War and Remembrance (148 page)

Connolly tossed down the letter and the magnifying glass. “I call that a superb tribute. I wouldn’t mind a man writing it about my wife, Pug! Your gal must be quite something.”

“She is. Well, I’m glad he’s giving her some diversion. She’s entitled to it, she’s got a rotten deal. I thought the admiral was expecting me.”

“No, he seems to be coming down with what you’ve got. The President got taken queer at dinner tonight, too. Had to leave Churchill and Stalin chewing the fat without him. The Secret Service had a poison scare, but I hear he’s sleeping it off all right. Just the crud. Persia’s kind of hard on newcomers.”

“It is that.”

“If you’re not better in the morning, go to the hospital, Pug, and get some blood tests.”

“I have a report to finish before I turn in. The President expects it in the morning.”

Connolly looked impressed, but his reply was offhand. “No sweat. Call the base duty officer and it’ll be picked up, any hour of the night.”

Coming into the officers’ quarters, Pug said to a sergeant sleepily reading a comic book at the entrance desk, “Is there a typewriter in this place?”

“This desk has a fold-away typewriter, sir.”

“I’d like to use it.”

The sergeant squinted at him. “Now, sir? It makes a racket.”

“I won’t be long.”

He went to his room, took a dram of strong bourbon, and returned to the silent lobby with his notes on the Lend-Lease tour. His ailment tended to retreat before alcohol, leaving him briefly euphoric; and the one-page report that he thunderously clattered off seemed brilliant to him. That it might look like drunken drivel in the morning was a risk he had to accept. He sealed it up and called the duty officer. In his unheated small room he tumbled into the cot, piling on every blanket and also his bridge coat.

He woke in sweat-soaked sheets. By the blurry look of his wristwatch, the spinning of the sunlit room, and his weakness when he tried to stand, he knew he had no choice but the hospital.

T
HE
“spoke in Churchill’s wheel” was nothing less than the expulsion of the British Empire from its leading position in world affairs, all in a few hours of polite talk around a table in the Soviet embassy.

Churchill had met Stalin before. Roosevelt had not. With the first face-to-face encounter of Stalin and Roosevelt, the center of gravity of the war and of the world’s future shifted. The one person who felt this shift in its full crushing force was Winston Churchill. Hints had not been lacking from the start at Tehran that his intimacy with Roosevelt in war leadership was fading: the President’s private first meeting with Stalin, for one thing, and his acceptance of Russian hospitality for another. But only in the plenary sessions did the change bite into Churchill’s role in history.

A great man, an astute historian, Churchill at Tehran could play only the cards he held. They were relatively weak. Roosevelt might feel affection for him, and total distrust toward Stalin. But in this new deal, shuffled up by world war, of the ancient great game, the Soviet Union now held the cards of manpower and willpower. At Tehran the British were dealt out; some three hundred years of Western European leadership in history ended; and the present day gloomily dawned.

The very hardest thing to imagine, in looking back on this old war, is that it could have gone other than it did. Yet the overwhelming reality during the war — which one must try to grasp, to get a sense of the time — is that nobody knew how it would go. Franklin Roosevelt had done well to journey to the Bolshevik’s back fence. Fighting men were dying in masses all over the world, tanks were burning, ships sinking, planes falling, cities toppling, resources wasting; yet the outcome was still very much in doubt, and no plan for winning existed among Hitler’s foes. After two years of talk, the American and British staffs remained at loggerheads: the Americans adamant for an all-out smash into France in 1944, the British holding out for less risky operations in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean. Roosevelt had no assurance that the Soviet Union would not make a separate peace, or like the Chinese quit fighting beyond a point; and that Stalin would ever declare war on Japan, or join a union of nations after the war, were mere hopes.

Tehran changed all that. In the space of three days, in three round-table strategy meetings lasting but a few hours, the President with bland art —
and what looks in the record like simulated clumsiness — led Josef Stalin to veto once for all Winston Churchill’s proposed nibblings at Europe’s periphery, and to swing the decision at last for
Overlord,
the grandiose cross-Channel landing in France. Stalin promised a synchronized all-out smash from the east; also, once Germany was beaten, an attack on Japan. He pledged, too, that Russia would join a postwar United Nations. The long suspicious fencing among the Big Three ended at Tehran in a tough solid alliance, with a firm plan for wiping out National Socialism. The alliance would not last in the riptides of postwar change, but it would win the war. Franklin Roosevelt went to Tehran to win the war.

The plan rode roughshod over Churchill’s cherished ideas. In the opening session, Roosevelt almost chattily asked Stalin whether he preferred the great assault on France, or one or another Mediterranean plan; and when the formidable Russian approved the Overlord attack, Churchill found himself outvoted two to one, with his vote the least powerful of the three. It was the “spoke in the wheel,” the quietus on his long dogged struggle to conduct the war so as to preserve his old Empire.

Next day in the second formal meeting he fought back, arguing long and frantically for his Mediterranean proposals, until Stalin stopped him cold by asking, “Do the British really believe in Overlord, or are they only saying so to reassure the Russians?” It was such a raw moment that Roosevelt said they had all better get ready for dinner. Stalin rode Churchill hard, all during the meal that evening, about his tenderness for the Germans. The Prime Minister at last stalked in fury from the room; whereupon the Russian followed and good-humoredly brought him back.

Early on the third morning Hopkins visited Churchill. Perhaps he brought the crusty old battler word from Roosevelt that it was time to quit; we do not know. Anyway, at the combined Chiefs of Staff meeting shortly after that, the British all at once conceded that the staff had better set the date for Overlord or go home. Thus the two-year wrangle ended. The Americans showed no elation or triumph. A one-page agreement on Overlord was rushed to Churchill and Roosevelt. At lunch, Churchill gamely suggested that Roosevelt read it to Stalin, and he did. With grim delight, Stalin responded that the Red Army would show the gratitude of Russia by a full-scale matching attack from the east.

