Churchill Was Right

by HANSON W. BALDWIN

ON July [1945] . . . Soviet. Russia was established in the heart of Europe. This was a fateful milestone for mankind.” Nine years later Soviet Communism is still “established in the heart of Europe.” Behind the iron curtain of which Winston Churchill warned prior to Potsdam, an entire generation has been drilled to the “conditioned reflexes” of Communism. Half of Asia is Communist, the rest a battleground. Three fifths of our national budget goes for arms; 142,118 Americans gave their blood in Korea to halt the march of world conquest. The world is two worlds and there is no end in sight.

Why has this come about? Why have the bright dreams faded once again? What mistakes were made and who made them? Triumph and Tragedy, the sixth and concluding volume of Sir Winston Churchill’s personal account of World War II, gives some of the answers and rounds off and polishes the arguments of prior volumes.

And it provides proof-proof buttressed by other documentation — that American political astigmatism, our blindness to post-war political aims and our naïve belief that Soviet imperialism had modified its dreams of world conquest, was partially responsible for the establishment of Communism in the heart of Europe.

This assertion, that American politico-strategic decisions in World War II, dominated by the singleminded pursuit of military victory, contributed to the subsequent loss of the political peace, was expounded by me in articles in the January and February, 1950, Atlantic (subsequently expanded into book form). My thesis— one held and advanced by many others — was that the unconditional surrender doctrine, our failure to penetrate the Danubian plain and to push into the Balkans, and the halting of our armies short of Rrague and Berlin and their subsequent withdrawal to the west had helped to give the Russians hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe. Similarly Yalta, with its territorial “bribes to Russia to induce her to enter the Pacific war, and our hasty and unnecessary use of the atomic bomb against a Japan already defeated and prostrate influenced adversely the peace in the Orient.

Chester Wilmot, the Australian writer and historian, whose untimely death in a Comet jet airliner crash off Italy terminated a brilliant career, developed and documented some of these contentions in The Struggle for Europe, the best singlevolume history of the European phase of the war vet published. This thesis has been discussed in many other volumes, and the documents pertaining to it —among which the most fundamental are Churchill’s works — are numerous and growing.

Phis conclusion—that we fought the war to win, period, and did not sufficiently consider the kind of peace we wanted — has been both distorted and challenged.

Copyright 1954, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

The affirmative distortions can and should be quickly dismissed. They are the work primarily of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the rabid extremists who rally round him, and alleged “historians" who fit the facts to the partisan objectives they pursue. General George Catlett Marshall has been one of the principal victims of this smear technique; so has former President Truman and the late Franklin D. Roosevelt. To challenge the past judgments of these men and the politico-strategic policies which they fathered is one thing, but to accuse two former Presidents of the United States, a former Chief of Staff of the Army, and the entire Democratic Party of “twenty years of treason” is as ridiculous as it is disgusting. This is not history but politics — a particularly reptilian form of politics which would have us believe that Pearl Harbor was a plot, not by the Japanese but by Roosevelt and his associates, to embroil us in the war; and that our mistakes at Teheran, Yalta, and above all in our politicostrategic policies were part of a Great Conspiracy intended to hand the country over to Communism on a silver platter. The more quickly such drivel is dismissed the better; we should be able to recognize, pinpoint, and examine the mistakes of the past without indulging in generalized judgments condemnatory to the sincerity, patriotism, and integrity of all who played a role on the stage of history.

2

THE genuine challenge to this thesis — that our policy mistakes during the war were in considerable part responsible for the lost peace—takes several forms.

In the first place, say the critics, this is ex post facto judgment. That is of course true, but balanced history is always ex post facto; it must represent judgment of past events, and it is not good history unless it labels mistakes for what they were. Moreover, the evidence is now clearly available — it is almost redundant in the Churchill volumes— that there were some (Churchill is most prominent among them) who raised warning flags at the time and before the event.

Second, say the challengers, the Churchillian (British) strategic arguments were never based, during the war, on a political foundation; in other words, the perspicacious political foresight now claimed for London was not evident then. Mr. John J. McCloy, who was prominent in the events of World War II, has said frequently since the war that he never heard of the British advancing political arguments to justify their hopes of invading the “soft underbelly” of Europe. He and other Americans got the impression that the British were lukewarm to the invasion of Western France partially because of Mr. Churchill’s addiction to “peripheral strategy” and his subconscious desire to recoup his Gallipoli failure of World War I, and because they were afraid such an invasion attempt would lead to a “blood bath.

Mr. McCloy’s recollections are unquestionably accurate, yet they in no way refute the basic contention: that actions which we took and the British opposed aided the Russians in the extension of the Moscow-dominated brand of Communism in the post-war world. Some of the documents cited in his memoirs and elsewhere show that Mr. Churchill was concerned at the time about the political complexion of the post-war world. That this concern was not made evident to Mr. McCloy and to most other Americans was perhaps due in part to the international atmosphere of those times, typified by the Yalta Conference — an atmosphere which reflected a rather close Roosevelt-Stalin, Amcrican-Russian rapprochement, at the expense of the British. Moreover, Mr. Churchill’s worry about the sanguinary cost of the liberation of Europe and his predilection for peripheral strategy both had a sound basis in history, which we should well note.

