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Fidelity Stamp Company in Washington with
    WINSTON CHURCHILL
British Prime Minister
ARRIVES
at the
WHITE HOUSE
December 22, 1941
    were being sold and postmarked at the Benjamin Franklin postal station.
    Before the “important visitor” had appeared, Steve Early reminded reporters of the Censorship Act. A later White House update added, “There is, of course, one primary objective in the conversations to be held in the next few days between the President and the British Prime Minister and the respective staffs of the two countries. That purpose is the defeat of Hitlerism throughout the world.” The statement noted that other allied nations would be consulted, and further announcements would be forthcoming, but the focus of Churchill’s planning scenarios radioed ahead had already been implicitly accepted. Despite the overwhelming American antipathy toward what seemed an unstoppable Japan, the term Hitlerism made it clear that victory over Germany had to come first.
    Even before Churchill sat down to a late dinner at the White House, a report in The Times of London had appeared, obviously emanating from Downing Street, that the PM’s mission had been “his own idea” and that, as coordination among partners was crucial, he was “not the only British statesman who is at present out of the country.” It was a strong hint rising through the secrecy that Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was already long absent from London and very likely on a circuitous journey to meet with Stalin in Moscow. Eden had left for Scotland the day after Pearl Harbor to join a task force sailing to Murmansk over the hazardous subarctic supply route arcing over Norway and Finland. The icy waters were infested with U-boats. Eden had cautioned Churchill, who had proposed going to Washington, “that I could not see how we could both be away at once. He said we could. The emphasis of the war had shifted; what now mattered was the intentions of our two great allies. We must each go to one of them.”
    The PM was still aboard the Duke of York approaching the East Coast when, on December 21, he received a radio encrypt from Eden in Moscow that, as the price of cooperation, Stalin, optimistic now that Germany could be turned back, had demanded secret Allied acceptance of prewar Soviet encroachments in Europe. The Red Army had seized the Baltic states in 1940, taken territory from Finland, and former Czarist territory from Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Although all of it was now occupied by the Wehrmacht, the Soviets expected to outlast Hitler. “Stalin, I believe,” Eden added, “sincerely wants military agreements, but he will not sign until we recognize his frontiers, and we must expect badgering on this issue.” Churchill radioed his Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, that the demands violated the Atlantic Charter, “to which Stalin has subscribed,” and in any case no arrangement could be made “without prior agreement with the United States.”
    Stalin’s contempt for pieces of diplomatic paper and confidence about the Red Army’s future control of the ground in question would keep the absorbed territories in the grip of Stalin’s successors until the implosion of the Soviet Union decades later. Churchill advised Attlee not to be “downhearted” if Eden should leave Moscow “without any flourish of trumpets.” And to Eden he conceded in a radiogram, “Naturally you will not be rough with Stalin,” but there could be no “secret and special pacts” without the United States. Even to present Stalin’s demands to Roosevelt (who, as would his successors, never recognize the theft of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) would be “to court a blank refusal” and “lasting trouble on both sides.”
    Churchill had already radioed Stalin “sincere wishes for your birthday”—he would be sixty-two on December 21. In return, Stalin offered the PM and the British army “my sincere congratulations in connection with your recent