Epilogue

TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY -- Winsfon Churchill--Houghfon Mifflin ($6).

The last time Churchill saw Franklin Roosevelt was on board the U.S. cruiser Quincy, in the harbor of Alexandria, after the Yalta Conference. The President seemed "placid and frail," to have only a "slender contact with life." The first time Churchill met Harry Truman was at Potsdam, ten weeks after the V-E day which Roosevelt did not live to see. Truman impressed the British Prime Minister with his "gay, precise, sparkling manner and obvious power of decision."

While Truman, Churchill and Stalin were at Potsdam, news arrived of the successful test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo. The momentous intelligence came in a code message: "Babies satisfactorily born." Henry Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War, showed Churchill the message and translated it for him. The U.S. and British leaders, who had been downcast by the desperate Japanese resistance on Okinawa, were immensely cheered.

"To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British," Churchill had reckoned. "Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision--fair and bright indeed it seemed--of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks." Churchill thought this "almost supernatural weapon" would induce the Pacific enemy to surrender and thus save many Japanese lives as well.

In view of the soul-searching and breast-beating that took place after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the quick decision by the U.S. and British at Potsdam, as recorded by Churchill, now seems rather remarkable. "There never was a moment's discussion . . . There was unanimous . . . agreement around our table."

The question then arose of how to tell Stalin. Truman decided to tell him in a private conversation, and Churchill watched it from about five yards away. "I can see it all as if it were yesterday. He [Stalin] seemed to be delighted. A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the whole Japanese war! What a bit of luck!" Afterward, Churchill asked Truman: "How did it go?" The President answered: "He never asked a question." The reason for Stalin's lack of curiosity became clear in later years, but in this account Churchill does not go into postwar disclosures of espionage.

Brute Issues. Triumph and Tragedy is the sixth and final volume, the epilogue, of Churchill's tremendous history of World War II, which he modestly calls "my personal narrative." In this volume, the thunder of military crisis is past; the tides of the war against Germany have been turned at Stalingrad and El Alamein, and the book is suffused with the glow of anticipated victory. The chronicle begins with Eisenhower's invasion of Normandy, which opened the land approaches to Germany and made Hitler's defeat certain, though not easy, quick or cheap. Churchill tells the closing episodes of the battle story fairly placidly, with a minimum of criticism of the combat commanders, and a minimum of attention to their quarrels (although in one place he does say that Omar Bradley's postwar criticism of Montgomery--TIME, June 18, 1951--was "unfair").

Along with the Olympian glow, there is another dominant note, the dark note of Churchill's growing concern for the shape and fate of the postwar world, his fear of Russian appetite for territory and power. The word "tragedy" in the title refers to the split between Russia and the West--the breakup of the "Grand Alliance"--which Churchill says he foresaw long before the end of the conflict. "The advance of the Soviet armies into Central and Eastern Europe in the summer of 1944 made it urgent to come to a political arrangement with the Russians about those regions . . . Difficulties in Italy had already begun, owing to Russian intrigues." On May 4, 1944, Churchill suggested to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that a paper be drafted for the Cabinet on "the brute issues between us and the Soviet government," and raised the question whether the Allies were "going to acquiesce in the Communization of the Balkans."

Government by Calculation. Churchill's personal relations with Stalin remained friendly, even affable, to the end, and he never ceased to praise Stalin as a great war leader. But Churchill was outraged by the Russian betrayal of the patriot Warsaw Poles under General Bor--urged to rise by the Red radio, and then methodically slaughtered by the Germans while the Red army halted contemplatively for weeks just a few miles away.

Franklin Roosevelt was also indignant, though less so than Churchill. When the two Western leaders asked the Kremlin leaders for explanations, Stalin first answered that the strength of the Bor partisans had been "exaggerated" (therefore the uprising was unwise) ; then Vishinsky described them as "adventurers," and finally Stalin called them "criminals." Churchill and Roosevelt wanted to drop arms and supplies to the beleaguered Warsaw fighters, then land their planes on Soviet territory (because of the long distance from Western air bases). Stalin refused permission. Churchill was so angry that he considered threatening a cutoff of the Allied supply convoys to Russia. But the needs of the Grand Alliance were still paramount and he did not "propose this drastic step." Yet Churchill adds: "It might have been effective, because we were dealing with men in the Kremlin who were governed by calculation and not by emotion . . . The cutting off of the convoys at this critical moment . . . would perhaps have bulked in their minds as much as considerations of honor, humanity, decent commonplace good faith usually count with ordinary people."

Resumption of Folly. The chronicle closes matter-of-factly and rather sadly, with an account of Churchill's defeat by the Labor Party in the elections of 1945. Churchill went to bed "in the belief that the British people would wish me to continue my work . . . However, just before dawn, I woke suddenly with a sharp stab of almost physical pain. A hitherto subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke forth and dominated my mind. All the pressure of great events, on and against which I had mentally so long maintained my 'flying speed,' would cease and I should fall." By noon of that day, the election results confirmed his premonition. The theme of the volume is given at its beginning: "How the Great Democracies Triumphed, and So Were Able to Resume the Follies Which Had So Nearly Cost Them Their Life."

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