In World War I, Britain departed from her traditional policy which had served her well for several centuries; she committed to the Continent a mass land army instead of depending as in the past upon supremacy at sea, small British land forces used where the enemy was weak, the power of the British pound, and the strength of allies. Britain won, but at a tremendous price; the blood of the best and finest of whole generations stained the fields of France, and there is little doubt that future historians will date the beginning of the decline of the British Empire from the years 1914-1918.

We should mark this lesson carefully; it is, indeed, the biggest single (historical) argument for President Eisenhower’s “New Look” military policies. If the United States becomes involved in mass land warfare, requiring the use of millions of American troops, on the continent of Asia or deep in Russia, we shall be substantiating Spengler; we may expect our decline and fall.

The third and most important argument countering the theory that we helped to make our own post-war bed of thorns during World War II is offered by those who claim that our wartime policies and actions and the agreements we made were not at fault; the fault lies with those (the Russians) who broke those agreements, who took advantage of our policies, and who turned our actions against us.

Now, I have no desire to play the Devil’s advocate, but certainly such an argument is at best oversimplified. Even the Devil cannot roast a soul, unless the soul has abetted him. Our World War II actions, policies, and agreements were in many cases so naïvely trusting, politically superficial, or limited in outlook as to make it not only possible, but easy, for Soviet Communism to turn them to its advantage. Our World War II mistakes aided Moscow to extend its Communist domination far beyond the borders of Soviet Russia.

The proof is here, for all who are not: blind, in Winston Churchill’s six volumes, particularly in the two final ones: Closing the Ring and Triumph and Tragedy. And Sir Winston’s own papers and recollections are strengthened by much other material, only a small part of which can be mentioned in this appreciation.

But neither Sir Winston nor Whitehall can for does) claim omniscience or an unfailing foresight. Mr. Churchill, in his own phrase, “missed the bus" many times during the war; he too is human and therefore fallible. It is, perhaps, hard for Americans to realize that Churchill at home has his own enemies no less bitter than the Roosevelt-haters of the United States. Nor are these confined to the left wing of the Labor Party. A bitter and partisan book, Unconditional Hatred, the work of Captain Russell Grenfell, R.N., criticizes Churchill’s political sagacity as much as Wilmot praises it, and blames the lack of a clear-cut definition of war aims for many of the British Empire’s post-war troubles.

It is true that Churchill demonstrated both his wartime strength and his wartime weakness at the time of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in the oftquoted remarks: “I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

Churchill’s single-minded concentration upon the defeat of Hitler made him underemphasize the importance of maintaining a moderately strong Germany as a counterpoise to Soviet Russia. And certainly out of his own mouth Churchill can today be refuted. We find him declaiming to Parliament after Yalta that the Soviet leaders were “honorable and trustworthy men,”and that “I know of no government which stands to its obligations even in its own despite more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”

Yet, as Sir Winston notes in Triumph and Tragedy, “I fell bound to proclaim my confidence in Soviet good faith in the hope of procuring it.” And the words Churchill uttered for public consumption at a time when the war was still in crisis must be weighed against Churchill’s actions and his private warnings — repeated again and again and again — of the growing danger of Soviet imperialism.

There can henceforth be, I think, no reasonable doubt, that Churchill and the British government commenced to fear this danger and to warn against it much sooner than did Roosevelt or the top echelons of the U.S. government. The contrasting approaches of the two governments are best illustrated by quotations from source material. Robert. Sherwood records in Roosevelt and Hopkins that Harry Hopkins took with him to the Quebec Conference in August,1943, a document, “Russia’s Position,” which quoted from a “very high level United States military strategic estimate.” This paper pointed out that “Russia’s post-war position in Europe will be a dominant one. . . . Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war, she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship. Likewise, since without question she will dominate Europe on the defeat of the Axis, it is even more essential to develop and maintain the most friendly relations with Russia.”

It is remarkable that this paper and the entire policy of the American government (until almost the end of the war) showed no worry about postwar domination of Europe by Russia, even though twice in the twentieth century the U.S. had gone to war to prevent domination of Europe by Germany.

3

CHURCHILL’S attitude strongly contrasted with this laissez-faire policy. “The Nazi regime,”he said in 1941 when Russia, was invaded by Germany, “is indistinguishable from the worst feat tires of Communism.” On October 27, 1942, in a “minute” to Foreign Secretary Eden (recorded in The Hinge of Fate), Churchill wrote: “Meanwhile I should treat the Russians coolly, not getting excited about the lies they tell” (the Hess case was the cause of the “lies”).

“You must remember the Bolsheviks have undermined so many powerful governments by lying, machine-made propaganda, and they probably think they make some impression on us by these methods.”

On August 23, 1943, Churchill in a telegram to Deputy Prime Minister and War Cabinet, quoted in Closing the Ring, reported that the “black spot at the present time is the increasing bearishness of Soviet Russia.”

