and cheeks, and even a sort of dropping of the muscles of control of the jaw and mouth, as though they weren’t working exactly... close to, you would see that his hands were weak.’

When he boarded the Quincy in Malta, Averell Harriman was ‘terribly shocked’ to see the President’s physical deterioration since their last meeting in Washington in the autumn. Roosevelt admitted that his ‘ticker trouble’ was far more serious than generally thought to his daughter, Anna Boettinger, who was accompanying him to Yalta—she was lodged in the admiral’s quarters. Charles Bohlen, who had been with Hopkins on his tour of western Europe, found the one-time Happy Warrior ‘not only frail and desperately tired, but ill’.

The hand of death was on the President, but his desire to do all he could to make the summit a success was such that he accepted the argument from the Kremlin that it was Stalin’s state of health which meant they had to meet at Yalta. That this was an initial power play—and also pandered to the dictator’s dislike of flying—was evident. Yet, the President must have sensed that he might not have much time left in which to achieve his global aims, so he made the long journey.

Travelling under the codename of Colonel Kent, Churchill had flown from snowy London to Malta on 30 January, with his daughter Sarah. Sitting huddled in his greatcoat on his converted bomber, he looked like ‘a poor hot pink baby about to cry,’ she reported to her mother. Developing a high temperature once again, he rested on a British warship after arriving, sitting, his daughter noted, like ‘a dejected lump’ on his bed before stretching out and ‘sleeping like a lamb’.2

Churchill read a book on India, which made him depressed. He wrote to Clementine that he was determined to make sure the imperial flag was ‘not let down while I am at the wheel’. ‘The world is in a frightful state,’ he told her in a cable. ‘The whole world appals me and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.’ Moran recorded in his diary that, at one point, his patient turned his face to the wall and called out for his wife. He ended his message to her:

Tender Love my darling I miss you very much I am lonely amid this throng Your ever loving husband.

By 2 February, Churchill was well enough to cross to the American cruiser to see Roosevelt. The two men lunched with their daughters and Eden and Stettinius. Roosevelt had a small candle set by his visitor’s place to light his cigars.3

Strong pressure from Downing Street over the previous month -’pertinacity’ Churchill called it—had induced the American leader to agree to the bilateral encounter before they met Stalin. Churchill, who counted on a follow-up meeting after the Big Three summit, greeted this by drafting a couplet reading:

No more let us alter or falter or palter.

From Malta to Yalta, and Yalta to Malta.

He thought better of employing the rarely used verb at the end of the first line, meaning, according to various definitions, ‘to mumble, babble, shuffle in statement or dealing’, ‘to act or talk insincerely or deceitfully’, and ‘to haggle in bargaining’. ‘Perhaps it was as well that I did not send it,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Instead, his message declared: ‘No more let us falter! From Malta to Yalta! Let nobody falter!’

Before the two leaders arrived in Malta, the Combined Chiefs of Staff held half a dozen meetings to review war plans, during which Eisenhower’s staff outlined the push on the Rhine. Sitting on either side of a long, rectangular table with a globe positioned at one end, they agreed that the most likely date for victory was 20 June 1945, though it was possible that the Soviet offensive might advance this to the middle of April. There was a sharp clash over strategy, with the British wanting to go faster and the Americans insisting on a broad front approach.

Eden and Stettinius met for a day of talks. The main matter was Poland, on which Eden was pleased to find the Secretary of State and Hopkins ‘fully alive’ to the seriousness of the issue. Stettinius warned that an ‘equitable solution’ was needed to satisfy US public opinion, particularly Catholics. Simple recognition of the Lublin Committee was out of the question; what was needed was a council of all groups.

As for Roosevelt, while acquiescing to the meeting in Malta, he was in no hurry to talk substance, setting off after lunch on a thirty-mile motor tour of the island. When he and Churchill did hold a session with the Chiefs of Staff, it lasted just fifty minutes. Brooke wrote in his diary that the Prime Minister had not read the briefing paper and ‘made the most foolish remarks’. Though disinclined to be involved in details, Roosevelt did get Churchill’s reluctant accord to withdraw 2 British divisions from Greece, and to send 3 divisions from Italy to north-west Europe. Dinner on the Quincy that night was a social occasion. After it, Roosevelt was driven to the airfield and was hoisted on an elevator into his converted bomber where he went to bed, awaiting the 3.30 a. m. takeoff for the Crimea - there was, he said, ‘an awful day ahead,’ but he had succeeded in avoiding the kind of planning session Churchill so desired.

Eden pointed out to Hopkins ‘that we were going into a decisive conference and had so far neither agreed what we would discuss nor how to handle matters with a Bear who would certainly know his mind’. The British could only note, in the Foreign Secretary’s words, how Roosevelt ‘moved out of step with us, influenced by his conviction that he could get better results with Stalin direct than could the three countries negotiating together.’

It was not a matter of the President trusting the Marshal, rather of seeking to manoeuvre him into positions that suited American ends. This was not a game Roosevelt could refrain from. ‘What he thought he could

Do was to outwit Stalin as he had done with so many interlocutors,’ as Walter Lippmann wrote. At Yalta, he wanted agreement on the United Nations and a firm commitment of Soviet entry into the war in the Pacific. Apart from Germany, he was not greatly concerned about Europe, and did not wish to see issues such as Poland clouding his main targets or, even worse, endangering his post-war plans.

For his part, Stalin came to Yalta with clear aims—to maintain the deep security zone conquered by the Red Army in eastern Europe, to assert his country’s position as a great power, and to ensure that Germany would not be able to attack Russia again. ‘We are interested in decisions and not in discussions,’ as he said at one point. He would show himself a self-assured master of negotiation, he and Molotov forming a perfect team.

Churchill’s position was much weaker, as the other two leaders well knew. He could still speak strongly and eloquently, making very valid points. But his country was the least powerful of the Allies, and had long lost its aura of 1940. The Americans and Soviets both felt they had the wind of the future in their sails; the Prime Minister, all too easily, appeared to be a man of the past, desperate to hold on to what he had and knowing that his country’s power and status would depend on him being able to manoeuvre between the other two. Though there was the usual bonhomie when the Big Three met for the second and last time, he and the other two were, as Bohlen wrote, ‘waging a fierce struggle on the shape of the postwar world’.

