April 27, 1997
Wartime Lies

The Churchill-Roosevelt partnership was plagued by deception

Roosevelt, Churchill, and
the Second World War.
By Warren F. Kimball.
Illustrated. 422 pp. New York:
William Morrow & Company. $25.

Winston CHURCHILL once observed to William Deakin, who had helped him write ''The Second World War,'' ''This is not history, this is my case.'' Crudely, the ''case'' was that the mistakes made in the war were due to Franklin D. Roosevelt's ignoring Churchill's advice; that as the role of the United States expanded, this happened more and more often; and that when Roosevelt began to make concessions to Stalin to get his cooperation in the postwar world, he opened the gates to tragedy. Since Churchill got his case in first, and argued it brilliantly, it remained ''history'' for a long time. Many years and books came and went before history got a proper deal. Warren F. Kimball's ''Forged in War'' is the latest of the books.

''There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them!'' Churchill said. The Churchill-Roosevelt partnership was plagued by conflicts of interest as well as of judgment, frequently leading to frictions, deceptions, initiatives attempted behind each other's backs and, in some cases, to lying. Mr. Kimball is an expert on all this, and his three-volume ''Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence'' has put him in a position to describe and analyze the problems of the wartime partnership -- if ''partnership'' is the word for a relationship so fraught with turbulences -- and to assess its legacy to world history.

The two most vexed questions were how to win the war and how to prepare for peace. Churchill long opposed the cross-channel invasion Roosevelt wanted from the start since he believed it was the only way to defeat Germany. Churchill's attitude created a problem for Roosevelt with the Russians: Stalin demanded a cross-channel invasion to take German pressure off his western front, and refused to enter the war against Japan until Germany had been defeated. Churchill preferred an invasion of Southeast Europe -- ''the soft underbelly of the Axis'' -- as the main thrust of Allied force in Europe. Roosevelt suspected that was Churchill's ruse to avoid a cross-channel invasion, while Stalin opposed any initiative that would put a massive British presence alongside the Russians in Eastern Europe.

What worried Churchill most was Roosevelt's ideas on the postwar world, not only because he thought them wrong in themselves but because he thought Roosevelt was doing wrong things in the war to bring them about. Churchill welcomed some of Roosevelt's postwar objectives, such as a concert of great powers and the setting up of a United Nations Organization, but deplored others, such as demands for the independence of India and the liquidation of the British Empire.

Deeply disturbed as he was by what he saw as Roosevelt's naivete in such matters, Churchill was even more alarmed by mounting evidence in 1943 and 1944 that Roosevelt was giving priority to securing Stalin's cooperation when the war had been won and was prepared to make irresponsible and dangerous concessions to him while the war was still being fought. Well before the 1945 Yalta conference, Churchill had concluded with dismay that Roosevelt really believed he could trust and handle Stalin, and would therefore agree to much that would soon prove to be a sellout of Eastern European countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Churchill's conviction that the Soviet Union was not to be trusted did not prevent him from making his own deals with Stalin. In October 1944, four months before the Yalta conference, he arranged to visit Stalin in Moscow. Roosevelt declined to do so because the Presidential election was imminent. Among other things Churchill suggested in Moscow was a 90 percent sphere of influence for Britain in Greece and the same for Stalin in Romania. The agreement should not use the phrase ''dividing into spheres,'' he told Stalin, since ''the Americans might be shocked.'' He also suggested specific concessions to Stalin in the Far East. Eight years later, after much public criticism of the Far East concessions made to Stalin at Yalta, Churchill wrote that neither he nor his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, ''took any part in making'' them. He put responsibility on the Americans. Mr. Kimball points out that in fact the Far East settlement worked out by Roosevelt at Yalta ''paralleled the quid pro quo Churchill had floated at Moscow.''

Mr. Kimball records and interprets rather than expresses opinions, but he dismisses the idea that the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the two great players significantly influenced the formulation of their policies. He dismisses as ''popular history'' the charge that Roosevelt ''gave away'' Eastern Europe and too much of the Far East to Stalin at Yalta ''because he was a frail, sick, dying man.'' On the contrary, he says, ''nothing he did at Yalta, or immediately afterward, altered the approach he had taken throughout the war, an approach toward a postwar settlement that by the time of the Yalta talks had been outlined in some detail. His assessment of Stalin may have been overoptimistic and mistaken, but that was a conscious and consistent position, not a matter of health.'' He also refutes the view that Churchill's health and his drinking might have affected his decisions: ''As for his drinking . . . there is no evidence, factual or anecdotal, to indicate that Churchill's drinking affected his policies during the war any more than it affected his policies before the war.'' He rejects the notion that his decisions ever suffered from his being ill or fatigued.

Far from being censorious about the ''mistakes'' made by Churchill and Roosevelt, Mr. Kimball rebukes those who ''have focused on all that went wrong with the results of the Second World War.'' Such critics, he says, forget that ''few, if any, of those 'mistakes' could have been made if Hitler's Germany and militaristic Japan had won or even survived the war intact. Winning the Second World War was the prerequisite to all the failures, and all the successes, that followed.'' In spite of their conflicts of interest and of judgment, Churchill and Roosevelt never lost sight of their mutual objective: defeat of the Axis first; postwar advantage second. Mr. Kimball's conclusion is: ''They could not solve all the political, social and economic problems of the world, but they could lead their nations to victory and prevent a far worse set of problems. And they did.'' Mr. Kimball's is the latest word on the alliance; it may be the conclusive one.

Kenneth Harris's most recent books are ''Attlee,'' ''The Queen'' and ''Margaret Thatcher.''

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