On May 4, 1944, prior to the invasion of Normandy, Churchill in a memorandum to his Foreign Secretary, quoted in the appendices of Closing the Ring, speaks of the “brute issues between us and the Soviet Government which are developing in Italy, in Rumania, in Bulgaria, in Yugoslavia, and above all in Greece. Broadly speaking, the issue is, Are we going to acquiesce in the Communisation of the Balkans and perhaps of Italy?” And again on the same day, he noted: “Evidently we are approaching a show down with the Russians about their Communist intrigues . . . .”

At the second Quebec Conference, in September, 1944, the Prime Minister, in a general survey of the war which opened the meeting, advocated a “right-handed movement to give Germany a stab in the Adriatic armpit,”and (contrary to Mr. MeClov’s beliefs) offered as “another reason for this right-handed movement... the rapid encroachment of the Russians into the Balkan peninsula and the dangerous spread of Soviet influence there.”

These and countless other references in Churchill’s memoirs certainly betray none of the illusions then current in Washington about the nature of Communism or the danger of Soviet imperialism. There wore, of course, some in the Administration who openly expressed their concern even in those days of the “happy marriage" between Washington and Moscow. The late James V. Forrestal, then Secretary of the Navy; W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia; Adolph A. Berle, Assistant Secretary of State; and Sumner Welles,

Under Secretary of State, were four, among others, who never lost sight of the need for concrete peace aims. In the fall of 1944, Berle in a memorandum expressed concern about the increasing danger of Soviet post-war domination of Central and Eastern Europe.

Forrestal congratulated Churchill on his Creek intervention policy in December, 1944 — a policy which was then under bitter attack in both Washington and Britain. This policy undoubtedly saved Greece from Communism but it was not until 1947, three years later, that the United States government, through the mouth of its Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, inferenlially endorsed Churchill’s prior unilateral action by declaring that “a Communist-dominated government in Greece would be considered dangerous to United States security.”

It is clear that by actions, words, efforts, and arguments Churchill tried consistently and persistently to check the forward march of Communism and to alert the United States government to potential post-war dangers. These efforts were particularly pronounced after the summer of 1943, and in the last volume of the memoirs — from D Day in Normandy to the end of the war — there is scarcely a chapter that does not reflect the Prime Minister’s growing preoccupation with the everincreasing Russian danger.

He knew that a war which created dangerous vacuums of power could only result in an unbalanced peace; he expressed this knowledge in a typical Churchiilian pensée, under date of April 8, 1945: —

“Prime Minister to Foreign Office: This war would never have come unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Auslria and Hungary and the Hohenzollernsout of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer on to the vacant thrones. No doubt these views are very unfashionable. . . .

Throughout this volume, from the triumph in Normandy until the Russians moved into Central Europe on the heels of the retiring British and American armies, the voice of impending doom a voice coral before the event — is everywhere evident. On May 12, 1945, with Germany not fully occupied, Churchill in a cogent letter to the new President Truman expressed his deep anxiety about the future and warned that an “iron curtain is drawn down upon” the Russian front. Europe was cut in two.

So much, then, for the attitude of Downing Street; Churchill’s approach to the problems of international power was unquestionably far more realistic than the idealistic but impractical altitudes of the egocentric, charming but internationally inexperienced Roosevelt and some of his trusted advisers.

What of the specific major issues of the war years which contributed to the later loss of the peace?

4

THE policy of unconditional surrender and its political and military implications have been both damned and praised — not only by those who enunciated that policy but by sincere and careful historians. Its very origin has been subject to debate. It is, however, clear that the famous phrase — first used publicly by President Roosevelt at a press conference at Casablanca on January 24, 1943 — was born primarily in the President’s mind and was mentioned in the secret conferences at Casablanca and in Washington prior to that conference. But it is equally clear that the policy never received, prior to its enunciation, the extremely careful consideration and study that it deserved.

Churchill, who now supports the policy and assumes his share of responsibility for it, records in The Hinge of Fate:—

“It was with some feeling of surprise that I heard the President say at the Press Conference on January 24 that we would enforce ‘unconditional surrender’ upon all our enemies. It was natural to suppose that the agreed communiqué had superseded anything said in conversation. General Ismay, who knew exactly how my mind was working from day to day, and was also present, at all the discussions of the Chiefs of Staff when the communiqué was prepared, was also surprised. In my speech [at the Press Conference] which followed the President’s I of course supported him and concurred in what he had said. Any divergence between us, even by omission, would on such an occasion and at such a time have been damaging and even dangerous to our war effort.”

Roosevelt himself, according to Robert Sherwood in Roosevelt and Hopkins, “absolved Churchill from all responsibility for the statement,” but Sherwood adds that unconditional surrender represented “a true statement of Roosevelt’s considered policy.”

There is no evidence, however, that this policy had had much preconsideration except in Roosevelt’s mind. Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell in Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare — 19411942 (a volume in the Army official history series) slate flatly: “The most striking illustration of the want of understanding between the White House and the military staffs was the President’s announcement at the 7 January [in 1943 — prior to Casablanca] meeting, of his intention to support the; ‘unconditional surrender’ concept as the basic Allied aim in the war. The President simply told the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] that he would talk to the Prime Minister about assuring Stalin that the United States and Great Britain would continue on until they reached Berlin and that their only terms would be ‘unconditional surrender.’ No study of the meaning of this formula for the conduct of the mar teas made at the time by the Army staff, or by the joint staff, either before or after the President’s announcement.” (Italics mine.)