On the night of 2 February, a flight of 25 aircraft flew the 700 Americans and British over the Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Seas to Saki airfield in the Crimea.4

Roosevelt’s ‘Sacred Cow’ arrived first, with a fighter escort. The President stayed in the plane until Churchill landed twenty minutes later after what he described as ‘a long and cold flight’. Wearing his dark cape and a trilby hat, the American leader was lowered to the slushy ground, and put into an open jeep from which he leaned forward, smiling broadly to chat with Hopkins. Molotov stood beside them, his right hand stuck into his black overcoat. A Soviet driver drove the President past an honour guard, the Prime Minister walking alongside.

Roosevelt appeared frail and ill, Churchill recalled. Moran noted that he looked straight ahead with his mouth open, ‘as if he was not taking things in’. Churchill tried to raise summit issues, but the Soviet microphones bugging them picked up Roosevelt telling him everything had been discussed and decided.

After being served vodka, champagne, caviar, smoked sturgeon and black bread, the visitors boarded a fleet of Lend-Lease Packards with Russian drivers for the eighty-mile road from Saki to Yalta through deep valleys, with torrents rushing down from the mountains. The going was slow on the bumpy, snowy road. The countryside was bleak; only a few peasants were to be seen. Soviet troops, some of them women, stood guard, raising their rifles at a 30-degree angle in salute. As the cars climbed to a 2,500-foot mountain pass, the lowering clouds gave way to bright sunshine. When not snoozing, Roosevelt stared at gutted buildings, burned out trains and wrecked tanks—it was his first sight of the devastation of the war. In the separate British motorcade, Churchill asked Sarah how long they had been going.

‘About an hour,’ she replied.

‘Christ,’ he exclaimed. ‘Five more hours of this.’ He began to swear as his daughter worried about the lack of toilet facilities.

Two hours later, the British stopped to eat stale ham sandwiches brought from Malta, with soup and a swig of brandy. ‘The call of nature was pretty desperate by now!’ Sarah wrote to her mother. ‘I scanned the horizon: cars in front — press photographers behind!! Obviously no future in that!’

Driving on, they reached a rest house where they were led to a small room with tables covered with food and wine—and a toilet. The Americans had not stopped, but the British ate what they could. Continuing their journey, they found the countryside more attractive crossing the mountains and descending through cypress trees towards the Black Sea. Churchill recited Byron’s Don Juan before falling asleep.

Famous for health cures and its association with Chekhov, Yalta was badly damaged in fighting before the Germans withdrew, taking everything with them down to the doorknobs. Given the destruction, Churchill described the resort as ‘the Riviera of Hades’. Four NKVD regiments guarded the town. Anti-aircraft batteries were set up, and 160 fighter planes deployed. More than 70,000 local inhabitants were checked, and 835 arrested as security risks. A thousand workers were drafted in to repair the accommodation. Hotel staff came from Moscow, bringing plates and cutlery. Bakeries were set up. A US naval delousing team arrived, but Anna Roosevelt found insects in the beds.5

Roosevelt and senior members of his party occupied the twenty-one-room Livadia Palace, overlooking the sea, its white walls camouflaged. The former summer home of the last Tsars, who had been visited there by Mark Twain, it had been a rest home before the war and was then taken over by the German commander. The American leader’s ground-floor suite consisted of a living room, dining room and a bedroom in the Tsar’s study. As at Teheran, he had the single private bath— Kathleen Harriman and the President’s daughter shared a small room opposite it. Anna wrote to her husband, John Boettinger, that the mattress was so thin she could feel the springs. A Soviet military officer, she added, ‘tried to pet me’. Roosevelt described him as ‘a most sinister-appearing pest’ who resembled some big businessmen he had known. Hopkins told Anna that Kathleen had had a torrid affair with Franklin Roosevelt Jr. She informed her father.6

George Marshall was in the Tsar’s bedroom while Admiral King

Was ribbed for occupying the Tsarina’s boudoir. The rest of the American party stayed in recently renovated, whitewashed rooms on the upper floor or in houses on the surrounding estate. Sixteen colonels shared one room.

Down the coast, the British had a light-brown, late Tsarist-era mansion built for a prince in a mixture of Gothic and Moroccan styles. Outside stood six large stone statues of lions. In the conservatory, there was a fish tank, which was empty, but was filled with goldfish by the Russians after Charles Portal remarked on it being unfilled—Sarah Churchill saw the RAF chief feeding them with bluebottles he caught in the library.

The villa looked ‘a bit like a Scottish baronial hall inside and a Swiss Chalet plus Mosque outside’, she wrote to her mother. ‘Though the ablutions question is grim, it is warm and light, and Russian hospitality leaves little to be desired...Papa is very sweet and insists on me sharing his bathroom which I do—but if you were a spectator along the bedroom corridors here at about 7.30 in the morning, you would see 3 Field Marshals queuing for a bucket! ’ Cadogan called the mansion ‘of indescribably ugliness...with all the furnishings of an almost terrifying hideosity’. At least he got to share Eden’s bathroom. Again, there were bugs in the beds; Churchill was bitten in the foot. But Brooke was pleased by the birds on the shore in front of the house, spotting a great northern diver among the gulls.

Stalin settled into a villa on an estate once owned by the assassin of Rasputin, set in formal gardens with large pools and statues. The building had twenty rooms, and a 77-square-foot hall. A bomb shelter was constructed and a telephone exchange installed so that he could keep in touch with the Kremlin and the war fronts.

Snow-capped mountains rose behind all three mansions, offering protection from the wind. The Black Sea stretched in front, a promenade running along the shore. The town was surrounded by woods, vineyards, fruit farms and shingle beaches. Most of its houses were roofless shells.

