Dear Franklin . . . Dear Joseph

THAT EXCEPTIONALLY WISE diplomat Sir Frank Roberts once observed that “Roosevelt and Churchill were susceptible to Stalin because he did not fit the dictator stereotype of the time. He was not a demagogue; he did not strut in flamboyant uniforms. He was soft-spoken, well organised, not without humour, knew his brief — an agreeable façade concealing unknown horrors.”

Roosevelt was definitely the more susceptible of the two. Paradoxically, this came from his own vanity. Proud of his famous charm, he was convinced that he alone could win Stalin to a postwar partnership after the wartime alliance. But such a transformation was highly unlikely. Roosevelt overestimated his own abilities and completely underestimated Stalin’s paranoid schizophrenia, xenophobia, ruthlessness and cruelty.

Roosevelt’s instinctive generosity and vision in 1941 must be recognised when he decided to throw his country’s industrial might into supporting the Soviet Union immediately after the Nazi invasion. The letters in My Dear Mr Stalin, a collection of the correspondence between the two, remind us of the staggering scale of US aid. In October 1942, at the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin provided a shopping list for delivery each month: 500 fighter planes (he understandably rejected the American Kitty Hawk as obsolete and demanded the newer Airacobra); 8,000 to 10,000 trucks; 5,000 tons of aluminium; and 5,000 tons of explosives. “In addition to this,” Stalin continued, the USSR needed “two million tons of grain” over 12 months as well as “fats, food concentrates and canned meat”. Machine tools, smelters, even refineries were to be shipped.

The great irony, unacknowledged by Russian historians even today, is that had it not been for the hundreds of thousands of Dodge and Studebaker trucks, the Red Army would never have reached Berlin before the Americans.

Roosevelt refused to attach strings to aid. Nor, more surprisingly, did he intervene or protest when it was discovered that the Soviet Military Mission in the US was spying shamelessly and flying quantities of stolen documents from the Manhattan Project out of the country. Stalin, not surprisingly, paid tribute to the largesse of American capitalism, even if the reasons for its efficiency were ignored for obvious political reasons. Yet the chief interest to historians in these letters is not in the mutual compliments and statesmanlike expressions of gratitude or admiration, but the explanations that they offer on the origins of the Cold War.

Stalin, the victor of Stalingrad and commander-in-chief of the Red Army, which had borne the brunt of the sacrifice, was able to dictate the military strategy of his Western Allies. All too aware that millions of Soviet citizens had died, the British and American leaders naturally suffered blood guilt. Stalin deferred to Roosevelt on the surface, but laid down the basic plan for the Western Allies. Their main thrust against Germany had to come across the Channel and through northern Europe.

Churchill, rightly afraid that Stalin would impose a Soviet dictatorship across the Balkans and Central Europe, preferred the political advantages of a Mediterranean strategy, attacking northeastwards from Italy into Austria and Hungary. But he was wrong for the sound military reasons of difficult terrain and over-extended supply lines.

Roosevelt, in his urge to take the pressure off the Red Army, declared that Anglo-American armies would launch a cross-Channel assault as early as the summer of 1942. This was not simply ill-considered but frankly irresponsible. Stalin locked on to this commitment. Even a year later, an attempt to invade the Continent would have met with disaster. We did not have the landing craft and the American armies were not yet battle ready. As a result, Churchill’s delaying tactics turned out to be the greatest service to the Allied cause — a failed invasion in 1943 would have been disastrous in every way. Stalin, however, saw these postponements as hard evidence that all his suspicions were justified. The Western capitalists were deliberately allowing the Soviet Union to bleed to death: “You write to me that you fully understand my disappointment. I have to tell you that this is not simply a matter of disappointment of the Soviet Government, but a matter of preservation of its confidence in the Allies.”

He underlined the tiny sacrifices made by Western armies in comparison with those of the Red Army. Stalin almost certainly despised the Western reluctance to risk lives. He would have been quite prepared to throw away 100,000 men in a premature attempt, just as he had sent untrained and unarmed militia to fight German divisions in the late summer of 1941.

When Roosevelt had to tell Stalin that the invasion of France would take place not in 1943 but “as soon as practicable”, he rightly (but in vain) emphasised the importance of the strategic bombing campaign by the USAF and the RAF. This aerial second front diverted Luftwaffe resources, both fighters and anti-aircraft batteries, away from the Eastern Front.

“As you are aware,” he wrote, “we are already containing more than half the German Air Force in Western Europe and the Mediterranean.” This proportion would rise above 80 per cent by the end of the following year, with huge advantages for the Red Army which, for the first time, benefitted from virtual air supremacy. One could argue that Operation Bagration, which destroyed Army Group Centre in the greatest surprise attack of the war in the early summer of 1944, depended largely on the fact that German reconnaissance aircraft had not stood a chance.