Thus one of the fundamental policies of World War II, a policy which has greatly influenced, for better or for worse, the lives of this generation, was born. Unconditional surrender was laid down as a diktat-a one-man decision without any study of its political or mililary implications and was announced publicly and unilaterally at a press conference to the surprise of the nation’s chief ally, Great Britain. Historians may agree or disagree as to the validity of the unconditional surrender policy, but history can describe the manner in which this policy was born in only one way: “This is a hell of a way to run a railroad.”

5

THERE remains the influence of this policy upon the war and upon the peace.

Churchill declares that he does not believe the policy prolonged the war or played into the hands of the dictators. In this belief he has the support of some distinguished historians, including John W. Wheeler-Bennett, the British historian, whose magnificent book The Nemesis of Power traces the history of the German Army in politics from 1918 to 1945. Mr. Wheeler-Bennett declares unequivocally that “one thing ... is very certain.

“The Allied formula of ‘unconditional surrender’ played no part in the hesitancy of the German generals to remove Hitler . . . the Casablanca declaration constituted for the conspirators a very small embarrassment, if any at all,”

To this point of view Chester Wilmot in The Struggle for Europe took considerable exception. The public announcement of the uncondit ional surrender policy denied the Anglo-Saxon powers “any freedom of diplomatic maneuver and . . . the German people any avenue of escape from Hitler,” he stated. As Goebbels wrote in his diary, “The more the English prophesy a disgraceful peace for Germany, the easier it is for me to toughen and harden German resistance.”

This writer’s vote is cast with Wilmot rather than with Churchill and Wheeler-Bennett. Wheeler-Bennett’s examination of the conspiracy against Hitler is thorough and written with a brilliant lucidity, but even so I find in its pages incomplete references to the attempts of some German officers, in the final months of the war, to surrender conditionally. The full story of some of these attempts has not been told. And both Churchill and Wheeler-Bennett deal only tangentially with the psychological effects of the doctrine upon the German people and the German troops. I agree with Wilmot’s contention that the unconditional surrender policy, harshened by Morgenthau’s “potato patch” plan for a post-war pastoralized Germany, strengthened rather than weakened the Gorman will to resist, and that even in the final winter of the war, with their cause completely lost, “the German people and their armed forces rallied to uphold the rule of the very man [Hitler] who had led them to the brink of ruin.”

But if history still leaves room, nine years afterwards, for legitimate debate about, the military effects of the unconditional surrender policy, there can be, I think, no room for valid disagreement aboul its political effects.

This policy represented a negative peace aim, not a positive one. It meant, as Mr. Churchill himself states, complete destruction of German (as well as Nazi) power, and peace terms so harsh that as the late British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, put it, it “left us with a Germany without, law, without a constitution, without a single person with whom we could deal, without a single institution to grapple with the situation. . . .”

It meant the creation of vacuums of power, the complete destruction of two nations—Germany and Japan — which in modern history had been the traditional counterpoise to Soviet Russia. It meant subordination of political aims to military ones; it put military victory ahead of political peace. The unconditional surrender policy was a triumph of the “total war" concept — a concept that has never led, and will never lead, to the only kind of peace worth having, a more stable one.

It was the foundation stone of the politicostrategic edifice the United States erected during the war upon the quicksands of unreality. We fought to win and we forgot that wars must have political aims and that, complete destruction and unconditional surrender cannot contribute to a more stable peace. We substituted one enemy for another; and today’s enemy, Soviet. Russia, is more threatening than the old.

History needs no footnotes to prove the truth of these assertions; it is written in the daily headlines and in all our policies since the war. Uncondilional surrender meant in World War II the complete destruction of the power of Germany and Japan; nearly ever since, at the cost of billions, we have been attempting to build up again the power of these two nations in order to restore some balance of power in the world. The tragedy is that wo cannot erase the psychological memories of unlimited devastation and destruction with unlimited dollars. The Germans and the Japanese have not changed and neither nation will soon forget the “no quarter" terms of World War II.

6

SIR WINSTON, taken bv surprise, did not oppose vigorously the Roosevelt policy of unconditional surrender. He “missed the bus" in lending even sequential support to this policy. But his position in the now famous issue of the Balkans versus Western Europe is fairly clear and, judged by the inexorable standards of history, far more correct than our own.

Sir Winston, with British history part of the very marrow of his bones, had no intention of allowing Russia instead of Germany to dominate the continent of Europe. Despite his support of the unconditional surrender doctrine, he knew that it was to Britain’s vital interest even more in the twentieth century of planes and guided missiles than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to maintain a balance of power policy on the Continent and to oppose the overwhelming superiority of one Continental nation over other European powers.

A major and fundamental difference about strategy marked from the beginning the American and British approach to victory in Europe.

