Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (14 page)

Sarah Churchill describes the dinner:

Details about the foods and wines leaked out from British and American attendees afterwards, most of
whom had followed their respective leaders back to Cairo. Cocktails, wrote an American journalist, “looked like
tomato
juice … probably the famous Middle East Bloody Marys, made by mixing tomato juice and vodka”.
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The menu was:

And champagne and both French and Persian wines with which to accompany the multiple toasts that had become so much a part of the ritual of those war leaders’ meetings. They allowed Churchill that night to set aside the multiple irritations inflicted on him by both the President and the Marshal and to praise both the President (toasted by Churchill as President and personally) and Marshal Stalin (as “Stalin the Great”). The Soviet custom that the man
proposing
the toast clink glasses with the subject of his toast meant that Stalin was up and about throughout the meal, touching glasses all around the room. The small birthday cake would not have served the 34 guests but it did
accommodate
the 69 candles, in the shape of a V, and made the occasion more festive.

The “Persian lantern” dessert – the source of the most
unexpected
and perhaps amusing event of the dinner – is best described by General Brooke, who was near Stalin’s
interpreter
Valentin Berezhkov:

Another description of the famous dessert – a highlight of Churchill’s birthday dinner – comes from Lieutenant General Sir Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s Military Secretary:

Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal was heard to say,
sotto voce
: “Missed the target” – meaning it should have been tipped over Stalin’s head.

The sharp-eyed Admiral of the Fleet, Sir John Cunningham, later described the “Persian Lantern” as an “ice pudding”. He also identifies the Russian interpreter as Pavlov.
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(There is some confusion about which Russian
interpreter
was actually there. Much later, Berezhkov wrote a memoir in which he lets us believe he was present. The official guest list prepared by Harriman says it was Pavlov; the list from the British Embassy in Teheran says it is Berezhkov. Hugh Lunghi says that, after 1942, Pavlov was Stalin’s only English interpreter. Oddly, the Soviet leader toasted – not once but twice – Churchill’s valet, Sawyers, who was probably standing at the back of the room in the event that his boss might need something.
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And then the dinner was over. It was successful in easing earlier tensions and may have been the basis for the lunch the following day at which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to a broad strategy for
prosecuting the war to a triumphant conclusion, Overlord was to be launched during May 1944, and cooperation
between
the three nations’ military staffs was enhanced.
32

That evening, the Prime Minister asked Sir Reader Bullard, the British Minister, to commemorate the dinner he had given for Roosevelt and Stalin with a permanent plaque and instructed that it be hung in the legation’s dining room. Churchill approved the text, which says, in part:

The plaque was engraved on silver and ceremoniously
installed
, and today frames the hallway just outside the dining room, across from a copy of the seating plan for the dinner. The Soviets later provided their own memento of the dinner but their text was engraved on a two-ton block of granite.
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Churchill and Roosevelt left Teheran for Cairo on 2 December. Stalin returned to Moscow.

Twenty years later, on Churchill’s birthday, in 1963, Averell Harriman sent him this private note: “All best
wishes
on your 89th birthday. I vividly recall your 69th birthday twenty years ago when we dined with you in Teheran when plans were laid for victory over Hitler and hopes were high for the development of a peaceful post-war world.”
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A nice footnote to a memorable evening.

C
HAPTER
7

Yalta February 1945

Y
alta was certainly not the easiest of locations for the next meeting of the Big Three. But Stalin would not fly, and refused to leave Soviet-controlled territory. The Soviet dictator, once again, had his way. No matter to Churchill, who believed that this meeting would be what US Secretary of State Edward S. Stettinius, Jr. later called “the most important wartime meeting of the leaders of Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States”.
3
For Roosevelt, however, the trip to this remote location, crossing parts of Europe still at war, was an arduous undertaking. Hopkins saw the President’s willingness to travel to Yalta
as a tribute to his “adventurous spirit [which] was forever leading him to go to unusual places”.
4
This, at a time when Roosevelt was so seriously ill that his energies would desert him during the meeting. He would die only two months after the Yalta Conference ended.

En route to Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt met for lunch aboard the cruiser USS
Quincy
at Malta, after which the Prime Minister cabled Clementine: “My friend has arrived in the best of health and spirits.”
5
He was alone in that view.

Marian Holmes, one of the Prime Minister’s secretaries, noted: “What a change in the President since we saw him in Hyde Park last October. He seems to have lost so much weight, has dark circles under his eyes, looks altogether frail, and hardly as if he is in this world at all”
6
– a description borne out by the photographs of him, which show a very sick man indeed.
7

After-dinner tête-à-tête

So unwell was the President that the plane to Yalta had to fly very low because of his blood pressure, a problem that would not have seemed serious to Churchill, since his own health during most of the war required the unpressurised planes of that time to fly below 10,000 feet.

Perhaps Churchill saw what he wanted to see on the eve of the Yalta Conference; perhaps he was harking back to his own experience of an almost miraculous return to full health a few years earlier, when he was taken seriously ill with pneumonia but quickly recovered, despite defying his doctors and constantly calling for the forbidden cigars – a defiance repeated when recovering from a broken hip and several strokes

The city of Yalta had become tsarist Russia’s leading
seaside
resort in the nineteenth century, its extravagant villas patronised by the royal family and the aristocracy. After the revolution it became the pre-eminent holiday destination for Soviet workers. But the war had brought severe destruction. The retreating Germans had destroyed much of its
infrastructure
and vandalised its palaces. For the conference, the Soviets had to bring with them all the furnishings, plumbing, carpeting, windows and even the domestic staff, who were from the prestigious Metropole Hotel in Moscow.
8
Some American delegates who had worked in Moscow recognised familiar faces. Everything had been packed into 1,500
railway
coaches
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which had begun arriving in Yalta just a few days before the start of the meetings.