This book is a curious mixture from a publisher as distinguished as Yale. It is one of the most important collections of 20th-century correspondence for a long time, and yet the introduction and commentary reveal the heavy responsibilities of an editor.

Susan Butler deserves credit for recognising the importance of this collection, but the number of mistakes and the degree of misunderstanding of key issues are at times bewildering. They show that the editor, whose previous speciality was the life of Amelia Earhart, is badly out of her depth in the Second World War. She confuses Colonel Stauffenberg, the failed assassin of Hitler, with Count von der Schulenberg, the German Ambassador in Moscow at the time of the Nazi invasion.

Her beliefs, based on partial truths, are simplistic, if not naive. Roosevelt is the noble idealist, the only man that Stalin, the great Soviet leader, respects. Butler goes on about Roosevelt and his great vision of the United Nations, but Stalin, as the Yalta discussions showed only too clearly, was prepared to humour Roosevelt on this side issue provided that he got what he wanted over Poland and Central Europe.

Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill could have saved Poland in 1945. As the American diplomat Chip Bohlen observed, “Stalin held all the cards”. But the issue of Poland is so central to the origins of the Cold War and to this correspondence that a basic degree of accuracy is required.

Butler evidently has no idea of Stalin’s personal hatred for the Poles, dating back to his own humiliation in 1921 during the Soviet-Polish War. The Katyn massacre of Polish leaders comes up, but there is no indication that she understands how the Poles suffered at the hands of the NKVD after Stalin stabbed the country in the back in 1939 and set out to liquidate its leadership and intelligentsia through mass murder. Polish suspicions of Stalin and his puppet Lublin Government are made to appear unreasonable and reactionary. It is not hard to imagine non-Communist Poles reading these passages speechless with rage at the impression given.

Inconsistencies are brushed over or ignored. “The President,” she writes in her introduction, “was determined to break through an arms-length relationship, get to know his man, and make Stalin trust him. To a great extent he succeeded.”

Yet how does she reconcile this notion of success with the cold anger and barefaced lies in Stalin’s signals to Roosevelt as soon as the Yalta honeymoon was over?

Letter after letter — whether about the surrender negotiations in Italy, Stalin’s allegations that the US Army was allowing the Germans to transfer troops against the Red Army, his insinuations that the Americans had deliberately given them false intelligence on German plans, and his fury at any opposition to his plans to turn Poland into a Soviet satellite — reveal how utterly superficial this trust really was. Arthur Schlesinger Jr in the foreword is far closer to the truth. Roosevelt’s “vision of the wartime alliance prolonged into peacetime encountered the hard rock of Stalinist ideology”, he writes. “No one should be surprised by what ensued. The real surprise would have been if there had been no Cold War.”

My Dear Mr Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin, edited by Susan Butler, is published by Yale, £17.50, 380pp; offer £15.75 inc p&p from 0870 1608080

Exchanges from the pens of the powerful
by Michael Binyon

On September 11, 1939, President Roosevelt sent a message to the the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. He was seeking information about the war and wanted to establish contact with a British leader who might take over should Neville Chamberlain resign.

So began a correspondence unparalleled among national leaders. The easy, affable style of their letters foreshadowed their friendship; Churchill signed himself “Naval Person”, which became “Former Naval Person” after he had moved to Downing Street.

The two exchanged thousands of messages, letters and telephone calls. But their friendship was not without tensions — glossed over by Churchill after Roosevelt’s death — as the Prime Minister became suspicious of Roosevelt’s correspondence with Stalin.

Transatlantic correspondence continued, however. Eden wrote to Eisenhower, but with little warmth. The letters chart a relationship that decayed from geniality to disaster. Eisenhower addresses Eden as “Dear Anthony”; he replies “Dear Mr President” and only later “Dear Friend”. As the Suez crisis unfolded, the letters became blunter, with Eisenhower all but ignoring Eden’s pleas for support.

Macmillan fared better with Kennedy, but the President’s most crucial correspondence was with Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuba missile crisis. The Soviet leader’s letters were alternately threatening and conciliatory — on one day one of each arrived. Kennedy ignored the bluster, responded to the conciliation and the tension was defused.

Most US presidents have written to European leaders; Lincoln used such messages to dissuade Britain from supporting the South during the Civil War.

European monarchs were also great letter writers. Catherine the Great kept up a long and lively correspondence with Voltaire, who was also a penfriend of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Queen Victoria wrote endlessly to other monarchs, mostly her offspring: she showed great affection for Tsar Nicholas II but was frosty towards Kaiser Wilhelm II. It is even believed that Elizabeth I and Ivan the Terrible exchanged messages.

Imperial correspondence goes back to Roman times. Augustus kept up a lively correspondence with the younger Pliny, then a governor in Asia Minor, advising him to turn a blind eye to the activities of the Christians.

[Antony Beevor at the TimesOnline]