Churchill himself does not make completely clear the nature of the difference in the British and U.S. approach. But his accounts are now fortunately supplemented by Matloff and Snell (Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare). The British plans, a twentieth-century outgrowth of the timetested strategy of the past, were explained in general terms as early as the Atlantic Conference of 1941. They were based primarily upon peripheral operations and British sea power; the U.S. European plans (unlike those in the Pacific) were based primarily upon mass land operations, supplemented later by mass air bombardment.

“We do not foresee vast armies of infantry as in 1914-18,” Admiral Sir Dudley Pound noted in the Atlantic Conference. “The forces we employ will be armored divisions with the most modern equipment. To supplement their operations the local patriots must be secretly armed and equipped so that at the right moment they may rise in revolt” (Matloff and Snell).

The differences were at first military, though in the case of Britain no hard and fast dividing line between military and political concepts was possible. The British peripheral strategy was the child of the marriage in past centuries of British political and military interests.

The British explained their concepts at the Arcadia Conference in Washington soon after we entered the war (December, 1941—January, 1942). Churchill’s aim, say Matloll and Snell, was to make full use of the advantages that the United States and Great Britain could expect to have command of sea and air, and the aid of the people of occupied Europe.

“He envisaged landings [by small forces] in several of the following countries, namely, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, the French Channel coasts and the French Atlantic coasts, as well as in Italy and possibly the Balkans. Thus, Mr. Matloff comments in a letter to me, “the Balkans . . . formed a basic part of the British notions of a war of speed and maneuver against American notions of mass and concentration.

The plan to form a bridgehead at Cherbourg, Churchill himself writes in The Hinge of Fate, seemed “to me more difficult, less attractive, less immediately helpful or ultimately fruitful. It would be better to lay our right claw on French North Africa, tear with our left at the North Cape. . . .

As the war progressed and the pressure of the United States for its “slam-bang” strategy — a direct and massive invasion of the Continent crossChannel from England — became stronger, Churchill modified his concepts, made them more specific; and gradually, as the Russian armies retraced the long road back toward the Balkans, immediate political factors as well as the politico-military lessons of the past influenced his judgments. Sir Winston states that he came to be in “complete accord with what [Harry] Hopkins called ‘a frontal assault upon the enemy in Northern France in

1943.’” (It was actually postponed, wisely, until

1944.) But he also emphasizes that he did not believe this assault should have precluded other operations, which he consistently supported, in the Mediterranean and the Danubian basin.

The preoccupation, throughout the war, of British policy with Turkey is clearly explicable by this Churchillian emphasis upon what he called the soft underbelly of the Axis”; he felt (wrongly in retrospect) that the conquest of Italy and operations in the Aegean-Greece-Rhodes area might encourage Turkey to enter the war. As early as November 18, 1942, the Prime Minister cabled President Roosevelt that the paramount task then before the Allies was first “to conquer North Africa and open the Mediterranean . . . and, second, to use the bases on the African shore to strike at the underbelly of the Axis . . . in the shortest time.”

General Marshall, however, was opposed to any further Mediterranean “dabbling” (Matlofl and Snell). And President Roosevelt, as Mr. Malloff points out in a letter to me, “had no desire to become embroiled in thorny domestic European politics—which the Balkans represented both to him and his staff.”

The unreadiness of the Allies for a cross-Channel assault, and the conquest of North Africa — plus Churchill’s persuasiveness — led to the Sicilian campaign and the Italian invasion. Mot tins was all. Here the British strategy, based upon sea power, mobility, and penetration into Southeast Europe, bogged down in the snows of the Apennines and was slowed up by the concentration of the United States upon its “slam-bang” strategy in the west. Despite the tremendous Allied superiority in sea and air power, the Allies fought a land campaign up the spiny ridge of Italy instead of leapfrogging their armies to the valley of the Po by sea power.

After Salerno only one amphibious operation was tried, and Anzio was almost a disaster, in large measure because of high-command overoptimism, U.S. concentration on Western Europe, and the shoestring nature of the operation. The unpublished diaries of the late Major General John P. Lucas, who commanded the initial assault force (the VI Corps) at Anzio and was later relieved when the Germans failed to collapse and Home did not fall, reveal clearly the cross-purposes that existed at high levels between British and Americans. Anzio was Churchill’s “baby,”and as such he must share the blame with the high command in Italy for its failure to achieve quickly the definitive results expected. Churchill apparently envisaged Anzio as part of his approach to the Balkans; he was characteristically optimistic about its opportunities, whereas the Americans viewed the landing with perturbation. General Lucas recorded in his diary, under date of January 1, 1944, at Maddaloni, Italy:-

“Yesterday we had a high-powered conference. General [Sir Harold R. L. G.| Alexander [Commanding Fifteenth Army Group in Italy] presiding.

. . . Apparently ‘Shingle’ [Anzio] has become the most important operation in the present scheme of things. . . . [Alexander] quoted Mr. Churchill as saying, ‘It will astonish the world,’ and added, ‘It will certainly frighten Kesselring’ [Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commanding German High Command Southwest in Italy].”Later, General Lucas added: “General Alexander, in addition to his remark as to inspiring fear in Kesselring, said in greal glee that ‘Overlord would be unnecessary.’ Overlord was the cross-channel operation [to Normandy] to which, all of us had heard, the Prime Minister was violently opposed.”

