World War II Behind Closed Doors Read Online Free PDF Page B

Instead of supporting Churchill, or simply changing the subject, he said that his compromise was that ‘49,000’ should be shot. The American President clearly intended this remark as a joke. But, knowing as he did Stalin's track record in matters of mass murder, it was a strange kind of jest. Others present took Stalin's words at face value. Elliott Roosevelt, the President's thirty-three-year-old son who was also at the dinner, said: ‘Look: when our armies start rolling in from the West, and your armies are still coming on from the East, we'll be solving the whole thing, won't we? Russian, American and British soldiers will settle the issue for most of thosefifty thousand in battle, and I hope not only those fifty thousand war criminals will be taken care of but many hundreds of thousands more Nazis as well’. 24
    This was too much for Churchill. It was bad enough being teased and harassed by Stalin, but to have to listen to the uncongenial views of a relatively junior American air force officer was more than he could stomach. The British Prime Minister stood up and left the table, stomping off into the room next door. Moments later Stalin and Molotov followed him, smiling, and the Soviet leader announced that he had only been ‘playing’.
    It was a watershed moment; not so much in the context of the relationship between Stalin and Churchill – the Soviet leader had verbally attacked the British Prime Minister before – but in the context of the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt. Stalin had bullied Churchill in front of an entire dinner party, and Roosevelt had not come to his aid.
    Churchill returned in a melancholy mood to the British legation, and remarked around midnight to his doctor, Lord Moran: ‘There might be a more bloody war. I shall not be there. I shall be asleep. I want to sleep for billions of years’. And later, ‘I believe man might destroy man and wipe out civilisation. Europe would be desolate and I may be held responsible…. Stupendous issues are unfolding before our eyes and we are only specks of dust that have settled in the night on the map of the world’. 25
    Moran wrote that he ‘lay awake for a long time, frightened by his [Churchill's] presentiment of evil’. And it was clear what the source of the Prime Minister's ghastly vision of the future had been. It was a world in which the democracies would not stand firm in the presence of dictators. ‘Now he sees he cannot rely on the President's support’, wrote Moran. ‘What matters more, he realizes that the Russians see this too’. And, in the last entry in his diary for 29 November, Moran records perhaps his most poignant insight of all: ‘The PM is appalled by his own impotence’.
    That same day the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, gave vent in his diary to his own feelings about the conference so far. ‘After listening to the arguments putforward over the last two days’, he wrote, ‘I feel more like entering a lunatic asylum or a nursing home than continuing with my present job. I am absolutely disgusted with the politicians' methods of waging a war!! Why will they imagine they are experts at a job they know nothing about! It is lamentable to listen to them!’ 26
    The next day, 30 November, began with a meeting of the British and American Chiefs of Staff. General Brooke and the other members of the British military delegation managed to convince the American military chiefs that a small delay in the date of Overlord would benefit them all – and a new date of 1 June was finally agreed.
    After their meeting the British and American military leaders went to report this new date to the President and Prime Minister. Roosevelt made one alteration to their conclusion – a small but significant one. He said that instead of announcing that Overlord would take place on ‘1 June’, they should tell Stalin that it would take place ‘during the month of May’. After all, wasn't 31