There was caviar at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and decanters of vodka in the bedrooms — Sergio Beria recalled that the American and British guards regularly drank themselves under the table, and had to be carried to bed. Communication with the Russian staff was difficult as they did not speak English. After much pantomime, Hopkins’s son, who was there as an army photographer, got over the message that he liked to start the day with eggs. He was brought a dozen, fried—along with a

Saucer of caviar. Soviet secret police kept a close watch. When Anna, Kathy and Robert Hopkins went for a walk and gave a child a chocolate bar, a soldier following them forced the infant to return it. ‘Russian children aren’t in need of food,’ he said. After one meeting, Stalin went to the toilet when the guards were not looking. Two of them rushed up to Bohlen yelling ‘Where’s Stalin? Where has he gone?’ They calmed down when the American told them.

Arriving by train on the morning of Sunday 4 February, Stalin called on Churchill and Roosevelt separately in the afternoon. He told the Prime Minister that he was optimistic about the progress of the war, reporting that the Soviet forces had established bridgeheads across the Oder River on Poland’s western frontier. This put them only fifty miles from Berlin.7

Meeting Stalin in a small anteroom off the main entrance hall of the Livadia Palace, Roosevelt grinned and shook his host’s hand warmly. The dictator gave a slight smile. They sat down on a plush couch with an inlaid table in front of them. Roosevelt, wearing a light suit and brightly coloured tie, mixed Martinis, and handed over a glass, apologising for the lack of lemon peel. The following morning, the Americans found a huge tree with 200 lemons standing by the door, flown in from Georgia.8

With Molotov and the two interpreters the only other people in the room, Roosevelt remarked that he had made bets aboard the Quincy that the Red Army would get to Berlin before the Americans reached Manila. Stalin gave a rather different report from what he had just told Churchill -hard fighting was holding up Soviet forces. Roosevelt said Eisenhower would not cross the Rhine till March because floating ice would cause difficulties earlier. Referring to the destruction he had seen on the drive to Yalta, he added: ‘I’m more bloodthirsty than a year ago.’

When the talk turned to de Gaulle’s visit to Moscow the President added he was going to say something indiscreet he would not mention in front of Churchill. The British were ‘a peculiar people’ who thought of artificially building up a French army against Germany. In this, they wished ‘to have their cake and eat it’. They seemed to think the US should restore order in France, and then hand them political control.

What about France getting its occupation zone in Germany? Stalin asked.

Only out of kindness, the President replied.

That would be the only reason to give France a zone, Stalin concurred.

There was an element of play-acting in this. During his visit to Paris, Hopkins had undertaken that France would get a zone, which he would not have done without Roosevelt’s authorisation. Stalin may well have learned of this from Communists in the administration in Paris. But bad-mouthing the French always has its appeal.

The Big Three then walked into their first full session with the military men. A lengthy paper from the Soviet General Staff described the eastern front campaign. Stalin said the Red Army had, out of ‘our duty as allies’, moved sooner than planned to help relieve pressure on the Anglo-American forces when they came under attack in the Ardennes. Churchill responded that Stalin could be depended on to do the right thing.

When the Russians asked for more air attacks on German communications lines to stop Hitler moving troops to the east, the British and Americans agreed to step up raids on Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden.9

* * * *

The Americans were the first dinner hosts at the summit. By Russian standards, the menu was modest — caviar, consomme, sturgeon, beef, sweet cakes, fruit, vodka, five varieties of wine. For once, Roosevelt did not mix cocktails.10

The pressures of war were being felt by all three—Churchill was seventy, Stalin sixty-five, Roosevelt the youngest at sixty-three but in the worst health. Still, the US record reported that they ‘appeared to be in very good humour throughout’. But Eden found the President ‘vague and loose and ineffective’, while Churchill talked too much. There were serious moments at the meal. Stalin said small countries should not have rights to enable them to contradict the big states; the Big Powers could not be put on the same rung as Albania. Roosevelt said the Big Three should write the peace. At which Churchill recited a verse: ‘The eagle should permit the small birds to sing and care not wherefore they sang.’

When the Prime Minister raised his glass to the proletarian masses, the talk turned to the rights of people to govern themselves and get rid of leaders. Vyshinsky told Bohlen Americans should learn to obey their

Leaders and not raise questions. The diplomat replied that he would like to see the Russian go to the United States and say that. Vyshinsky responded that he would be glad to do so.

Roosevelt then said the American people would not let him keep troops in Europe after the war. Stalin could not have missed the import of this, but merely remarked that the West’s weakness was that its people did not delegate permanent rights such as the. Kremlin enjoyed.

Then there was an awkward moment when Roosevelt mentioned that he and Churchill referred to the Soviet leader in telegrams as ‘Uncle Joe’.

According to Roosevelt’s account of the time when he needled Churchill at Teheran to win over Stalin, he had mentioned the nickname then without provoking a reaction. But now the dictator asked angrily: ‘When can I leave this table?’

‘Half an hour,’ Churchill replied.

James Byrnes, the Director of the Office of War Mobilization, saved the day. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘you do not mind talking about Uncle Sam, so why should Uncle Joe be so bad?’

Stalin subsided. Molotov said later his boss understood the joke.

At 3.55 p. m. on the Monday, as a Soviet newsreel cameraman at the entrance to the Livadia put it: ‘first the huge cigar entered, which was followed by Winston Churchill, accompanied by his adjutant and his daughter Sarah.’ A doorman, half concealed by the cloud of smoke, took his coat and fur hat. Seeing the cameraman, the British leader, who was in uniform with two rows of medals, pushed Sarah forward.11

Stalin was hardly visible among the throng of taller generals surrounding him. He wore his marshal’s tunic with gold shoulder boards and walked slowly, through the hall, waving from time to time to photographers. Finally, the half doors of the President’s quarters opened and Roosevelt, who had been conferring with Hopkins, was wheeled out by a valet. He smiled, and shook hands with the other leaders. Then they went into the one-time Tsarist ballroom.

Twenty-six men sat at the table or on lines of chairs behind, the sun shining on them through French windows. At one end of the table, Stalin was flanked by Molotov, Vyshinsky, Maisky, Gousev and Gromyko.

