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By Root 895 0

for the postwar world, including international trusteeship for the Dutch and French empires in Asia, and enforced disarmament of all save the Great Powers. Then the foreign minister outlined his exchanges at the White House about the Second Front: “I mentioned among other things569 that Roosevelt agreed with the point of view that I had set forth, i.e., that it could prove harder to establish a second front in 1943 than in 1942 due to possible grave problems on our front. Finally, I mentioned that the president attached such great importance to the creation of a second front in 1942 that he was prepared to gamble, to endure another Dunkirk and lose 100,000 or 120,000 men … I stressed however that I thought the number of divisions which Roosevelt proposed to commit insufficient, i.e., six to ten.

“Here Churchill interrupted me in great agitation, declaring that he would never agree to another Dunkirk and a fruitless sacrifice of 100,000 men, no matter who recommended such a notion. When I replied that I was only conveying Roosevelt’s view, Churchill responded: ‘I shall tell him my view on this issue myself.’” Oliver Harvey recorded the same conversation: “Roosevelt had calmly told Molotov570 he would be prepared to contemplate a sacrifice of 120,000 men if necessary—our men. PM said he would not hear of it.”

Molotov said years later: “We had to squeeze everything we could get571 out of [the Western Allies]. I have no doubt that Stalin did not believe [that a Second Front would happen]. But one had to demand it! One had to demand it for the sake of our own people. Because people were waiting, weren’t they, to see whether help [from the Western Allies] would come. That sheet of paper [the Anglo-Soviet agreement] was of great political significance to us. It cheered people up, and that meant a lot then.”

The Anglo-Soviet treaty signed on May 26 merely committed “the High Contracting Parties … to afford one another572 military and other assistance and support of all kinds.” But in Moscow after Molotov’s return from London, Pravda reported, “The Day is at hand when the Second Front will open.” On June 19, the newspaper described a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, whose members were told that the accords reached between the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States reflected the fact “that complete agreement had been achieved about the urgency of opening of the second front in Europe in 1942.” This announcement, said the paper, was received with protracted applause, as was a subsequent statement that “these agreements are of the highest importance for the nations of the Soviet Union, since the opening of the second front in Europe will create insurmountable difficulties for Hitler’s armies on our front.” All this was untrue, and well understood to be so by Stalin and Molotov. But among so many other deceits, what was one more, deemed so necessary to the spirit of the Russian people? And in this case, the Russians were entirely entitled to declare that the Americans, and in lesser degree the British, were making promises in bad faith.

Molotov, in old age, asserted that he found Churchill “smarter”573 than Roosevelt:

I knew them all, these capitalists574, but Churchill was the strongest and cleverest … As for Roosevelt, he believed in dollars … He thought that they were so rich and we so poor, and that we would become so weakened that we would come to the Americans and beg. This was their mistake … They woke up when they’d lost half of Europe. And here of course Churchill found himself in a very foolish predicament. In my opinion, Churchill was the most intelligent of them, as an imperialist. He knew that if we, the Russians, defeated Germany, then England would start losing its feathers. He realized this. As for Roosevelt, he thought: [Russia] is a poor country with no industry, no grain, they are going to come and beg. There is no other way out for them. And we saw all this completely differently. The entire nation had been prepared for the sacrifices, for struggle.

This was, of course, a characteristic Soviet ex post facto