Winston Groom - The Allies: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

November 1943

It was a sunny day in Tehran when Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived by air to attend the second Allied leadership summit of World War II, code-named Eureka. Joseph Stalin, who did not like to fly, had finally agreed to a meeting with the American president and the British prime minister in the recently occupied Persian capital, which he could reach by private train from Moscow. Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union had fought alongside one another for nearly two years to stem the Nazi tide that threatened Europe, yet their leaders had never before gathered together in the same room. Churchill himself later remarked that it was the greatest concentration of political power the world had yet seen.

On the afternoon of the first day, Stalin appeared at Roosevelts door with a hearty welcome. He insisted that Roosevelt stay at the Russian Embassy in Tehran, citing a suddenly uncovered assassination plot. Polio had long since destroyed Roosevelts leg muscles, so he was appreciatively surprised that his suite at the embassy included a newly built handicapped-style bathroom. But an atmosphere of suspicion hung over the proceedings: if Roosevelt had been expected to stay in the Soviet building all along, as the new bathroom suggested, it probably meant that he was being surveilled by Stalins cronies. After a long chat, Stalin went away amused by the American presidents cheery, casual approach to diplomacy but judged him a lightweight compared to the more formidable Churchill. Roosevelt, on the other hand, believed he could do business with Stalin, known familiarly between him and Churchill as Uncle Joe.

In Tehran, the three great leaders were perfectly in character. Roosevelt was charming as always, attempting with finesse to establish favor with his Soviet counterpart. He made martinis and cracked jokes to ease the obvious tension between the other two Allies. Stalin remained quiet and mysterious, projecting an icy confidence in his crisp military uniform and epaulets. Churchill stubbornly resisted playing nice with the Russian dictator and focused conversation on the wars multiple fronts, especially the eastern Mediterranean. While Stalin insisted on a definitive date for the cross-Channel Allied invasion of France that would open a second front against the Germans, Churchill urged the American president to consider delaying the invasion slightly in favor of new operations to get at Germany through the southern Balkans. Roosevelt sided with Stalin: Operation Overlord (now remembered as D-day) would be the main event.

FDR had always been more favorably disposed toward the massive Communist state and its leader than had his British counterpart. Ever the bon vivant, Roosevelt approached Stalin with characteristic confidence in his own sparkling charisma. So when the two finally met in Tehran, it is perhaps not surprising that he found Stalin personally engaging. (Influenced by Walter Durantys New York Times articles praising the Soviet regime, one of Roosevelts first acts as president had been to diplomatically recognize the Soviet Union as a legitimate nationagainst the wishes of a large number of his countrymen and his own mother.) As soon as Stalin became an ally of the United States in the war against Hitler, he was routinely portrayed in the American media as a benign, avuncular figure or as a bold, fearless leader. And yet up to this point in history, Uncle JoeTime magazines 1942 Man of the Yearhad systematically killed at least 20 million of his fellow citizens.

Churchill, for his part, hated communism from its inception, and he remained distrustful of Stalins intentions even after the Soviet Union openly avowed that it had no designs on any countries in Europe. At Tehran, Churchill was loath to allow the relationship he had carefully cultivated with the American president to be undermined by Stalins insistence on definite plans for a second front and was put off by Roosevelts eagerness to please the Communist leader. Stalin frequently tossed out words like freedom, liberty, and democracy, in regard to such Soviet-occupied countries as Poland, prompting Churchill to recall Humpty Dumptys conversation with Alice: When I use a word it means just what I choose it to meanneither more nor less.