In contrast to this optimism, General George Patton, who saw Lucas before the Anzio landing, seemed much disturbed,”and blurted out, “John, there is no one in the Army I hate to see killed as much as you, but you can’t get out of this alive.”

“He advised me,”Lucas records, “strongly to read the Bible when the going got tough”; and later Patton buttonholed one of the aides to General Lucas and said, “Look here, if things get too bad, shoot the old man in the ‘backend,’ but don’t you dare kill the old bastard.” The operation was initially envisaged on a scale far too small, but despite these weaknesses Churchill’s driving insistence forced the landing. Lucas was at least in part the scapegoat of superiors’ mistaken judgments.

But Anzio was strategically sound (though tactically weak), and it was part and parcel of Churchill’s attempts to exploit past Allied victories in the Mediterranean and to move on quickly to the head of the Adriatic and into the Danubian basin.

In these objectives Churchill never faltered, despite what seemed at times the implacable opposition of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, President Roosevelt, and the U.S. Chiefs of Staff. In late 1943, after the surrender of Italy, the British undertook ill-fated operations against Cos, Leros, and Rhodes. Again, as at Anzio, the strategy and Churchill’s ultimate objective—to pose a threat to Germany’s southeastern flank — were sound, but insufficient forces —sea, air, and land — were available. Prizes that should have been ours for the grasping were rather easily held by the Germans, for the United States refused to aid materially in what it then considered “diversionary” operations. The American land concept of strategy, which minimized and misunderstood the proper uses of sea power, again triumphed, and Churchill records the “sharpest pang" he suffered during the war, a “pang" provoked bv the triumph in Europe of the U.S. Army version of strategy.

The United States Navy concentrated upon the Pacific; to it the Mediterranean was a British theater. There was some friction between Admiral Ernest J. King and the British, and Admiral King resented what he felt were failures of the British to live up to their naval commitments -failures which required consequent diversions from American naval efforts in the Pacific. But Churchill’s bitterness was nevertheless justifiable; the “control of the Aegean" and major psychological and political advantages might have been won at little cost.

7

THESE Aegean operations represented one of the main differences between Churchill and Eisenhower. The debate over the Southern France invasion was another. An earlier Anglo-American difference was sharp on staff levels but never reached a polemical stage between the General and the Prime Minister. This concerned the invasion of the Italian island of Pantelleria (prior to the Sicilian landing), an operation which of Eisenhower’s British subordinates mistakenly regarded as highly dangerous. There were other differences, of degree rather than of principle, in the conduct of the campaigns in Western Europe, but the major Anglo-American dispute concerned the southern flank operations in the Mediterranean.

Churchill believed, as he told Eisenhower in 1943, in concentrating “six tenths of our realizable strength” across the Channel, three tenths in Italy and thence in the “right-handed movement” the Prime Minister preferred (as against the Southern France invasion) through the Ljubljana Gap toward Vienna, and one tenth in the Eastern Mediterranean.

“From this I never varied, not an inch in a year.”This flat assertion is a little less than frank, however. Churchill, in his memoirs, particularly in Closing the Ring, specifically denies that at Teheran he wished to substitute a “mass invasion of the Balkans, or a large-scale campaign in the Eastern Mediterranean” for the cross-Channel invasion. He Speaks in many places of “coming into" the Balkans, but differentiates between Austria and Hungary and the Balkans proper, and he explains, though sometimes cryptically, that when he speaks of “coming into" the Balkans he means essentially penetration by commando units, local guerrilla forces, and underground units, backed up by small Allied ground forces and Allied sea and air power. But both Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff apparently contemplated a definite “Balkan Front";the phrase is, in fact, used repeatedly, and it is indisputable that at Cairo just prior to Teheran the British Chiefs of Staff tentatively proposed postponement of the 1944 cross-Channel attack and substitution of a campaign in the Aegean. Moreover, as early as December, 1941, Churchill admitted that the small peripheral operations he advocated, “once started, will require nourishing on a lavish scale.”

The British insistence upon the Mediterranean operations was usually supported until late 1944 by military arguments, but it is rather clear that the ultimate complexion of the post-war world was always present in Churchills mind — particularly as the Russian armies started to move westward after recovery from their defeats. It is significant, too, that Field Marshal Smuts in a speech in London on November 25, 1943, spoke with prescience of the need of some Western European union after the war, since Russia, he foresaw, would be “in the midst of Europe.”

This political motivation is emphasized in a brilliantly documented book that is far too little known: The Great Powers and Eastern Europe by John A. Lukacs. Mr. Lukacs declares that at the Teheran Conference on November 30, 1943, “the decision which had the effect of delivering central-eastern Europe to Russia was made: it was finally and irrevocably decided that the main invasion of Europe would come in northwestern France during May-June, 1944, followed by a secondary landing in France’s Mediterranean shores.”

From then on Churchill’s attempt to save Central Europe from post-war Russian domination was a rear-guard action; he tried repeatedly, supported by General Mark Clark and (in certain respects) by Major General Walter Bedell Smith, to fend off the invasion of Southern France and instead to press the Italian campaign, and to move through Istria and the Ljubljana Gap into the Danubian basin and the Austrian and Hungarian plain.

