The Yalta Papers

Sir Winston Churchill, his initial alarm dissipated, is now crowing with satisfaction at the Yalta record made public by Mr. Foster Dulles. "We seem to have come out of it very well," he boasted in the House of Commons, to the accompaniment of sycophantic cheers from his adulators. How well had he in fact come out of it? It is true that he resisted the infamous proposal to murder 50,000 German officers—no British leader could have done other. It is also true that at that time he stood by the British empire. But what of the crusade for which we were supposed to have entered the war? What of the Poles? The Poles were about to be betrayed. Churchill, professedly, was against their betrayal. Did he care? Are the Poles today a free and happy nation? If they are not, how can he claim to have emerged with credit from Yalta?

Even Churchill's "sympathetic" attitude towards Poland did not appear to be beyond reproach. The American record declares him to have told the conference that he would have to be able to say in Parliament that the Polish elections would be held in a fair way, but that he did not care much about the Poles himself. The precise facts are perhaps not very important. What is important is that Churchill, although dragged protestingly and impotent at the tail of the Roosevelt-Stalin chariot, really thinks that he "came out of it very well." Impotence itself now means a garland for Sir Winston, and the dead are left to bury the dead.