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His afternoons were spent in meetings, meals were taken with Braun; his four secretaries still had to endure ‘tea’ until 4 a.m. as the supine dictator droned on – a routine interspersed with embers of hope and spasms of rage.

FDR AND THE THREE KINGS

On 4 February, Stalin, travelling in Nicholas II’s train carriage, arrived at Yalta, as in Berlin, Eva Braun, determined to remain and if necessary die with Hitler, celebrated her thirty-third birthday with her lover and his courtiers upstairs in an intact section of the Chancellery.

In the tsar’s white palace of Livadia, Stalin presided with calm, gleeful and inscrutable potency, master of his brief though weary after years of sixteen-hour days. FDR, the youngest of the three, was exhausted, having just been elected president for an unprecedented fourth time. But he now suffered arteriosclerosis and felt ‘tired and listless’, his mouth sometimes gaping. Churchill too was worn out, ‘woollier than ever’, complained a participant; but even past his best he was still better than most. Revelling in his new power, Stalin was moved by FDR and suspicious of Churchill. FDR, accompanied by his daughter Anna and a depleted Hopkins, leaned towards Stalin, naively believing their progressive powers could remake a post-imperial world; Churchill craved his old partnership with FDR. But Britain, bankrupt and overstretched by imperial obligations, was overshadowed by the new superpowers. The Three decided that Germany must surrender unconditionally; they would create a stronger international organization called the United Nations. Stalin would enter the war against Japan. But that grim realist, whose armies were liberating eastern Europe, already knew that ‘Borders will be decided by force,’ and was sending in cohorts of local Stalinists to be his vassals. Only in Yugoslavia and Albania did local partisans seize power without Soviet troops.^*

FDR told Stalin he was a Zionist and asked if he was one. ‘In principle,’ replied Stalin. Talking of Palestine, FDR joked that he had ‘three kings waiting for him’.

‘I’m a bit exhausted but really all right,’ FDR told Eleanor before sailing from Yalta on USS Quincy. Moored in the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt, sitting on deck in a dark cape, he met the epicene young Egyptian king Farouk, descendant of Mehmed Ali, then Haile Selassie, now rebuilding Ethiopia after Italian depredations; finally Abdulaziz ibn Saud arrived, conveyed on USS Murphy with a herd of sheep to slaughter and guards wearing scimitars. Abdulaziz was lame. President and king sat together on deck in their wheelchairs. Citing German atrocities, FDR asked him to approve rising Jewish migration to Palestine. ‘Jews and Arabs could never cooperate,’ replied Abdulaziz. ‘Give the Jews the best German lands.’ FDR’s voyage home took nine days.

On 19 March Hitler ordered the destruction of all German infrastructure, the Nero Decree, but in many areas reasonable officials were already ignoring fanatical orders; across the sinking empire, SS guards blew up the killing camps and forced starving prisoners westwards on death marches. On the 20th, Hitler emerged from the bunker to review young fighters of the Hitler Youth – one was twelve – pinching cheeks, tweaking ears as he moved down the line, his last appearance on film. Goebbels retained Hitler’s favour, while Göring dreamed of the succession and Himmler tried to trade Jewish lives in secret negotiations.

‘Well, who’s going to take Berlin?’ Stalin asked his top commanders in the Kremlin on 1 April, ‘we or the Allies?’

‘It’s we who’ll take Berlin,’ barked bullet-headed Marshal Konev.

‘Whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin,’ ordered Stalin. Konev and Zhukov raced for their planes to fly to the front.

While the Soviets were marshalling their vast forces, FDR was with Daisy Suckley at Hyde Park but he ‘looks terribly badly – so tired … He just can’t stand this strain indefinitely.’ Boarding the train to Warm Springs (the Little White House) with Daisy, he was ‘joking and laughing as usual’, perhaps because Lucy Mercer was joining him. On 12 April, sitting with Daisy and Lucy, FDR raised his hand to his head, saying he had a headache, and died.^*

‘The great miracle!’ cried Hitler, convinced this was the replay of Frederick the Great’s reprieve. ‘Who’s laughing now? The war’s not lost.’

WE CAN STILL WIN: HIROHITO’S OFFENSIVE

Stalin was strangely moved by the president’s death: ‘Roosevelt was clever, educated, farsighted,’ even if ‘he prolonged the life of capitalism’. At the White House, minutes after Eleanor heard the news, the vice-president Harry Truman, an obscure but loyal Missouri senator, arrived for a drink. She placed her hand on his shoulder: ‘Harry, the president is dead.’

Pause.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ Truman asked Eleanor.

‘Is there anything we can do for you?’ she replied. Later Truman placed a placard on his Oval Office desk: ‘The buck stops here!’