The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945–1953

By Robert Dallek

"Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a lifetime of studying leadership. The story of what went wrong during the postwar period…has never been more intelligently explored." —Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Team of Rivals

Robert Dalleck follows his bestselling Nixon and Kissenger: Partners in Power and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 with this masterful account of the crucial period that shaped the postwar world. As the Obama Administration struggles to define its strategy for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dallek's critical and compelling look at Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and other world leaders in the wake of World War II not only offers important historical perspective but provides timely insight on America's course into the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9780062016713

Robert Dallek

Robert Dallek is the author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 and Nixon and Kissinger, among other books. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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PREFACE

This is a book about the generation of leaders in the years of upheaval between the close of World War II and the early Cold War. It is not a comprehensive history about why and how the Cold War began. Rather, it is an attempt to underscore the misjudgments and unwise actions that caused so much continuing strife and suffering, and suggest alternatives that might have made for greater international harmony.

While I highlight the failings of the notable men who dominated the scene during this time, I am not intent on denying them their due, or in the case of the greatest villains of the day, revising their reputations for wrongdoing. My greatest interest is in revisiting the decision making and events of the period as a cautionary tale—a reprise of what went wrong as a call for future improvement in world affairs, or an educator’s lesson of what might have been done to avoid the difficulties that beset strong and weak nations around the globe.

Such an exercise in finger-pointing and advice-giving is bound to provoke debate. The what-ifs of history are always risky propositions, more the product of speculation than persuasive evidence. I would be the first to grant that my suggested remedies for the missteps of the period reflect the historian’s advantage over leaders who could not know how things would turn out. During his presidency, John F. Kennedy told the historian David Herbert Donald, No one has a right to grade a President—not even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made decisions. Yet it is the historian’s job not only to examine the record as fully as possible but also to render judgments on how past officeholders performed. Otherwise, we are no more than chroniclers telling a story without meaning.

I hope my retrospective suggestions on how world leaders might have done better for the millions of people they governed are seen as a constructive exercise that encourages reflection on their limitations. The fact that men and women gain governing power—whether by democratic elections or extraconstitutional means—is no guarantee of wise leadership.

The success of this book depends less on whether I stimulate a chorus of approving nods on the alternatives I see to some of their actions than on renewed discussion of how the most powerful men of the 1940s and early ‘50s performed, and—more importantly—what their mistakes tell us about crafting more considered actions in the future. That most of the book’s focus is on leaders’ shortcomings is not meant as a lament about the limits of governments to act more wisely. The post-1945 era had its share of sensible actions between nations. I hope my discussion of wrong turns, then, is seen not as a cry of despair but as a reminder that we can do better in resolving conflicts and promoting international cooperation.

R.D.

Washington, D.C.

September 2009

INTRODUCTION

I have no high opinion of human beings: they are always going to fight and do nasty things to each other.

—George F. Kennan, 1976

At the start of 1945, total war had absorbed the world’s energies for almost ten of the century’s first forty-four years. Winston Churchill thought of the period between 1914 and 1945 as another Thirty Years’ War. And in 1948 he lamented the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security. It was, in his words, the human tragedy.

So much of what happened throughout the twentieth century, Churchill believed, was preventable. World War II, he told Franklin Roosevelt, should have been called The Unnecessary War, as many said of the century’s first great war. And could also be said of much of the post-1945 international strife.

It may well be that a human affinity for struggle and conflict make war—whether among tribes, religions, or nations—inevitable. But heads of state have always had the power to influence events, especially at the end of World War II, when the defeat of Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese militarism presented an uncommon opportunity for more rational, humane governance.

The rise of new international conflicts or the failure to secure a stable, more durable peace can be blamed on a blundering generation of leaders around the world. If this had been a period when American, European, and Asian rulers were notable for their limitations, the lost opportunity might be more understandable. But the sitting and emerging chiefs of state were as able and effective a group of executives as we have seen in any one generation in modern times. This is not to suggest that they were so superior in understanding and judgment to most other preceding and subsequent heads of government that they could do no wrong; they were as vulnerable to human miscalculation as all of us. Still, they were impressively talented politicians blessed by circumstances favorable to changing international relations for the better. But they didn’t, or at least fell well short of what they might have accomplished. Why and how the world’s leaders blundered is the focus of this book.