Yalta’s harbour had been so heavily mined, and there were so many sunken ships, that the American and British ships had to anchor at Sebastopol, 90 miles away. Those ships were the “sole link with their home countries, and all
messages
in and out were transmitted through them”.
10
“If we
had spent ten years on research we could not have found a worse place,” Churchill complained to Harry Hopkins.
11
He was right: Yalta was clearly not the best place for a second meeting of the Big Three, one of whom was obviously
failing
. Churchill was sufficiently chagrined at the site selection to apologise to Marian Holmes, “What a hole I’ve brought you to.”
12
He described the place as a “Riviera of Hades”
13
and intended to survive “by bringing an adequate supply of whisky good for typhus and deadly on lice”.
14
(Churchill had declared “war on lice” in the trenches of the First World War when he discovered that his men were infested with them.) All attendees complained about bedbugs until the US
military
sprayed DDT everywhere.

After a few days at Yalta, Churchill revised his initial impression, cabling Attlee and the War Cabinet: “This place has turned out very well … It is a sheltered strip of
austere
Riviera with winding corniche roads …”
15
Perhaps he had found some virtues to the site, or was buoyed by sharing US Secretary of State Edward S. Stettinius, Jr.’s later
optimistic
assessment of the meetings’ importance: “It was not only the longest meeting; it was also the first time that the three leaders reached fundamental agreements on post-war problems”
16
– a bit of an exaggeration since they had earlier agreed on substantial points of war-time strategy at the final lunch at Teheran.

Churchill was hoping for a resolution to the problem of Poland, unresolved at previous meetings. Roosevelt had a new item on his agenda: the structure of a post-war
institution
devoted to maintaining world peace. Roosevelt was determined not to meet the fate of a man he much admired, Woodrow Wilson, who, after the Great War, failed to
persuade
the American Congress to support membership of the League of Nations.

Not only had Stalin been unprepared to accommodate his allies on where to hold this meeting (just as he would later insist that the next meeting be held in Potsdam, in the Soviet Union’s zone of defeated Germany), he also refused to
accommodate
them on most issues of substance. He was,
however
, quite prepared to play the gracious host by showering his guests with buckets of champagne and vats of caviar for “breakfast, luncheon and dinner”
18
– much appreciated by Churchill – and “lots of lovely butter”,
19
a luxury strictly
rationed
in Britain (and, although less stringently, at the White House.) When one of the British delegation was heard to complain that there were no lemons for their gin and tonics, and Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, commented that caviar tasted better with lemons, the Soviets somehow provided lemon trees with real lemons the next day.
20
When another delegate noticed that a fish tank was empty, the Soviets filled it with water and goldfish the next day.

The Prime Minister had taken off very early from his stop-over at Malta, and landed at a run-down airfield in Saki in the Crimea. After a brief ceremonial meeting with Roosevelt, who had arrived earlier, Churchill was then driven to Yalta – some seven or eight hours away, stopping en route at a rest house. The Prime Minister and his daughter Sarah, plus carloads of trailing staff and press, were greeted there by
Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and by “a most magnificent luncheon … prepared for me and the President or anyone else. Champagne, caviare, every luxury. Alas we had eaten a good deal before, but still there was a pleasant hour or two of talk and gourmandizing”.
21
Sir John Martin, Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, recalled that “the table groaned with caviare and the pop of champagne bottles went on all the time like machine-gun fire”.
22

Vorontsov Palace: Churchill’s villa

Suitably refreshed, the Prime Minister pressed on by car for another three or four hours across rough terrain, and along mostly unpaved road. Saluting Soviet soldiers were stationed at intervals variously reported as at 50, 100 or 200 yards.

The three villas assigned to the national leaders were about half an hour away from each other. The roads between the villas were cleared of all traffic and heavily patrolled by male Soviet troops, whereas the road from the airport had been patrolled by both male and female troops. Quite a show of
power for Stalin, a demonstration he would later repeat at Potsdam.

Churchill and his party were billeted at the Vorontsov Palace, designed by a Victorian architect. Joan Bright, a member of the British staff, describes it as a “
pseudo-Scottish
-castle-cum-Moorish Palace”.
23
Cadogan describes it as “a combination of the Moorish and Gothic styles … a big house of indescribable ugliness – a sort of Gothic Balmoral”.
24
It was in fact modelled in part on Windsor Castle, where Count Vorontsov’s father, the Tsar’s Ambassador to London, had been received by Queen Victoria.

Elizabeth Layton, who was with Churchill at Yalta, later recalled:

Unusually, only three of the six nights were booked for formal banquets given by the national leaders. But on all days lavish lunches were served for the leaders and their staffs, both military and political. Cadogan tells us that the Soviets had prepared for arrival day “an enormous luncheon – more caviar and smoked salmon, more vodka, and much food of all sorts, ending with tangerines”,
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not available in Britain and considered a wonderful treat by the Churchills.
Clementine especially appreciated receiving some as a gift via one of the Americans visiting Britain.

Caviar was so often on offer, and in such huge
quantities
, that it came to be taken for granted. The Prime Minister complained that it was no substitute for news from his private office in Downing Street. In a letter to John Colville, John Martin quotes Colonel Kent (a code name for Churchill) sadly “calling again and again for news and being only offered caviar”.
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After the midday feast set out on the day of Churchill’s arrival, and throughout the conference, there was a general dinner for the entire British contingent, including staff, but the Prime Minister, who had arrived at around dinner time, slipped off to bed early. “He must have dined in his own room,” Cadogan writes in his diary.
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