Read World War II Behind Closed Doors for Free Online

May nearly 1 June and yet still in ‘the month of May’? It is a minor moment amidst the epic decisions these statesmen were making at Tehran, but one that nevertheless shows the subtle way in which Roosevelt's mind worked. By coming up with this form of words the President must have felt that he had squared the circle between Stalin wanting Overlord on 1 May and the generals wanting it to be launched at the earliest on 1 June.
    Hugh Lunghi, who observed Roosevelt at the conference, thought that he detected signs of the scheming mind behind the bonhomie: ‘He seemed at first to be very sort of hail fellow, well met. He was smiling and cheerful and slapping people on their back – but from a distance, metaphorically – and smiled and nodded to me, but as time went on I got an impression that he was rather cold and insincere. I don't know why – this was the feeling that I got. His laughter and his jokes, such as they were, seemed rather forced – as though he was pushing it’.
    The final plenary session of the conference was held that afternoon, and little of substance was added to the decisions that had already been taken. Overlord would take place ‘in the month ofMay’ and a commander for the operation would be named within the next few days.
    That evening a dinner was held at the British legation to celebrate Churchill's sixty-ninth birthday. There were many courses and a complex layout of cutlery – something that seemed, momentarily, to fox the Soviet leader. ‘All seemed to be going well’, says Lunghi, ‘[when] I saw Churchill's chief interpreter, Arthur Birse, pointing something out to Stalin with the cutlery And I learnt afterwards from Arthur Birse that Stalin had been puzzled to have all this vast amount of cutlery on either side of his plate, and he actually asked Arthur Birse: “What do I do with them?” And Arthur Birse said to him: “Just proceed as you want. It doesn't matter at all which one you pick up – whatever you're comfortable with,” to put him at his ease’.
    It was moments like this that made Stalin appear almost a comforting figure to the sophisticated Westerners. He could be admired as the leader of a nation fighting back against the Nazis, but still gently patronized. As one British correspondent put it: Stalin ‘looks like the kindly Italian gardener you have in once a week’. 27 And so his occasional breaches of good taste – like his aggressive taunting of Churchill the previous night – could be put down to bad manners and lack of ‘class’.
    The evening proceeded in a relaxed and happy way, marred only by a remark that Stalin made as he proposed a toast to General Sir Alan Brooke. Stalin's suspicions that it was the British who had, as he saw it, consistently been obstructive over the launch of the second front had been confirmed by the way the conference at Tehran had proceeded. So he made a sly dig, remarking that he hoped Brooke would ‘no longer look upon the Russians with such suspicion’ 28 and adding that if he really got to know them he would find them good people to deal with. Brooke, the most forthright of men, was not about to keep silent in the face of such a comment. He stood up and told Stalin that he had been deceived by appearances. Just as earlier in the day the Soviet leader had talked of the importance of ‘dummy tanks, aircraft and airfields’ in the deception of the Germans, so Stalin had mistakenBrooke's genuine desire for a closer working relationship with the Soviets with the belief that he viewed them with ‘suspicion’. The speech seemed to mollify Stalin. But it did nothing to alter the substantive criticism, because Stalin was right. It had been the British – and in particular Churchill – who were least enthusiastic about the second front.
    A small moment of comedy was provided towards the end of the evening when the dessert was brought in by a Iranian waiter, dressed in formal uniform with white gloves. According to Hugh Lunghi,