At the start of the twentieth century, some European thinkers saw the state of war as essential to a nation’s survival. Not only did external threats from other countries that coveted territory and resources beyond their borders encourage national militancy between states, but the discipline of a command system also seemed likely to make citizens more productive and the nation more prosperous. And even more than any material benefits generated by a country at war were the intangibles—national pride in disciplined forces performing heroic deeds has had enduring universal appeal. Being too proud to fight has never been a match for courageous warriors ready to give their lives for some larger good.

Yet while national leaders have always justified war by invoking the nobility of patriotic sacrifice, they have also made the case for war as a prerequisite for lasting peace. How many in the aggressor nations in 1914 or 1939, however, especially the mass of Germans who rallied to Adolf Hitler’s marching orders, would have chosen war if they knew what costs in suffering these conflicts would produce without the promised respite from bloodshed? The horrors of the years between 1914 and 1945 undermined the belief of even the most confident advocates of military action that they could turn the world toward long-term peace. The brutal trench warfare and strains on civilian populations of 1914–18 that destroyed 18 million lives convinced some observers in the 1920s and ‘30s that total war between advanced industrial societies was too destructive to victors and vanquished alike to let countries ever fight again. As French premier Georges Clemenceau said after 1918, War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

Although a formidable pacifist movement sprang up in Europe and America after 1918, millions of people, especially in the defeated nations, turned the war into a holy crusade. They prided themselves on having fought for a larger good, believing the sacrifice of so much blood and treasure a noble enterprise. This pride, combined with the losers’ passion for revenge and the economic collapse of the 1930s, renewed millions of people’s faith in the regenerative powers of violence: it allowed Hitler to launch Germany, and ultimately all Europe and the world, into the second great war in a generation. The savagery of the conflict, however, makes it difficult to understand how anyone in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia, the aggressor nations, could have justified it as worthy of moral support. The image of the Soviet Union as a victim of aggression should be balanced against its attacks on Finland and Poland.

World War II consumed as many as 50 million lives, giving warfare an unprecedented claim on merciless brutality. War had always produced terrible acts of inhumane violence, but never on a scale like that of 1939–45.

The war may be recalled not just as an all-out conflict between belligerents but also as the collapse of civilized behavior. The combined German-Italian air attacks on Republican-controlled cities in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, most notably the assault on the Basque town of Guernica, which Pablo Picasso memorialized in his universally recognized painting; the Japanese Rape of Nanking in 1937, in which as many as 300,000 Chinese were brutally killed; and the Nazi air raids on London that launched the round of devastating bombardments against innocent civilians, which eventually led to the Allied firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo and the slaughter of over 100,000 Japanese in the atomic decimations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—all were calculated acts of destruction in the service of what the belligerents justified as self-defense and deserved punishment of ruthless enemies.

The Nazi scorched-earth devastation of Russia, which took over 25 million military and civilian lives, aimed to destroy Stalin’s Communist regime and subjugate what the Nazis considered Russia’s subhuman Slavs. An orgy of rape and killing by invading Soviet troops in Germany in 1945 was accepted by most people in the West as understandable, if not justifiable, acts of revenge. By contrast, the massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) on orders from Stalin and the Politburo was seen in the West as an act of Soviet ruthlessness to eliminate competitors for the future control of Poland. For the sake of wartime unity, however, London and Washington accepted Soviet assertions of German culpability.

