Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [288]
Despite all the criticism of Churchill in the United States during the past months, few Americans at Yalta doubted the power of his personality. C. L. Sulzberger wrote in the New York Times that among the “Big Three,”1056 Roosevelt was “certainly blander than either of his colleagues,” while Churchill, “with his romantic conceptions, his touch of mysticism, his imperialism, his love of uniforms and color, is something of a Renaissance figure. He combines more talents than either Stalin or Roosevelt—more than almost any political figure who has ever attained his stature.”
Polls in America continued to report widespread personal respect for the prime minister, and a renewed faith that Britain would prove a reliable postwar ally. But enthusiasm for Churchill’s country was importantly qualified. Most Americans—70 percent—were implacable in their belief that at the end of the war the British should repay the billions they had received in Lend-Lease supplies. Even when told that their ally lacked means to do this, 43 percent of respondents said that they must do so anyway. It was a perverse and unhelpful compliment to Britain that the United States, its leaders and people alike, still overestimated the wealth of Churchill’s nation. Few grasped the extent of its moral, strategic and financial exhaustion. Finally, of course, the war had done nothing to diminish U.S. anti-imperialism. A March OWI survey reported: “During the past year, Britain1057 … has been under severe attack by an active minority for its alleged failure to play its proper role in the ‘Big Three Team’… During December and January dissatisfaction with Big Three cooperation was … directed chiefly at Britain … [which was] chiefly blamed for ‘not living up to the Atlantic Charter.’”
The attitude of the unusually large anti-British minority found striking expression in a widely publicised article in the Army and Navy Journal. In a stinging passage, equally critical of Russian and British policy, the journal accused Britain of “showing greater preoccupation in Italy, Greece and Albania to protect her life-line through the Mediterranean to India than in achievement of the prime objective of our American armies—prompt defeat of Germany.” The survey concluded: “A shift in the allocation of chief blame from Russia to Britain is revealed by recent polls.”
All this should be considered in the context of the miracle that, thanks to the statesmanship of George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and finally Harry Truman, the Western Allies preserved to the end of the war a façade of unity. Given the shortcomings of every alliance in history, the Anglo-American working relationship remains remarkable. But Roosevelt made policy during the last months of his life in the knowledge that the American people supported his own postwar vision, and felt scant sympathy for that of Churchill. Britain could draw upon only a meagre credit balance of sentiment in the United States.
The Western leaders’ first meeting with Stalin, at the Livadia Palace, where the conference convened, briefly revived Churchill’s spirits. Stalin, the affable host, deployed some of his limited repertoire of English phrases: “You said it!,” “So what?,” “What the hell goes on around here?” and “The toilet is over there”—all except the last presumably garnered from watching American movies. Churchill wrote later, describing the sensation of finding himself one of the three most powerful men on earth, now gathered together: “We had the world at our feet1058, twenty-five million men marching at our orders by land and sea. We seemed to be friends.” Such romantic illusions were soon banished. For the British at least, the Yalta experience became progressively more distressing.
Churchill opened on an entirely