Yalta 1945 Churchill, Roosevelt And Stalin Summits Six Meetings That Shaped The Twentieth Centurie Csill

YALTA 1945 Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin
Summits six meetings that shaped the twentieth centurie

During the Cold War the Yalta conference of February 1945 became notorious. In Gaullist France it was depicted as the moment when the superpowers divided Europe between them into two blocs. In America it was cited by Republicans as another example of craven appeasement, in which millions inPoland and eastern Europe were consigned to communist oppression. Sixty years on, President George W. Bush was still coupling Yalta with Munich as historic turning points when “the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.”This “attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability,” the president declared, actually “left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Centraland Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.” 1 Bush, like most Republicans, blamed Franklin Roosevelt for selling out to Stalin at Yalta.Yet the agreements were also negotiated by his great hero, Winston Churchill. To understand why, we need to comprehend both men’s remarkable confidence in Stalin. And we must move beyond the conventional focus on Poland andlook at the whole agenda of the conference. Yalta’s problems lay in its preparation and implementation rather than in the parley at the summit itself. 103
Neville Chamberlain pioneered modern summitry, but Winston Churchill made it almost routine. He was even readier than Chamberlain to take personal charge of foreign relations. In the first month of his premiership, Churchill flew across theChannel five times in an increasingly desperate effort to stop the French from surrendering. Once Britain was left to fight Germany alone, Churchill turned his formidable attention on America. “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt,” he remarked later. 2 The courtship was conducted through nearly two thousand telegrams and letters, 3 but also face toface. Because Franklin Roosevelt was “the wheelchair president”—stricken with polio in his forties and henceforth unable to move unaided— Churchill usually traveled to North America. 4 After their seaboard meeting off Newfoundland in August 1941, famous for the Atlantic Charter, they met three times in Washington and twice in Quebec, as well as at Casablanca, Cairo and Malta. They also conferred ontwo occasions with Josef Stalin— at Teheran in November 1943 and Yalta in February 1945— and Churchill went twice to Moscow, in August 1942 and October 1944. President and prime minister both enjoyed these trips, which provided a welcome respite from the pressures of politics at home— especially when the meetings were held in warm and exotic locations. Plumping for North Africa rather than Alaska inJanuary 1943, FDR told Churchill:“I prefer a comfortable oasis to the raft at Tilsit.” FDR’s allusion to Napoleon and Alexander I on the Niemen River in 1807 reveals the degree to which these leaders self-consciously thought of themselves as successors to the potentates of the past. Harold Macmillan, Churchill’s emissary in North Africa and a lover of classical allusions, depicted Churchill andRoosevelt at Casablanca as an encounter between the Emperor of the East and the Emperor of the West, because it seemed “rather like a meeting of the later period of the Roman Empire.” 5 Yet these modern emperors traveled very differently. Churchill’s first two visits to Roosevelt were by ship but he returned from America in January 1942 on a flying boat, which opened up new 104) Figure 3-1 DuringWorld War II, in the era of air travel, modern summitry took off. David Low depicts Churchill and Roosevelt flying across the Mediterranean for their January 1943 meeting at Casablanca, while Hitler and Mussolini look on, enraged, from the toe of Italy. (Evening Standard, January 28, 1943, Solo Syndicate, University of Kent Cartoon Library) possibilities. “Perhaps when the weather gets better,”...