The Bataan Death March in the Japanese-American conflict was one of the most infamous episodes in the Pacific War. More than 70,000 already undernourished U.S. and Filipino troops were forced to walk without food and water some eighty miles to prison camps, while being beaten and bayoneted along the way. The Japanese cruelty to surrendering forces, which they viewed as unworthy of honorable treatment, stirred passions for revenge against an enemy seen as undeserving of regard as fellow human beings. Images of Japanese as bloodthirsty fanatics committing atrocities—and metaphors about exterminating vermin, usually yellow rats—abounded in the United States during the war.

Japanese troops, who died by the tens of thousands rather than surrender to the Americans in their Pacific Island campaigns, saw capture as too frightening and death as more honorable than giving up. Indoctrinated with propaganda that U.S. Marines had gained admission to the corps by killing their parents, the Japanese believed that American captors would reciprocate the ferocity that they themselves used against their prisoners. And there was some basis for their fear: inflamed by stories of Japanese brutality toward captives, eagerness to die for their emperor, and booby traps on surrendering troops, American soldiers killed combatants trying to surrender, mutilated their bodies, and turned body parts into souvenirs.

Although Germany’s Nazis were regarded with deep animus in the United States during the war, the Germans were not seen as barbaric as the Japanese. Ernie Pyle, America’s most famous wartime correspondent, said that in Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here [in the Pacific] I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice. Though Germany was a heretic or lapsed sinner from universal standards, these were standards the Japanese never knew.

The perception about the Nazis and Germany changed, however, in 1945 with revelations about the Holocaust, the greatest organized slaughter of the entire war: Hitler’s campaign of extermination against the Jews. The Nazi obsession with the Final Solution, Judenrein, ridding Europe of all of its 8.8 million Jews, came close to realization. The destruction of 90 percent of the Jewish populations of Germany, Austria, Poland, and the Baltic countries as well as 75 percent of Holland’s, 60 percent of Belgium’s, and 26 percent of France’s Jews largely achieved Hitler’s design.

Allied victory in 1945 against so malign a force as Nazism and Japanese militarism was an extraordinary moment—not simply because the most destructive war in history, which had left many of the world’s major cities in rubble, had ended, but also because the mood of cynicism about human behavior made it difficult for even the most optimistic among the victors to imagine a future without war. U.S. general George C. Marshall, Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff, declared, If man does find the solution for world peace, it will be the most extraordinary reversal of his record we have ever known. While 81 percent of Americans in 1945 believed that the United States should join a world organization with power to maintain world peace, only 15 percent was confident that a United Nations could prevent future wars.

And yet leaders among the victors, buoyed by their success in such a deadly struggle, believed that their triumph was bound to bring more tranquil times, if not permanently, at least for a while. War and defense preparations would not disappear entirely, but the appetite for anything resembling the global conflicts of the first half of the century had been sated. The world’s leaders saw peace or an aversion to large-scale combat as a reflection of what their masses insisted on. There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader, one nineteenth-century French politician declared. Woodrow Wilson similarly remarked that statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their people or be broken.

Alexis de Tocqueville made the same point about the world’s emerging democracies in the first half of the nineteenth century when he wrote, No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country, and however powerful a man may be, it is hard for him to make his contemporaries share feelings and ideas which run counter to the general run of their hopes and desires.

Winston Churchill was never willing to be so self-effacing about his or anyone else’s leadership of a democratic nation. He decried the part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom. (He might have had in mind a February 1945 survey in America asking whether Washington or Lincoln was the greater president: some of those choosing Lincoln thought he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, the discoverer of America, or the first one to say the world was round. One man chose Washington, because his picture was on the one-dollar bill.) Churchill belittled those who were so ready to take the nation’s pulse and temperature and keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that ungainly posture, he declared. The leader’s work, he believed, was to goad the mass public into a greater realism about the issues and possible solutions before it.

Churchill understood that however beholden a head of government might be to the people, he could not deny responsibility for the actions of his administration, especially in a tyrannical system where a dictator, relying on terror tactics, encouraged murderous passions. To be sure, Hitler’s crimes against humanity could not have occurred without the help of German and foreign collaborators. Still, at the heart of Germany’s malign deeds were Hitler and his Nazi chiefs—Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Göring, to mention the most prominent members of the Nazi inner circle, and the Wehrmacht generals who enthusiastically implemented their war plans.