Eden sat beside Churchill at the other end of the table. The rest of the British party consisted of Cadogan, Clark Kerr and Sir Edward Bridges, the Cabinet secretary. On the other side of the table, Roosevelt was surrounded by Hopkins, Stettinius, Harriman, Byrnes, Leahy and H. Freeman Matthews, head of the State Department’s European section. Bohlen, Pavlov and Birse interpreted.

Given Stettinius’s lack of experience, Hopkins, who took the room next to Roosevelt’s suite, continued to play a key role, even though he spent most of the summit in bed, and lost eighteen pounds. He had fallen ill again with dysentery during his trip to Europe, and had been drinking too much. He joked that his health had been fine until he had met the Pope. Moran described him as ‘only half in this world... his skin was a yellow-white membrane stretched tight over his bones.’ Getting up for plenary sessions, he sat behind Roosevelt. Back in bed, he held meetings with the delegation.

The leaders met each afternoon, for three or four hours from 4 p. m. The military chiefs held sessions in the morning. The Foreign Ministers gathered at lunchtime, their discussions delayed by toasts—seventeen on one occasion.

There was no orderly agenda. Issues were brought up, and dropped or shunted off. This could be confusing; but, in the best Rooseveltian manner, it meant arguments usually broke off below boiling point. Though the State Department had drawn up detailed ‘black books’ on topics which would arise, it became obvious that the President had not studied them closely.

Stalin was well informed about the thinking of the other participants by the Soviet spy ring in Britain and moles in Washington. He had also been supplied with psychological profiles of the two leaders. As at Teheran, microphones bugged the visitors. The listeners anticipated that Roosevelt would be wheeled out from time to time into the gardens of the Palace, so they traced a route, and placed microphones along it.

The Americans were warned that, if they deviated from the paths, they might be blown up by unexploded mines.

* * * *

The first subject for political discussion was Germany. Roosevelt handed out a map of the occupation zones. He rambled on about his youthful visits to Germany, talking of the evils of centralisation in what Bohlen called an ‘inconclusive statement that didn’t even hang together’. It was, the diplomat thought, ‘the one place where I felt that his ill health might have affected his thinking’. His remarks were met with polite indifference from Stalin and boredom from the British. Churchill fiddled with his cigar, tapping his fingers on the table, Eden looked into the distance.12

In contrast, Stalin was all business. He wanted to know how Germany was to be dismembered—into five zones as he and Roosevelt had envisaged at Teheran or into Prussian and Austrian-Bavarian federations with the Ruhr and Westphalia under international control, as Churchill had suggested on his visit to Moscow. The Prime Minister objected that such decisions would take more than the five or six days of the summit, and he said he would find it difficult to do more than give assent to the principle of dismemberment. A month earlier, he had noted to Eden the danger of ‘having a poisoned community in the heart of Europe’. He felt it best to leave the long-term future of Germany till later, he told the Foreign Secretary, rather than trying ‘to write out on little pieces of paper what the vast emotions of an outraged and quivering world will be either immediately after the struggle is over or when the inevitable cold fit follows the hot.’

At the suggestion of Hopkins, Roosevelt shuffled off the issue by proposing that the Foreign Ministers should be asked to produce a plan in twenty-four hours — nothing came of this, leaving the military situation on the ground largely to decide the outcome. Bohlen thought none of the Big Three had his heart in dismemberment. The President had lost interest and ‘was just giving lip service to a dying idea’. Churchill could see the need for Germany, as well as France, to balance Soviet power.

Confirming what Hopkins had told de Gaulle, Roosevelt agreed with Churchill that France should be given an occupation zone, carved out of US and British areas. Stalin said he had no objection so long as the French did not participate in the Control Commission that would supervise Germany.

Paris should share in helping to ‘keep Germany down’, Churchill remarked, since it was not known how long the United States would remain in its zone.

‘I should like to know the President’s opinion,’ Stalin said.

‘I can get the people and Congress to cooperate fully for peace but not to keep an army in Europe a long time,’ was the reply. ‘Two years would be the limit.’

In his memoirs, Churchill described this as ‘a momentous statement’. In the meeting, he said he hoped it would be according to circumstances, adding: ‘At all events we shall need the French to help us.’

‘France is our ally,’ Stalin interjected. ‘We signed a pact with her. We want her to have a large army.’ But he opposed Paris taking part in the control machinery.

‘If the French are to have a zone, how can they be excluded from the control machinery?’ Eden broke in. Molotov ended the discussion by saying it was agreed that France should have an occupation zone but that the Foreign Ministers should consider its relation to the control machinery.

Though the Morgenthau Plan was dead, Stalin told Maisky to set out Moscow’s draconian scheme for reparations. Factories, machinery and rolling stock, amounting to 80 per cent of heavy industry, were to be removed in the two years after the war ended. Payments in kind would go on for ten years. All plants used to make weapons, including aviation factories, would be taken out of the country. Churchill recalled how little reparations had yielded after the First World War. He was haunted by the spectre of a starving Germany. If you wished a horse to pull a wagon, you had at least to give it fodder, he remarked. Right, Stalin replied, but take care the horse does not turn round and kick you.

That night, before going to sleep, Churchill told his daughter: ‘I do not suppose that at any moment in history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.’13

At the next plenary the following afternoon, the first subject was the global body, on which Roosevelt pinned his hopes for peace. Some of the American team were disconcerted to find that Stalin had not read the proposal about voting Security Council procedures sent by Washington two months earlier. ‘That guy can’t be very interested in this peace organisation,’ Hopkins remarked.14

Churchill reassured Stalin that, while the behaviour of the great powers could be criticised verbally, the veto system would make it virtually powerless for the organisation to act against the US, the USSR, Britain or China. Stalin asked if it would be unable to move against Britain over Hong Kong or British interests in Egypt. Churchill told him this was so.

Still suspicious, Stalin recalled how the League of Nations had expelled the USSR after its attack on Finland in 1939.

That would now be impossible, Eden said.

‘Can we create even more obstacles?’ Stalin asked.