That night Churchill’s birthday dinner took place in the British legation. Churchill presided, with Roosevelt at his right, Josef Stalin at his left, and military leaders and foreign ministers ranged up and down the glittering table. All was conviviality and wassail, optimism and friendship. The sense of a great turn in history was strong. The toasts went round and round. It was Churchill’s prerogative to give the last one, but Stalin surprised the gathering by requesting the privilege. These were his words:

“I want to tell you, from the Russian point of view, what the President and the United States have done to win the war. The most important things in this war are machines. The United States has proven that it can turn out from eight thousand to ten thousand airplanes per month. Russia can only turn out, at most, three thousand airplanes per month. England turns out three thousand to thirty-five hundred, which are principally heavy bombers.

“The United States, therefore, is a country of machines. Without these machines, through Lend-Lease, we would lose the war.”

It was more than Stalin ever said publicly to his own people about the American contribution to the war until he died. He might have been expected, given the occasion, to compliment Churchill and the British; instead the old monster chose to praise America and Lend-Lease. He had never allowed Churchill to forget his enmity to Bolshevism; perhaps this was his oblique last thrust at the aging Tory.

There would be another day of political chaffering, leaving the sore issue of Poland uppermost and unresolved, but the Tehran Conference was over. All three leaders could go home in triumph. Stalin had his full-scale invasion of France, which was what he had been demanding since the day Germany had invaded his country. Put down though Churchill was, he could bring to the British people assurance of victory in the war they had all but lost; and if his Mediterranean plans had been subordinated to Overlord, he would fight on for them, and push some through.

The chief gain was Roosevelt’s. He had a firm alliance against Germany at last, the exact Allied strategy he wanted, elimination of a separate peace, Stalin’s pledge to attack Japan, and his commitment to join the United Nations: a clean sweep of objectives. Franklin Roosevelt bore himself at Tehran, the memoirs suggest, as though it were his finest hour. Perhaps it was.

Yet no human mind can peer very far into the coming time; less so, in the smoke of war. In the end, the United States would not need Russia’s help in the Pacific, indeed would be embarrassed by it. But now the atomic bomb project was a limping question mark, and capturing one small atoll, Tarawa, had been a very bloody business. The war against Japan was expected to go on after Germany’s fall for a year or more, ending in an invasion of the Tokyo plain that might cost a million casualties. Stalin’s pledge seemed a godsend. As for the eventual dismal decline of the United Nations, who could foresee that? What was there to do but try?

For the Jews still alive in Europe’s dreadful night, Tehran was also a dawn; but for them, too, a gloomy dawn. The Overlord assault could not traverse the stormy English Channel before the mild weather of May or June. Roosevelt jocosely observed to Stalin, in breaking this bad news, that
the Channel was “a disagreeable body of water.” Churchill interjected that the British people had reason to be glad it was so disagreeable. On this waggish byplay turned countless Jewish lives. By the time of Tehran the “territorial solution” was going full blast. Most of Europe’s Jews were dead or en route to their deaths. Yet multitudes might yet be saved by the quick smashing of Nazi Germany.

Nobody talked at Tehran about the Jews, but among the high stakes of the conference was this race for the rescue of a remnant. Franklin Roosevelt had made sure that Hitlerism would not much longer darken the earth; but meantime the German murder machinery was working very fast.

What remains of the Tehran Conference, besides old words and old photographs, is the shape of the modern world. If you would see the monument of Tehran, look around. The quaint Persian city in which it took place has been engulfed by a roaring metropolis. The war leaders, having strutted and fretted their hour, are gone. Their work still turns history’s wheels. The rest is for the tellers of tales.

A fat pale Army doctor, moving along the double row of beds, came upon Pug Henry sitting up in a khaki hospital gown. “How are you?” the doctor wearily said. He was himself a newcomer, and had a touch of some Persian ailment.

“Hungry. Can I order breakfast?”

“What have you in mind?”

“Ham and eggs and hashed brown potatoes. Maybe I should go over to the officers’ mess.”

The doctor sadly grinned, felt his pulse, and handed him a letter. “Will you settle for powdered eggs, dehydrated potatoes, and Spam?”

“Sounds great.” Pug was eagerly tearing open the envelope, addressed in Pamela’s mannish vertical hand. It was dated the previous day.

My love,

I am beside myself. They won’t let me see you!

They tell me you’re still too sick to come out to the visitors’ room, and a female can’t enter the ward. Blast, hell, damn! They say you don’t have amoebas, malaria, or any of the other local horrors, so that’s a relief, but I’ll worry about you all the way back to New Delhi.
Please
go to the British legation before you leave, look for Lieutenant Shinglewood (a nice green-eyed girl) and tell her you’re all right. She’ll get word to me.

Duncan is abysmally disgusted with the way the conference has gone. He says it’s the end of the Empire. I am hearing a lot of the
Bhagavad-Gita.

Now
listen,
very quickly and no doubt very clumsily, here it is. I put on an idiotic show that other night in the garden. Possibly there was no “right”
way to behave when you threw those questions about Rhoda at me. I reacted on pure instinct, squirting an ink cloud like an alarmed octopus. Why? Not sure. Solidarity of the sex, reluctance to stick a knife into a rival, whatever. Now I’ve thought it over. Matters are too serious for any of that. The happiness of several people may be at stake. Anyway, you obviously know something, possibly more than I do.