The failure by the most powerful and influential leaders of the twentieth century to attain the elusive goal of world peace at a time when their citizens were thirsting for tranquillity, deepens the puzzle about the failed search for international concord, especially when it was so transparent that modern weaponry made militarism and war a prescription for economic and social disintegration that did more to destroy nations than to save them. After the development of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, the atomic bombings of Japan were seen as a small instance of how advanced societies could be devastated in a total nuclear war. I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, Albert Einstein said.

How then to evaluate the leadership of the period between the closing months of World War II and the first years of the Cold War, the time frame of this book, which shaped international relations for years to come? It was a moment when the most talented and memorable government chiefs in modern history ruled or vied for power in their respective countries—America, Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia, and Vietnam—and were making indelible marks on their nations and the world.

It was also a time when the leaders and their nations in America, Europe, and Asia considered how to change foreign affairs after the most destructive war in history had discredited Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese militarism. The years between 1945 and 1953 seemed ripe for a calculated revolution in world politics, or at least some more rational approach to international differences that, if squandered, would cast a shadow over the leaders responsible for what some hoped could be long-term peace.

There was no reluctance by the victorious Allies and the new generation of political leaders in the defeated countries to compel the Germans, Italians, and Japanese to abandon their systems of failed governance, which had inflicted so much suffering on so many around the globe. A larger problem for the victors, however, was whether their politicians and peoples could curb the suspicions and rivalries that could jettison the cooperation that had brought them successfully through the war.

In the last year of the fighting, every major Allied figure began discussing the preservation of the alliance for the sake of future peace. Roosevelt spoke to this concern in January 1945, when he used his annual State of the Union message to call for a peoples’ peace that would prove durable and secure. He did not see a time when power politics would entirely disappear, he said, but he hoped it could be subordinated to men’s better angels.

General Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of ground forces in the Pacific, echoed Churchill and Roosevelt in September 1945 during the surrender ceremony on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Remembering Abraham Lincoln’s appeal for malice toward none at the close of the Civil War, MacArthur declared that the two countries do not meet in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. He invoked a higher dignity than the celebra tion of the victor over the vanquished and the hope of all mankind for a better world. In a speech broadcast to the American people at the conclusion of the ceremony, MacArthur described the war as man’s last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem is basically theological, he said, and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character…. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

To Toshikazu Kase, the Japanese translator at the surrender ceremony, who anticipated the occasion as the worst humiliation, MacArthur’s words left him spellbound and thunderstruck at the general’s generosity. The quarterdeck of the battleship had become not a place of unbearable embarrassment but an altar of peace.

The horrors of the twentieth century’s two unlimited wars provoke unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions. How could supposedly effective leaders, with the skills to gain the headship of such large advanced industrial nations, have been so blind to the miseries they would inflict upon their own peoples as well as those they saw as enemies? When someone asked Stalin at the end of the war if Hitler was a lunatic or an adventurer, he responded: I agree that he was an adventurer. But I can’t agree he was mad. Hitler was a gifted man. Only a gifted man could unite the German people.

Stalin could have been speaking of himself in explaining how so many Europeans and Asians could have followed the dictates of men whose decisions produced such catastrophes for them.

But how could anyone, after witnessing the repression and slaughter of the war years, have believed, as Stalin did, that might alone made right or guaranteed a nation’s security? To be sure, one lesson of World War II was that a poorly armed nation was an inviting target to an aggressor. Yet another transparent lesson was that might alone was no guarantee of a nation’s defense against conflict and loss.

I do not pretend to have any simple explanation for why so many millions of people were drawn to mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin, and Japan’s military chiefs. It is easy to understand why, after witnessing the horrors these men perpetrated on the world, defeated peoples would yearn for an alternative to militarism and war as a defense against external dangers.

