Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [227]
The U.S. leader was much more interested in promoting Soviet support for the future United Nations organisation, an easy ball for the Russians to play. They indulged Roosevelt by ready acquiescence, though even Stalin expressed scepticism about the president’s vision of China joining Russia, Britain and the United States to police the postwar world. Harriman perceived the danger of flaunting before the Russians Roosevelt’s carelessness about eastern European borders. The relentless advance of Stalin’s armies would have rendered it difficult for the West to stem Soviet imperialism. Churchill was by now reconciled to shifting Poland’s frontiers westwards, compensating the Poles with German territory for their eastern lands to be ceded to Russia. That proposal represented ruthlessness enough. But the president’s behaviour went further, making plain that Stalin could expect little opposition to his designs in Poland or elsewhere.
Roosevelt, bent upon creating a future in which the Great Powers acted in concert, seemed heedless of reality: that Stalin cared nothing for consensus, and was interested only in licence for pursuing his own unilateral purposes. Among the American team, Charles Bohlen and George Kennan of the State Department shared Harriman’s misgivings about Roosevelt’s belief that he shared a world vision with Stalin. The prime minister’s fears for the future began to coalesce. “That the President should deal with Churchill838 and Stalin as if they were people of equal standing in American eyes shocked Churchill profoundly,” wrote Ian Jacob.
Yet most of Roosevelt’s delegation left the summit basking in a glow of satisfaction created by the formal commitment to Overlord, so long desired by both the United States and Soviet Union. The persistent evasiveness of the British on this issue irked even the most Anglophile Americans. The Tehran experience afterwards yielded one of Churchill’s great sallies, no less pleasing for its misplaced self-belief. The meeting, he said, caused him to realise how small Britain was: “There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one … who knew the right way home.”
Stalin was highly satisfied with the Tehran talks. He perceived himself as getting all that he wanted. He thought the president a truth-teller, as Churchill was not, and told the Soviet high command on his return to Moscow: “Roosevelt has given a firm commitment839 to launch large-scale operations in France in 1944. I think he will keep his word. But if he does not, we shall be strong enough to finish off Hitler’s Germany on our own.” After Kursk, his confidence was justified.
Eden thought the 1943 meetings with the Russians the most satisfactory, or least unsatisfactory, of the war, before the steep deterioration of relations during 1944, when Soviet expansionism became explicit. But the British delegation at Tehran deplored the manner in which the Big Three’s discussions roamed erratically across a wilderness of issues, bringing none to a decisive conclusion save that Churchill would thereafter have found it difficult to escape the Overlord commitment. Cunningham and Portal declared the conference840 a waste of time. The British were especially dismayed that no attempt was made to oblige the Russians to recognise the legitimacy of the Polish exile government in London in return for Anglo-American