The last volume of Churchill’s memoirs is replete with references to this unsuccessful effort, which was faced with the obdurate and increasing opposition (although the Russian armies were moving always to the west) of the Americans — notably General Marshall, General Eisenhower, the U.S. Chiefs of Staff, and President Roosevelt. Churchill even threatened to “lay down the mantle of my high office.” Butcher records (Harry C. Butcher: My Three Years with Eisenhower) under date of August 15, 1944: —

“The PM [Prime Minister] wants ... to continue into the Balkans through the Ljubljana gap, in Yugoslavia, to reach Germany through Austria. Ike said the PM wanted to go through ‘that gap, whose name I can’t even pronounce.’ ”

The military and logistical difficulties of a drive from Trieste toward Vienna cannot, of course, be underestimated. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that such a strategy could have succeeded had sufficient sea and air power been allocated to it and had the same number of ground troops been employed that were actually used in Italy and in the invasion of Southern France. Three crack American divisions, heavily reinforced, more than seven French divisions, and very strong naval and air forces launched the Southern France invasion. These forces were certainly more than adequate to establish a major beachhead at the head of the Adriatic. After junction with the Yugoslav guerrillas and with Alexander’s more than twenty divisions (who were pushing northward toward the Po valley) this combined force, equivalent in strength to perhaps forty divisions, would have had ample power to drive northward into the Danubian plain and to threaten Germany from the south. There is some evidence that the Germans feared a Balkan invasion and were relieved when they learned, through their espionage system, of the Teheran decisions to launch the cross-Channel and Southern France invasions.

Politically there can be no dispute. Major General J. F. C. Fuller, in his The Second World War, has summed it up well. Politically the decisive area “was Austria and Hungary, for were the Russians to occupy those two countries — the strategic centre of Europe — before the Americans and British could do so, then the two Western Allies would have fought the war in vain; for all that would happen would be the establishment of a Russian Lebensraum in Eastern Europe instead of a German.”

Lukacs compares Russian and Anglo-American strategy in August, 1944, even more incisively: —

Russian

Subordinated military objectives to long-range political goals; stopped [their| offensive 325 miles from Berlin, leaving the central bulk of the German armies intact in order to:

1. Throw the bulk of the Russian armies into the Balkans, Hungary and Austria.

2. Bring about the destruction of the Polish insurgents by the Germans.

3. Thereby indirectly enable the Germans to gain a breathing space on the main sector of their eastern front and thus delay the advance of the Western Allies into Germany.

Anglo-American

Practically excluded political considerations from their military plans; ordered their main armies to make a bee-line hinge toward Berlin, whereby they:

1. Abandoned the possibilities of an advance into Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia.

2. Did not give effective help to the Poles; were unable to assist Czech, Slovak, Serb insurgents, certain Hungarian forces ready to secede.

3. Were facing the bulk of the western German armies on a relatively short front; suffered three defeats at Arnheim, in the Ardennes, and in Alsace, thus delaying their final advance into central Germany from Sept. 1944 to [March 1945.

It will be hard, I think, for history to refute the contention that the loss of much of Eastern Europe was due in considerable measure to American political astigmatism.

In the history of our wartime mistakes t he loss of Central Europe need not be labored long. In his last volume, Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill produces again and again documentary evidence of his increasing fear marked from Teheran onwards -of Soviet domination of Central Europe. His telegrams and minutes of those times are now amply supported by other source material.

As Churchill states, “when wolves, are about, the shepherd must guard his flock, even if he does not himself care for mutton. The British Prime Minister knew there “were wolves about.”Russian “imperialism and the Communist erect! saw and set no bounds to their progress and ultimate domination.”

Sir Winston foresaw most emphatically in the last year of war:

“First, that Soviet Russia had become a mortal danger to the free world.

“Second, that a new front must be immediately created against her onward sweep.

“Thirdly, that this front in Europe should be as far east as possible.

“Fourthly, that Berlin was the prime and true objective of the Anglo-American armies.

“Fifthly, that the liberation of Czechoslovakia and the entry into Prague of American troops was of high consequence.

“Sixthly, that Vienna, and indeed Austria, must be regulated by the Western Powers, at least upon an equality with the Russian Soviets.

“Seventhly, that Marshal Tito’s aggressive pretensions against Italy must be curbed.

“Finally, and above all, that a settlement must be reached on all major issues between the West and the East in Europe before the armies of democracy melted, or the Western Allies yielded any part of the German territories they had conquered. . . .”