Despite the attraction of a more benign way of assuring future peace than military might, it is not so difficult to understand why the success of the victors’ armed forces created a compelling appeal to sustained reliance on strength of arms as a guard against foreign threats. And yet, as the German and Japanese experiences might have suggested to the Allies, a buildup of military power is no assurance of national safety. Still, in a world in which trust is in such short supply, reliance on other nations’ goodwill seems less wise than strength of arms.

This is not a book condemning national defense arrangements, though there is much to be questioned. Rather, it is an attempt to revisit the end-of-war and immediate postwar events by asking why, in spite of the uncivilized acts of violence that had dominated international affairs, men and women all over the globe could still imagine that traditional power politics could assure their national safety and a wider peace. In short, what drove the postwar leaders of the most powerful and populous nations around the globe to act as they did?

In 2005, I had a conversation with a French attorney visiting the United States. We talked about his children, who were in their twenties, and how different their outlook was toward their country and the world than what he—a man in his fifties—had heard from his parents, who were part of the World War II generation. His children, he told me, certainly identified themselves as French, but unlike his parents they also viewed themselves as Europeans, or as citizens of a larger community. I asked him if he thought his children could imagine another war between France and Germany or any of the Western European states. Certainly not, he replied.

It was a reflection of the sea change that had taken place in Europe. The pain and suffering of the century’s two continent-wide wars had brought the Western Europeans, in spite of themselves, the wisdom to replace armed conflicts with cooperative assemblies and institutions. The United States, which through the first hundred and fifty years of its history had largely isolated itself from foreign wars, succumbed to the curse of every emerging modern power, a military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower described in 1953 as the bane of America’s existence. Eisenhower was not decrying the need for arms or denying that the country justifiably felt embattled, but, as his successor in the presidency, John F. Kennedy, would say in his inaugural address, Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle … against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

I hope my exploration of timeless questions about the search for long-term postwar peace sheds some light on the roots of the individual and mass conduct that dominated national behavior in the years between 1945 and 1953. Since neither unwise acts of war nor mass illusions are about to disappear, it seems important to make every effort to come to a greater understanding of the acts of history that in some form or other are all too likely to reoccur. To be sure, the wars of the post-1945 era have been on a different scale and in different places and circumstances, but there have been indisputable similarities to earlier moments of violence and hope, as well as similarly poor judgments on the part of both the public and their chiefs.

On balance, the postwar generation did well enough in averting greater catastrophes than the world might have experienced. Nevertheless, it made its share of missteps, which are better considered than ignored. I take limited account of most of the achievements of the end of war and postwar leaders not out of any desire to diminish their accomplishments, but in the belief that their errors in judgment are more usable lessons of the past. As McGeorge Bundy, John Kennedy’s and then Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, noted later about his role in expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam, I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution. If I have learned anything I should share it. He added, Because it matters what lessons are learned … there are lots of errors in the path of understanding.

PART I

A WILDERNESS CALLED PEACE

1

LONDON, MOSCOW, AND WASHINGTON: FRIENDS IN NEED

The only thing worse than having allies is not having them.

—Winston Churchill

In the second half of 1944, as Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin laid plans to confer in the coming year about postwar arrangements, they tried to mute long-standing suspicions of each other’s intentions. Without continuing cooperation that had brought them to the edge of victory against powerful German resistance across Russia, the Middle East, Italy, and now Western Europe, Churchill and Roosevelt foresaw another period of international tension that could provoke a new global conflict in the not too distant future. Stalin was deeply cynical about his allies and even less confident about avoiding another war unless he could arrange Soviet territorial and strategic advantages that would inhibit the reemergence of Western anticommunism.

Yet however much Churchill and Roosevelt hoped they might find means to blunt differences with Moscow, they were also doubtful that the national and ideological competition between East and West would disappear and sharply reduce their reliance on traditional military, economic, and political instruments of defense against an aggressive adversary.

