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By Root 734 0

and again that summer, Churchill found his aspirations thwarted. He was eager that Britain should have the honour of hosting a summit, after he himself had travelled so far and often to dance attendance on Roosevelt and Stalin. He now proposed as a venue Invergordon, in Scotland, arguing that each leader could arrive there by battleship. The king would be able to entertain the Big Three at Balmoral. Stalin flatly refused to leave Russia. Even when Roosevelt agreed to a bilateral meeting, and after briefly professing enthusiasm for Invergordon, to Churchill’s chagrin he finally decided that the conference should not take place in Britain. The president was unwilling, especially in a U.S. election year, to be seen as the guest of his nation’s subordinate partner. A second visit to Quebec was scheduled for September.

Churchill’s lonely struggle to save fragments of Polish freedom became ever less rewarding. He allowed himself a surge of hope when Stalin cabled on July 23, endorsing a “unification of Poles friendly disposed towards Great Britain, the USSR and the United States.” Interpreting this—which Eden did not—as a sign that Stalin was willing to accommodate the “London Poles” in a new regime, Churchill told Roosevelt: “This seems to be the best ever965 received from Uncle Joe.” But the significance soon became clear of Stalin’s recognition of Moscow’s puppet Polish National Committee, dubbed in London the “Lublin Poles.” Stalin was bent on a Communist-dominated Polish government, with only token representation of other interests. Under extreme pressure from Churchill, the Polish exile prime minister in London, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, agreed to fly to Moscow. But Mikolajczyk rightly anticipated that obeisance to Stalin would serve no purpose either for himself or his country’s freedom.

On July 31, with Soviet forces only fifteen miles away across the Vistula, the Polish Home Army in Warsaw launched its uprising. Through the agonising weeks that followed, Churchill strove to gain access to Russian landing grounds to be used to dispatch arms to the Poles. The most earnest and humble pleas to Stalin—and in some of Churchill’s cables, he was indeed reduced to begging—failed to move Moscow. The Russian leader believed that Churchill had deliberately provoked the Warsaw Rising to secure for the “London Poles” the governance of their country. Moscow was determined to prevent any such outcome. The prime minister had certainly since 1940 promoted an ideal of popular revolt, and some SOE officers encouraged Polish delusions. But he was in no way complicit in the launch of the Warsaw Rising, an explicitly local initiative. Though he sustained his campaign on behalf of Polish freedom for many months to come, he knew how great the odds were against success. While the Americans were not indifferent, they seemed so both in London and Moscow. The Red Army stood deep inside Poland, while Eisenhower’s forces were far, far away.

Even more serious, from Churchill’s viewpoint, was the frustration of his strategic wishes. He made a last, vain attempt to persuade the Americans against a campaign in Burma. Throughout the war, while Churchill was eager that British forces should be seen to regain Britain’s colonies in the Far East, his interest in the military means by which this should be accomplished was sporadic and unconvincing. Most of his attention, and almost all his heart, focused upon the German war, even as Slim’s imperial army prepared to advance towards the Chindwin frontier of Burma.

Until almost the last day before the landing in southern France on August 15, Churchill argued doggedly against “the Anvil abortion,” pleading for alternative assaults on the Atlantic coast of France, or in northeast Italy. “I am grieved to find that even splendid victories and widening opportunities do not bring us together on strategy,” he wrote to Hopkins in Washington on August 6. The British failed to perceive that the arguments for getting into southern France were less persuasive in rousing U.S. determination than those for getting every possible