Even though, in the winter of 1944-45, the Normandy invasion and the Southern France assault meant that the eleventh hour, politically, was at hand, many of these eight points were still realizable. The sixth and seventh, as a matter of fact, were accomplished, at least in part, as a result of Churchill’s emphatic and repeated warnings. Berlin might well have fallen first to American troops had the Balkan operation, considered ‘“diversionary" by our Chiefs of Staff, been undertaken. Indeed we might, even so, have beaten the Russians to this prize had its political and psychological significance been fully understood, Churchill repeatedly urged Eisenhower to focus his efforts upon Berlin, but “Ike” saw it as a goal of scant military importance and he failed to appreciate its political significance. Prague was clearly within the grasp of American troops, but with almost naïve faith in Russian good intentions, we deliberately halted our armies short of the goal. And, most emphatically, as Churchill told President Truman in a cablegram on May 12, 1945, “this issue of a settlement with Russia before our strength has gone seems to me to dwarf all others.” In the following months he repeatedly urged that the withdrawal of American troops “three million to our one”

-from the heart and center of Germany to the occupation zones be delayed pending definite agreements with Russia. But President Truman, new to his office and confronted with contrary advice, showed no more prescience than had Roosevelt and felt he had to conform to agreements made prior to his assumption of office, even though Russia already had violated some of those agreements.

“Thus, in the moment of victory was our host, and what might prove to have been our last, chance of durable world peace allowed composedly to fade away. ...”

8

IN TWO of the great wartime issues -the entry of Russia into the Pacific war and our use of the atomic bomb issues that influenced the peace in the Orient, Churchill and the British played purely subordinate roles.

At Yalta, Churchill subscribed to but had no part in shaping the much-criticized territorial concessions promised to Soviet Russia as her reward for entering the war against Japan. Those concessions— Southern Sakhalin and the Kuriles and rights in Dairen, Port Arthur, and Manchuria — were the inducements offered by Roosevelt without the then knowledge of Nationalist China to secure what the bulk of his military advisers, in one of the most mistaken intelligence estimates of history, told him was necessary to final victory in the Pacific: the participation of Soviet Russia in the war.

“. . . on behalf of Great Britain I joined in the agreement, though neither I nor Eden took any part in making it,” Churchill records.

“It was regarded as an American affair and was certainly of prime interest to their military operations. It was not for us to claim to shape it. Anyhow we were not consulted but only asked to approve. This we did. In the United States there have been many reproaches about the concessions made to Soviet Russia. The responsibility rests with their own representatives. To us the problem was remote and secondary.”

Yet Churchill cannot escape some of the responsibility of history by thus washing his hands. For he did agree, without cavil, to what was a mistaken political gesture based on a mistaken military analysis. And since he had fought for and demanded, successfully, some part for the British forces in the closing phases of the war against Japan, Sir Winston, having secured authority in the Pacific, cannot forswear responsibility, even though it be secondary, for the moral, psychological, military, and political blunder of the Yalta concessions.

In the final days of the war against Japan, Churchill shied away slightly from the same policy he had supported in Europe—unconditional surrender.

But at Potsdam he and Britain played a secondary role; the decisive blows against Japan had been delivered by American forces utilizing, ironically, the strategy of sea power which Churchill had tried futilely to “sell" to the Americans in Europe.

British “consent, in principle" to the use of the atomic bomb was given on July 4, 1945. But at Potsdam “there never was a moment’s discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not. . . . The-final decision . . . lay in the main with President Truman . . . but I never doubted what it would be, nor have I ever doubted since that he was right. The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise. . .”

And yet, just a few pages later in his closing book, the greatest Prime Minister in Britain’s modern history records that “it. would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell, and was brought about by overwhelming maril ime power. . .”

Indeed, Japanese peace overtures daring back to 1944 had been reported from many sources; in July of 1945 the fundamental question was in no sense how to win the war-it was already won but merely bow to set face-saving conditions which would make what amounted to unconditional surrender acceptable to Japan. Potsdam refused to do this; we demanded uneonditional surrender; we dropped the bombs and then accepted conditional surrender.

Judged, as Churchill says, “in the after-time,” this admittedly unnecessary use of atomic weapons against a power already defeated, already striving for peace, represents a historical and psychological mistake of grave consequence in the moral, psychological, and political fields. It arrayed the AngloSaxon world, long known as the defenders of freedom, the champions of tolerance, the enemies of the doctrine that the end justifies any means, on the side of those exponents of total war whose outlook is limited to military victory no matter what the corollary costs. We have suffered dearly in Asia as a result; Communist propaganda has pictured us as ruthless, unscrupulous destroyers.

Churchill and Britain must share whatever verdict history finally renders on this account. For British scientists participated in the development of the atomic weapon, British energy went into its making, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed not to use the weapon without the other’s assent, and Britain claimed some degree of authority, even though secondary, in the Pacific realm. It. is amazing and sad that a man of Churchill’s prescience and warmth for his fellow men can record that so vital a decision was not even discussed or debated at Potsdam. The end result might well have been the same, but how much more defensible in history would have been the decision had someone argued the ease for Man! An apostrophe, a comma, a caveat, a but these might at least have shown historically that the West thought beyond victory to the good of future general ions.

These six volumes will serve in future time as Churchill’s finest epitaph. They represent personalized history — incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, but withal honest, vivid, grandiose in scope. They reveal the immense nature of Churchill’s mind; truly he is the political Michelangelo of our times. He is fallible because human, wrong as well as right, but certainly a man of far more than ordinary foresight, a man who understands the harshness of life but loves his fellow men. He is that rare statesman— perhaps the only great one of his time — who has kept his feet in the mud of today but his eyes on the stars of tomorrow.