Between January 31 and February 11, 1945, the Big Three, as the leaders of Britain, Russia, and the United States were described in the last year of the war, met at Malta and Yalta to plan the postwar organization of Europe and Asia. Outwardly, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and their staffs were pledged to sustained cooperation. And the conversations among them gave little indication that their unspoken assumptions about each other jeopardized the future peace. Yet their personal and national histories made them doubtful about their allies’ intentions and prospects for postwar harmony.

Churchill’s life experience inclined him to see future strife with Moscow. Churchill lived for crisis, the historian A. J. P. Taylor said. He profited from crisis. And when crisis did not exist, he strove to invent it…. He did not share the contemporary belief in universal improvement nor did he await the coming of some secular Heaven on Earth. He strove to ameliorate hardships without ever expecting that they would be finally removed.

From his earliest days, Churchill had been ambitious for power and dominance, ambitions that were reflected in a combative personal nature. Combined with his long-standing fear of the Soviet Communist threat to Great Britain’s world position, this character made Churchill as much an adversary as a compliant friend to Stalin and Russia.

Churchill was born in November 1874 into a British noble family. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the son of the seventh duke of Marlborough, was a distant figure, who had little involvement in his son’s rearing. To Winston, his absent father was more an idealized representative of the family’s values than a flesh-and-blood character with whom his son directly engaged. As a boy, Winston imbibed the heroic attitudes of his class and times. He dreamed of military glory, of the chance to join the ranks of Britain’s greatest heroes who had rescued the nation from defeat and humiliation and received the Victoria Cross from the sovereign. His ambitions resembled those of earlier generations of English noblemen. The principal difference between Winston and most of his privileged contemporaries is that they outgrew their boyhood fantasies, and he never relinquished them.

After a time at Harrow School, where he exhibited behavior problems and performed poorly, Winston sought admission to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, which he won on his third try, demonstrating his keen determination to become an army officer. At Sandhurst, he seemed to find his calling, earning high marks and graduating eighth in a class of 150 in 1894. Eager for action and adventure that would test his courage, satisfy a yearning to serve queen and country, and expose him to dramatic events that he could record for a larger public in articles and books that could make him famous, Churchill won postings to the British Empire’s outlying regions of Pakistan, Egypt, and the Sudan. He was not disappointed: exhilarating combat against seemingly primitive tribesmen gave him the chance to feel heroic and write newspaper stories that put him before potential British voters.

In 1899, Churchill unsuccessfully stood for a seat in Parliament. Although intent on trying again in the following year, he used the time between elections to serve as a correspondent in South Africa, where the British were fighting the Boer War. Captured by the Boers and held as a POW in Pretoria, he had the satisfaction of escaping after a month and then rejoining the army to participate in successful campaigns in South Africa and the Sudan.

In 1900, after returning to Britain, Churchill won election to Parliament as a Conservative, but soon found himself in opposition to his party’s support of the protective tariff. Shifting his allegiance to the Liberal Party, he established himself as a national figure, his reputation as an independent maverick feeding his self-image as a courageous battler who put principle above slavish party loyalty.

Between 1908 and 1919, Churchill held a succession of cabinet posts, including First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I, where he shouldered responsibility for a failed invasion of the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli that compelled his resignation and threw him into one of the periodic depressions he called his Black Dogs. Unlike so many other contemporaries, who saw the failure at Gallipoli and the larger cost of the war in blood and wealth as reasons to turn away from force in response to international conflicts, Churchill found relief in action. His down moods induced aggressive deeds more than passivity. In November 1915, he rejoined the army to command a battalion in France.

During subsequent service in the War Office, Churchill was an architect of the Allied intervention in Russia after the revolution of 1917 had turned into a conflict between Communists and defenders of the czarist regime. Churchill was no admirer of the Russian monarchy, but he thought that Bolshevism should have been strangled in its cradle. In the 1920s, he praised Italy’s Benito Mussolini for fighting communism. In his war memoirs, after Il Duce had become Adolf Hitler’s ally, suffered defeat, and been lynched in Milan by anti-Fascist partisans, Churchill described him as an adventurer, but justified his assumption of dictatorial powers as a response to communism.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Churchill opposed the pacifism that had developed as a reaction to wartime losses and postwar European tensions threatening another war. In the 1930s, he was also critical of Spain’s Republican government, which was supported by the Communists in a civil war with Francisco Franco’s Fascists. In response to Italo-German intervention in the fighting that helped Franco defeat the Republic, Churchill favored a policy of strict Anglo-French neutrality.

