• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 877 0

lasted three hours and forty minutes, was made even less palatable by poor interpreting. All foreign visitors to the Kremlin were at first disconcerted that Stalin never looked into their eyes. Instead, this infinitely devious warlord, clad in a lilac tunic and cotton trousers tucked into long boots, gazed blankly at the wall or the floor as he listened and as he spoke. There were no immediate Soviet tantrums, though Stalin made plain his displeasure at the Second Front decision. “A man who is not prepared to take risks,” he mocked, “cannot win a war.” Given his prior knowledge of Churchill’s “revelation,” at this meeting he was making sport of the prime minister. But he did so with his usual supreme diplomatic skill, maintaining his visitors’ suspense about what their host really knew or thought. When they parted and Churchill returned to his villa, he signalled Attlee in London: “He knows the worst, and we parted in an atmosphere of goodwill.” Harriman cabled Roosevelt: “The prime minister was at his best and could not have handled the discussion with greater brilliance.” The next day, August 13, Churchill conferred with Molotov about detailed aspects of Allied plans and aid to Russia.

That afternoon Brooke, Wavell and Tedder arrived, in a Liberator delayed by technical trouble. They were in time to attend the prime minister’s second meeting with Stalin, and were shocked by their glacial reception. The Soviet leader began by handing Churchill a formal protest about the delay in launching the Second Front: “It is easy to understand that the refusal of the Government of Great Britain to create a second front in 1942 inflicts a moral blow to the whole of Soviet public opinion … complicates the situation of the Red Army at the front and compromises the plans of the Soviet command.” What Churchill called “a most unpleasant discussion” ensued. He was resolute in making plain that the Allied decision was irrevocable, and thus that “reproaches were vain.” Stalin taunted him with the destruction of PQ17: “This is the first time in history the British Navy has ever turned tail and fled from the battle. You British are afraid of fighting. You should not think the Germans are supermen. You will have to fight sooner or later. You cannot win a war without fighting.”

Harriman slipped a note to Churchill: “Don’t take this too seriously—this is the way he behaved last year.” The prime minister then addressed Stalin with unfeigned passion about Britain’s past defiance and future resolution, his stream of rhetoric flowing far ahead of the interpreters. Stalin laughed: “Your words are not important, what is vital is the spirit.” Churchill accused Stalin of displaying a lack of comradeship. Britain, he reminded the Georgian, had been obliged to fight alone for a year. In the early hours of August 14, the two delegations parted as frigidly as they had met. “I am downhearted and dispirited,”643 Churchill told his British colleagues. “I have come a long way and made a great effort. Stalin lay back puffing at his pipe, with his eyes half closed, emitting streams of insults. He said the Russians were losing 10,000 men a day. He said that if the British Army had been fighting the Germans as much as the Red Army had, it would not be so frightened of them.”

After a few hours’ sleep, the British communed among themselves. Churchill was smarting from the drubbing he had received. All his latent animosity towards the Soviets bubbled forth, revived by abuse from a leader who eighteen months earlier had been content to collude in Hitler’s rape of Europe. He was also dismayed by an incoming signal from London, detailing heavy losses to the epic Pedestal convoy to Malta. Cabling Attlee to report the Russians’ intransigence, he said that he made “great allowances for the stresses through which they are passing.”

That night, the British attended a banquet, accompanied by the usual orgy of toasts. Hosts and guests feasted in a fashion grotesque in a society on the brink of mass starvation. But what was one more grotesquerie, amid the perpetual black pageant