There would be differences between the great powers, Roosevelt noted. Open discussions would demonstrate confidence between their governments, and strengthen unity. True, said Stalin. But, while Roosevelt foresaw ‘a peace which will command good will from the overwhelming masses of the peoples of the world’, the dictator wanted to ensure that the new organisation would be another brick in the USSR’s defensive wall and could not become a Western tool against Moscow.

He knew the value of not agreeing immediately. So he said he wanted to study the scheme further, and discussion turned to the most sensitive issue on the table—Poland. With Churchill’s support, Roosevelt floated the idea of a council of all Polish parties to prepare elections.

Stalin asked for a ten-minute break, and then launched into a bravura performance. He stressed that the security aspects of a Polish settlement were a life and death matter for the Soviet Union. Then he pointed out that the new eastern frontier he advocated between Poland and his country had been suggested by the British and French at the end of the First World War; how could he return to Moscow and be accused of getting less than Curzon and Clemenceau had proposed?

As for the new Polish administration, how could the Big Three act without the participation of the Poles? ‘I am called a dictator and not a democrat, but I have enough democratic feeling to refuse to create a Polish government without the Poles being consulted — the question can only be settled with the consent of the Poles,’ Stalin said. The Lublin Committee had at least as strong a democratic base as de Gaulle. The Red Army needed a secure rear area as it advanced on Germany, but agents of the London Poles were attacking its units. ‘When I compare what the agents of the Lublin government have done and what the agents of the London government have done I see the first as good and second as bad,’ he concluded.

It was a brilliant, supremely cynical, show, turning his puppets into a democratic, patriotic group, and picturing the London Poles as a danger to the war effort. Churchill said his information was different; in any case, Britain could not recognise the Lublin Committee as the government. Roosevelt tap-danced away, saying merely: ‘Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years.’ To which Churchill responded: ‘All the more must we do what we can to put an end to these troubles.’ But the President was keen to end the discussion, so they adjourned for twenty-four hours.

* * * *

That night, Roosevelt wrote a letter on Poland to Stalin after consulting Churchill, who stiffened its language. He warned that the differences of views could create the impression of a breach among them. Failure to reach agreement would be lamentable. So why not invite to Yalta two Lublin representatives and two or three from other Polish groups to seek an accord on a joint provisional government to prepare free elections?15

Ever alert to the domestic political daisy-chain, Roosevelt could see the danger that open discord on Poland might jeopardise his other plans by turning US opinion against cooperation with Moscow and putting the United Nations at risk. He warned Stalin that Americans

Would ask: ‘If we cannot get a meeting of minds now when our armies are converging on the common enemy, how can we get an understanding on even more vital things in the future?’ Thus, he put his finger on the fault line of the alliance.

Anxious to get the Polish roadblock removed, Roosevelt began the following day by saying he was more concerned by the nature of the government in Warsaw than by frontier issues. Stalin responded that he had been unable to contact members of the Lublin Committee to get their reaction to Roosevelt’s suggestion to invite them to Yalta. Molotov had drawn up some proposals to Poland, he added, but they had not been typed up. So why did they not talk first about the global body?16

Molotov had good news—he announced Soviet agreement to the American scheme for voting in the Security Council. He also scaled down Moscow’s call for additional seats in the assembly from sixteen to three, Ukraine, Lithuania and White Russia (Byelorussia). Before leaving Washington, Roosevelt had told the Cabinet that, if Moscow demanded additional seats, he would ask for forty-eight for the United States. An American note listed three objections [The note was drawn up by Alger Hiss, a member of the State Department team, who, Stettinius wrote, ‘performed brilliantly’ at the summit (Stettinius, p. 37).]—the Soviet Republics had not signed the United Nations Declaration of 1942; the Soviet constitution did not let them control foreign policy; and Roosevelt had said that the matter should not come up until the organisation was actually formed. But the British were on tricky ground here as Churchill wanted the Dominions plus India to sit in the assembly. Requiring Moscow to limit itself to a single seat, he told Attlee in a cable, ‘is asking a great deal’. The Soviet request was passed to the Foreign Ministers, and, eventually, agreement was reached on two additional seats—White Russia and Ukraine. Bohlen thought that Roosevelt, ‘ill and exhausted after days of arguing’, simply made a mistake, but Stalin assured him in a note that he would approve an increase in the number of seats controlled by Washington.

Roosevelt told Stettinius to cable Chiang Kai-shek to get his accord to the voting system. The President suggested that the meeting to set up the organisation should be held the following month. Churchill thought that was too fast; they should wait till the fighting ended. But Roosevelt and Hopkins did not want to risk losing momentum. In a note to his boss, the aide called the British objection ‘rot’, which the President crossed out

And replaced by ‘local politics’—that is, the general election to be held in Britain at the end of the war in Europe.

After a diversion on Iran, Molotov produced his proposals on Poland. As well as the usual frontier demands, this added that ‘it was deemed desirable to add to the Provisional Polish Government some democratic leaders from Polish emigre circles.’ Molotov said that, since it had still not been possible to reach members of the Lublin group, the Poles could not be invited to Yalta. Rather, Clark Kerr, Harriman and Molotov should discuss enlargement of the Warsaw administration when they got back to Moscow. Roosevelt and Churchill accepted the fiction that the Soviet leadership had been unable to contact its puppets. ‘In better health, FDR might have decided to stay in Yalta until the thing was done,’ Harriman wrote. ‘Some more acceptable compromise might have been worked out if [the Polish leaders] had been brought down to Yalta.’

Roosevelt and Churchill welcomed the Soviet ideas, though they took issue with the word ‘emigre’—Churchill did not like its French Revolution connotations.

But there was still uncertainty about how far west Poland should reach. References to the Neisse River as the frontier with Germany had not taken into account that there were two waterways of that name: Moscow naturally wanted to adopt the westerly one while the other two Allies plumped for the easterly one. Churchill warned that moving the frontier too far might shock British public opinion. It would, he added, be ‘a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it got indigestion’. Stalin observed that most Germans across the line had run away. That simplified matters, Churchill responded, calculating that the refugee population Germany would absorb would be about equal to its war casualties.