Although he would later be on record as regretting the Fascist victory, Churchill continued to see Spain’s Marxists as a dreadful alternative. With the goal of absolute power, they had inflicted a reign of terror on Spain characterized by wholesale cold-blooded massacres of their political opponents and of the well-to-do. If he had been a Spaniard, he later wrote, the Communists would have murdered me and my family and friends. He continued to believe that Britain’s best course had been to keep out of Spain.

Churchill was as vocal about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, which he described after the Munich concessions to Hitler on Czechoslovakia as a defeat without a war. He said of Chamberlain, You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.

Churchill wisely advocated rearmament against the Nazi menace, and favored an alliance with Soviet Russia to deter Hitler from an attack on Poland. The defense of Britain’s national security trumped his anticommunism. He condemned the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of August 1939 as an unnatural act that only totalitarian despots could have signed and then survived the repressed public condemnation in their respective countries. The fact that such an agreement could be made, Churchill asserted, marks the culminating failure of British and French foreign policy and diplomacy over several years.

Churchill also saw the pact as a demonstration of how crafty men and statesmen can be misled by all their elaborate calculations. It would take only twenty-two months for Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union to reveal the hollowness of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Governments with no moral scruples, Churchill added, gain only temporary advantages from betraying their true interests. The Russian nation in its scores of millions were to pay a frightful forfeit.

For Churchill, the 1930s have been described as the wilderness years, a time when his views were largely out of sync with the national mood that favored appeasement and avoidance of war at almost any cost. His determination to persevere through this difficult period rested on convictions that he was right and that his public positions would eventually be vindicated. His affinity for what he could see as heroic opposition to wrongheaded popular sentiment helped sustain him through a phase of personal depression over the public’s blindness and his political isolation.

The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 restored Churchill’s public influence. The war brought him back into the government as First Lord of the Admiralty. Germany’s conquest of Poland, followed by Hitler’s successful spring offensive in the West, toppled Chamberlain’s government and elevated Churchill to the post of prime minister, where he famously offered nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Churchill’s inspirational rhetoric at the time of Britain’s peril, especially after the fall of France in June 1940, when Britain stood alone against Hitler’s triumphant military, was partly a function of the inner struggle against despair that had plagued him throughout his life. In the aftermath of Hitler’s 1939–40 victories, when so many of his countrymen feared for Britain’s future, Churchill’s personal history made him the nation’s perfect leader. Having struggled through periods of defeat and renewed success, Churchill could impart a message of hope during a time of loss. He rallied Britain with words that he could have told himself in past moments of hopelessness. It was a marvelous example of how one man’s life experience could serve a whole nation in its struggle to chase away gloom and turn retreat into a sustained fight for victory.

In rallying the nation, Churchill drew once again not only on his personal experience with overcoming setbacks but also on his affinity for the hero’s role—the fulfillment of long-standing fantasies of power in the service of valiant deeds. In my long political experience, Churchill wrote later, I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me [of prime minister] was the one I liked the best…. Power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing. Fighting Hitler perfectly suited Churchill’s attraction to a contest with someone he identified as pure evil. It gave him enormous vitality. He found the energy to work almost nonstop in his drive to destroy Hitler and the Nazis. They were ideal enemies for someone who craved a contest with wickedness that could give him the wherewithal to resist his affinity for depression and immobility.

In June 1941, after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Churchill unhesitatingly identified Britain as Stalin’s ally. The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism, Churchill declared in a radio address the night of Hitler’s attack on Russia. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But the realities of defeating Hitler required a different approach to the Soviet Union. The primary goal was to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. Churchill promised to fight him by land, sea, and air until we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated his peoples from its yoke.