The next afternoon, Stalin called on Roosevelt, who had eaten lunch off a tray in his room with his daughter. The President began with the main subject on his mind now that he had agreement on the United Nations— the war in the Far East. It is easy to underestimate how large this loomed at the time. Military planners expected fighting to continue for a year and a half after Germany’s defeat. Roosevelt hoped Tokyo could be beaten by bombing, but reports of Japanese determination to fight to the last made him particularly anxious to see the Red Army used in Asia. Stalin laid out his conditions.17

He wanted the thirty-two Kurile Islands stretching out from Japan towards the Soviet Kamchatka peninsula, and the southern half of Sakhalin Island. The latter had been seized by Japan from Russia in 1904, and the Kurile had been ceded by peaceful treaty in 1875. Stalin’s next demand was more sensitive since it involved the territory of China. He wanted to resume Tsarist-era rights to railways in Manchuria, together with use of the port of Dairen (now Lu-ta) at the end of the line. Without the railway concessions, it would be hard ‘to explain to the Soviet people why Russia was entering the war against Japan’, he said. He required agreement in writing before leaving Yalta.

Though Stalin had put his demands to Harriman for transmission to Washington six weeks earlier, Roosevelt had not consulted Chiang Kai-shek. Now, he sought to tone down the Soviet position by suggesting that the railway could be operated by a joint commission with the Chinese. As though it nagged at him, he referred three times to his lack of consultation with the Chinese, at one point giving the explanation that ‘anything said to them was known to the whole world in twenty-four hours’. Secrecy was considered vital because of the possibility that, if word leaked out, Japan might attack Siberia before the Soviet Union had been able to move troops to Asia.

The two men then talked briefly about trusteeships for Korea and Indochina—the Indochinese, Roosevelt remarked, were ‘of small stature

And...not warlike’. Turning back to China, Stalin said he thought the Nationalists and Communists should get together under Chiang. Then they went into the plenary session to resume the discussion of Poland.

18

‘This is the crucial point of the conference,’ Churchill said

Molotov argued that the way ahead was enlargement, not a new government. Creating a presidential committee, as the Americans suggested, might cause problems since a national council already existed. He, Clark Kerr and Harriman could meet Poles in Moscow, but he was not sure about inviting Mikolajczyk on the evidence of the autumn talks with him.

‘The whole world is waiting for a settlement, and if we separate still recognising different Polish governments the whole world will see that fundamental differences between us still exist,’ Churchill declared. ‘The consequences will be most lamentable, and will stamp our meeting with the seal of failure.’

The British understood that the Lublin group did not ‘commend itself to the majority of Poles, he added, so ‘we cannot feel that it would be accepted abroad as representing them’. Marshalling his arguments, he said that brushing aside the London government would bring world protests and virtually united opposition of Poles abroad. Some 150,000 Poles had fought with the Allies ‘very bravely’, and were still doing so.

He acknowledged that he had no way of knowing what was going on inside Poland, but, if he fell in with what the Lublin group reported, his government would be charged in Parliament with ‘having altogether forsaken the cause of Poland’. The ensuing debates would be most painful and embarrassing to Allied unity. Molotov’s proposals did not go nearly far enough. Only after a free general election with universal suffrage would Britain be able to ‘salute the Government that emerges without regard to the Polish Committee in London’. In his memoirs, he wrote that the President supported him; but the US record has Roosevelt saying merely that they all agreed on the need for free elections, and that the only problem was how Poland was to be governed in the interval.

While resonant and well-argued, Churchill’s intervention was water off the dictator’s back. Stalin responded with an unusually lengthy speech in which he threw out assertions without evidence, dismissed contrary views out of hand, and ended with a restatement of his basic position.

He did not see why the British and Americans could not send their people to judge the situation on the ground. The Lublin group might not be geniuses, but its leaders were popular, having not fled during the war. The Red Army’s liberation made Poles more friendly towards Russia, but the London politicians had not participated in the national celebrations. He reiterated a favourite gambit in asking how the provisional government differed from de Gaulle, who was, he said, in fact less popular. Molotov was right. The provisional government should be reconstructed. That was all.

Moving off to one side, Roosevelt asked how long it would take to hold elections. A month if there was no catastrophe at the front, was the Soviet reply. At which, the President suggested referring the matter to the foreign ministers. There followed a brief excursion through Yugoslavia, where an accord had been worked out between Tito and the British-backed regent. Stalin raised Greece, as if to remind Churchill of his compliance there. The Prime Minister said he was ‘very much obliged to Marshal Stalin for not having taken too great an interest in Greek affairs’. Then the session ended.

Churchill was ‘puzzled and distressed’, Moran recorded in his diary that day. ‘The President no longer seems to the P. M. to take an intelligent interest in the war; often he does not seem even to read the papers the P. M. gives him. Sometimes it appears as if he has no thought-out recipe for anything beyond his troubles with Congress.’ With a doctor’s eye, Moran added in his diary that Roosevelt was ‘a very sick man. He has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries of the brain in an advanced stage, so that I give him only a few months to live.’19

The interpreter Birse recalled that, at the opening session, the President appeared to be far away from the proceedings, and that Stettinius and Byrnes seemed to be prompting him. The ever-dismissive Cadogan found Roosevelt ‘very woolly and wobbly’. ‘I got the impression that most of the time he really hardly knew what was going on,’ the diplomat wrote to Halifax. When the President was in the chair, he added, he made hardly any effort to guide the discussion, but sat silent ‘or, if he made any intervention, it was generally completely irrelevant’.

On the night of 8 February, Stalin gave a dinner at his Tsarist palace. He was ‘in an excellent humor, and even in high spirits,’ the US record noted. Forty-five toasts were drunk. Brooke found the dictator ‘full of fun and good humour’. Sarah Churchill wrote to her mother that ‘The “Bear” was in terrific form and it was very friendly and gay.’ Kathy Harriman excelled herself by replying in Russian to a toast to the three women, but the food was too much for them—they could only toy with the suckling pig.20

Introduced to Beria before the meal, Sarah Churchill used one of five Russian phrases she had learned to ask if she could have a hot-water bottle.

‘I cannot believe that you need one!’ the lascivious killer replied. ‘Surely there is enough fire in you! ’

At dinner, Sarah found herself seated next to Vyshinsky. She tried out her hot-water bottle line on him. ‘Why?’ he replied. ‘Are you ill?’ With difficulty, she explained that it had been a joke.

Gesturing towards Beria, Roosevelt asked ‘Who’s that in the pince-nez?’ Stalin replied: ‘Ah, that one, that’s our Himmler.’ The squat, balding secret police chief smiled, showing yellow teeth inside his flabby lips. Roosevelt appeared discomforted,—he did not wish to be reminded of his ally’s murderous ways.

Kathy Harriman found the secret police chief ‘little and fat with thick lenses, which give him a sinister look, but quite genial’. When Clark Kerr raised his glass to Beria as ‘the man who looks after our bodies’, Churchill swiftly admonished him. ‘None of that,’ he said. ‘Be careful, Archie, be careful.’ This did not stop Clark Kerr and the police boss embarking on a long conversation about the sex life of fish.

When it was his turn to toast Stalin, Churchill praised the Soviet leader as a statesman and conqueror, and added: ‘I walk through this world with greater courage and hope when I find myself in a relation of friendship and intimacy with this great man.’ In response, the Soviet leader called Churchill ‘the most courageous of all Prime Ministers in the world’ for having carried on the fight against Hitler alone. He knew, he added, of few examples where the courage of one man had been so important to the history of the world. Stalin evidently felt no shame about evoking a period when he had been allied with Hitler. He toasted Roosevelt as the man who brought a country that was not seriously threatened into the war, paying tribute to the ‘remarkable and vital achievement’ of Lend-Lease. To which, the President reached out to one of his favourite notions, that they were like a family. Stalin said the real test would be to keep post-war unity. Churchill compared the three of

Them to men standing on the crest of a hill looking at the prospect of overcoming ‘poverty, confusion, chaos and oppression’.

‘I am talking as an old man,’ Stalin said. ‘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.’

‘In an alliance the allies should not deceive each other,’ he went on. ‘Perhaps that is naive? Experienced diplomats may say, “Why should I not deceive my ally?” But, as a naive man, I think it best not to deceive my ally even if he is a fool. Possibly our alliance is so firm just because we do not deceive each other; or is it because it is not so easy to deceive each other? I propose a toast to the firmness of the Three-Power Alliance. May it be strong and stable; may we be as frank as possible.’

When the Foreign Ministers met at noon the next day, Stettinius withdrew the US proposal to set up a committee for Poland. He stressed the domestic debate in America about the global organisation, and said the Polish question was important in this respect. He read out a note which moved towards the Soviet position by proposing ‘that the present Polish Provisional Government be reorganized into a fully representative government based on all democratic forces in Poland and including democratic leaders from Poland abroad.’21

Eden objected that the lack of support for Lublin meant a new start should be made. The presence of Mikolajczyk would, he added, do more than anything to give a government authority, and convince the British people of its representative character. If the election was controlled by Lublin, British opinion would not see it as free. Stettinius said he backed the British in this respect, then shifted his opening position to argue that it would be preferable to start with an entirely new government. No agreement would be possible if the Soviet reference to the ‘existing Polish Government’ was kept, he added. Roosevelt and Churchill, meanwhile, were discussing the United Nations over a lunch arranged by Hopkins. Byrnes conjured with the idea of seats for Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Alaska. When it was put to him, Stalin said he could see the point. But nothing was decided.

At 4 p. m., Stalin and Roosevelt went into the courtyard of the Livadia, which had been covered with carpets. Three chairs were set up by the well in the centre. Churchill walked out to join them, wearing a Russian fur hat that raised smiles from the other two.

‘How do you want to handle this, Robert?’ the President asked Hopkins’s photographer son.22

The young man suggested the Foreign Ministers stand behind each of the principals, which they did. His father was too ill to come down.

The most frequently used shot shows Roosevelt wearing his cape and looking slack-jawed, though others depict him appearing more alert. Stalin sits to his left, self-contained in his patched greatcoat and military cap. Churchill, dumpy in a thick coat, either stares ahead or looks round at Stettinius. In some shots, the Secretary of State, Eden, Molotov, Clark Kerr and Harriman stand behind the leaders; in others, the background is made up of military men, with Brooke and Marshall modestly at the rear. After fifteen minutes, they all headed for the ballroom. On the way, Robert Hopkins snapped the Soviet leaders under the arcade running round the courtyard.

Stalin, who had met him at Teheran, beckoned to the young man to come closer.

What were his plans? he asked.

He would like to be the first American photographer in Berlin, Robert replied. But US forces were still far from the city.

How would he like to be attached to the Red Army? Stalin inquired.

Could Stalin arrange that? Robert inquired.

‘You take care of it from your end, and I’ll take care of it from ours,’ came the response.

After shaking hands, Robert hurried into the palace where he met Marshall. Could he be seconded to the Red Army? he asked. Yes, that could be arranged.

But when he got to his father’s bedroom and told him the news, Hopkins vetoed it. Even if he did get to the battlezone, his son would not be allowed to take pictures, he predicted. And even if he did manage to do that, he would never be able to transmit the result. ‘You go into Berlin with the American army,’ his father ruled.

Robert went to tell Stalin. The dictator shrugged.

* * * *

Molotov began the two and a half hour plenary session by giving out proposed new wording on Poland. But proceedings were then temporarily derailed when Stettinius read a general report on the deliberations of the Foreign Ministers which touched on territorial trusteeships under the United Nations. Jumping to his feet and speaking so fast that Hopkins, for one, could hardly follow what he was saying, Churchill objected that he had not been consulted, and did not agree with a single word of the draft. He would not consent to forty or fifty nations ‘thrusting interfering fingers’ into the Empire.23

Stalin rose to walk up and down the room, beaming and applauding. Roosevelt looked embarrassed. Every scrap of territory over which the British flag flew was immune from interference, Churchill insisted. No British representative would go to a conference where his country would have to defend itself. ‘Never. Never. Never,’ he growled as he sat down. Stettinius said the draft was not intended to refer to the British Empire, but to areas taken from enemy control. In which case, Churchill replied, it would be better to say this. How would Stalin feel if it was suggested that the Crimea should be internationalised as a summer resort? The Soviet leader said he would be glad to dedicate it to summit meetings.

Later in the afternoon, the subject came up again in a discussion on liberated areas. Churchill insisted that the Atlantic Charter should not apply to the Empire. He had, he remarked, told the Commons this, and had given Wendell Willkie a copy of his speech.

‘Was that what killed him?’ Roosevelt asked.

Returning to Poland, Molotov produced new wording that the ‘present Provisional Government should be reorganized on a wider democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from those living abroad. ’ This, Roosevelt said, meant they were very near agreement. Churchill pleaded that observers should be allowed to provide information on conditions in the country. He would welcome Soviet observers in Greece, he added. To avoid any quid pro quo, Stalin replied that he had complete confidence in British policy there.

‘I must be able to tell the House of Commons that the elections will be free and that there will be effective guarantees that they are freely and fairly carried out,’ Churchill insisted. Would Mikolajczyk be allowed to return? The Polish politician belonged to a non-fascist party, so he could take part in the election, Stalin replied.

According to the US record, Churchill said, ‘I do not care much about Poles myself.’ What concerned him was what he could tell Parliament.

‘There are some very good people among the Poles,’ Stalin remarked. They were good fighters, and had some good scientists and musicians, ‘but they fight among themselves, too’.

Roosevelt brought up his need to assure voters of Polish extraction in America that the poll would be freely conducted.

‘I want this election in Poland to be the first beyond criticism,’ he said. ‘It should be like Caesar’s wife. I did not know her but they say she was pure.’

‘They said that about her,’ Stalin interjected, ‘but in fact she had her sins.’

‘I don’t want the Poles to be able to question the Polish elections,’ Roosevelt continued. ‘The matter is not only one of principles but of good politics.’

Alter lunch the next day Molotov handed Harriman an English translation of Stalin’s conditions for entering the Pacific war.24 The document provided for ‘possession’ of Dairen and the other north-eastern harbour of Port Arthur and for sole Soviet operation of the Manchurian railway. The ambassador said he believed Roosevelt would want to change ‘possession’ to ‘lease’ and insert a reference to the harbours becoming free ports under international control. As for the railway, there should be a reference to it being run by a Chinese-Soviet commission. In addition, Harriman said he felt sure the President would not reach a final agreement until he had got Chiang’s accord. Molotov agreed to the first two points, but took some time to grasp the third.

Returning to the Livadia, Harriman showed the document with his amendments to Roosevelt, who approved it after adding a sentence reading: ‘It is understood that the agreement concerning the ports and railways referred to above requires the concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.’ At 4.30, Roosevelt received Stalin for fifteen minutes to confirm the secret accord, under which the USSR undertook to enter the war in their Far East two or three months after the defeat of Germany in return for recognition of continuing control of Outer Mongolia, the return of islands, the concessions in Manchuria with joint Soviet-Chinese operation of the railway, internationalisation of Dairen, and a naval base at Port Arthur. The Kremlin was also to sign a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, recognising him as head of the government and China’s sovereignty over Manchuria.

When Stalin told Churchill of his demands in the Far East, the Prime Minister welcomed the presence of Soviet ships in the Pacific, and favoured restoring Tsarist-era rights. But, on being shown the US-Soviet document on the last day of the conference, Eden regarded it as ‘discreditable’. Backed by Cadogan, he argued that Churchill should not add his signature. The Prime Minister insisted, in the interests of his country’s presence in the Far East. In his memoirs, he calls it a ‘remote and secondary’ matter which did not merit an argument with Roosevelt.

A note in Hopkins’s files records that ‘there appear to be elements among the British who, out of imperial considerations, desire a weak and possibly disunited China in the post-war period. ’

Though Roosevelt had promised to get his agreement, Chiang Kai-shek was not formally told for four months. ‘I feel more than simply hurt and sad,’ the Generalissimo wrote in his diary when finally informed. ‘The Chinese people have...been placed in an unparalleled and dangerous predicament.’

Later on the afternoon of 10 February, it was time to return to Poland at a three-hour plenary. Eden read a new draft from the Foreign Ministers, calling for the Provisional Government to be reorganized on a broader democratic basis. Molotov and the ambassadors in Moscow would consult groups from inside and outside Poland about free, unfettered elections with universal suffrage and a secret ballot. When a new government was chosen, the three Allies would recognise it.25

The draft made no mention of frontiers, and Churchill returned to his theme of limiting Poland’s expansion to the west. He had received a cable from the War Cabinet saying that the size of the population transfer under the borders proposed by Stalin would be too big to handle. Roosevelt said he did not have the right to commit on this point. That must be done by the Senate. But something should be said about the Curzon Line in the east, Molotov interjected, though they need not mention the west. How about a statement that Poland would get compensation in the west, but that this had to be discussed with the new government in Warsaw, Churchill suggested. Very good, Molotov concurred.

Later, the Soviets proposed wording referring to the return to Poland of its ancient frontier of East Prussia and the Oder.

‘How long ago had those lands been Polish?’ Roosevelt asked. ‘Very long ago,’ Molotov replied.

‘Perhaps you want us back,’ Roosevelt said to Churchill with a

Laugh.

‘You might be as indigestible for us as it might be for the Poles if they took too much German territory,’ the Prime Minister responded. Stalin accepted a British draft stating that Poland ‘must receive

Substantial accessions of territory in the North and West’ but that final delimitation should await a post-war peace conference.

When the talk turned to Germany, Roosevelt said he had changed his mind about the Control Commission—he now agreed with Churchill that France should be a member since it would have an occupation zone. He had already told Stalin this through Harriman. Playing the game, the Soviet leader raised his arms above his head and said ‘Sdaiyous’—‘I surrender’. Roosevelt took this as evidence of his influence with the dictator.

The Soviet leader then showed a rare burst of fury