When Churchill’s private secretary asked if his reputation as an arch anti-Communist was not being compromised by aid to Moscow, he replied, Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler…. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons. His implicit reference to Stalin as the devil was a telling expression of how he viewed the Soviet dictator: a useful ally in the struggle against Hitler and Nazism, but a ruthless tyrant nonetheless who after the war would likely revert to a reach for world power through the eclipse of Britain and the extension of communism around the globe.

In December 1941, when Stalin pressed British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, who had come to Moscow for conversations, to agree to postwar Soviet control of the Baltic states and eastern Poland, Churchill refused, telling Eden that the Soviets had acquired this territory by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler. The transfer of the peoples of the Baltic states to Soviet Russia against their will would be contrary to all the principles for which we are fighting this war and would dishonour our cause.

Yet in October 1944, with Soviet armies moving decisively into southeastern Europe, Churchill met with Stalin in Moscow to discuss the fate of the Balkans. The sixty-seven-year-old Churchill and the sixty-five-year-old Stalin showed the effects of age and the burdens of their wartime responsibilities. Churchill was short, fat, and stoop-shouldered, his ruddy complexion betraying his years of heavy alcohol consumption. A damaged left arm from a childhood accident, facial scars from a smallpox attack at the age of seven, a yellowish complexion, and tobacco-stained teeth made the diminutive Stalin a match for the imperfect Churchill.

Together, hunched over a table in the Kremlin, they cynically divided up responsibility for the postwar Balkans: the Soviets were to have 90 percent control in Rumania, 75 percent in Bulgaria, and 50 percent in Hungary and Yugoslavia, with an equal share of power for Britain, which would have 90 percent dominance in Greece along with the United States. Churchill suggested burning the paper on which they recorded what they called the percentages agreement. He feared the reaction to their disposal of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner. But Stalin, who had no qualms about eventual public knowledge of how great power arrangements were made, urged Churchill to keep the paper. In the same meetings, Churchill emphasized to Stalin how essential their friendship was to a future without war. Perhaps it is the only thing that can save the peace for our children and grandchildren, he said. Hopes are high for the permanent results of victory, he added.

The percentages agreement with Stalin speaks volumes about Churchill’s belief that unless he reined in Soviet ambitions in the Balkans by acknowledging their respective spheres of control, Moscow would impose itself on all the countries in the region. It was also Churchill’s way of buying big power peace at the cost of small nations’ autonomy. The division of power was the kind of language Churchill and Stalin understood. While Stalin agreed to Churchill’s proposal, it was only a temporary arrangement that served the war effort. Who controlled what in the Balkans, Stalin believed, would be decided not by a paper pledge but by who had troops on the ground. How many divisions does the pope have? Stalin famously asked an adviser who warned him against open verbal clashes with the Vatican.

Roosevelt was no less mindful of power considerations. In August 1943, almost two years after an Anglo-American agreement for joint research on atomic energy, and a year after development and manufacture of a bomb had begun, the president and prime minister signed an agreement promising not to use an atomic weapon against each other or against a third party without mutual consent. They also agreed not to share information about atomic development with another country unless both saw it as acceptable. It was an unspoken commitment to exclude the Soviet Union from knowledge that could help it build a bomb, or to give Britain a military advantage in a postwar Europe over which London and Moscow would presumably exercise greatest control.

A year later, after a second Anglo-American conference in Quebec to discuss postwar arrangements, Churchill and Roosevelt traveled to the president’s home at Hyde Park, New York, where they made their exclusion of Soviet access to their knowledge of atomic development more specific. In an aide-mémoire of a September 19, 1944, conversation, they agreed that the Russians were not to share in the control and use of atomic power. Because the Danish physicist Niels Bohr had urged both Churchill and Roosevelt to reach an agreement with Moscow on international control of atomic energy, they included a proviso that said, "Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor