all the more strongly his rights and those of
France. The disparity between the reality of the
French position and de Gaulle’s behaviour struck
Churchill and Roosevelt at the time as incongru-
ous. But Churchill, with more imagination,
insight and sympathy than Roosevelt, urged after
the Allied invasion of France in June 1944 that de
Gaulle’s administration should be recognised as
the provisional government of France. Such
recognition nevertheless was delayed until
October 1944. The manner in which de Gaulle
had been treated by the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers
made the deepest impression on him and still ran-
kled years later. The restoration of France to
great-power status, and its independence from
Anglo-American dominance, became almost an
obsession with de Gaulle in the post-war years.
The war was clearly drawing to a close in the
autumn of 1944. But stiff German resistance frus-
trated a quick victory. In the east, the Germans
continued to fight fiercely. In the west, they were
even able to inflict temporary reverses on the
Allies. Montgomery made a bold attempt in
September 1944 to cross the lower Rhine at
Arnhem with the help of parachute divisions
dropped in advance, but just short of Arnhem the
Germans were able to halt his thrust. The Allied
armies, however, were slowly pushing on to the
Rhine along a broad front and had reached prac-
tically the whole length of the German frontier
by mid-December. The Germans had still one
surprise left. Powerful German divisions, led by
tanks, together with what was left of the
Luftwaffe in the west, opened an offensive
through the Ardennes on 16 December 1944.
The Germans advanced sixty miles before they
were halted. It was their last offensive of the war.
With the imminent collapse of Hitler’s Germany,
agreement with the Russians on the military divi-
sion of the territories the Allies would occupy,
and on the post-war delimitation of frontiers and
spheres of influence, took on a new urgency.
In October 1944, Churchill flew to Moscow.
Russian armies were by then already in Romania
and Bulgaria and a British force was about to
enter Greece. Churchill in Moscow proposed to
Stalin a division of influence in the Balkan states.
Stalin readily consented. But the resulting agree-
ment was little more than a piece of paper. The
Red Army would dominate Romania, Bulgaria
and Hungary as it advanced towards greater
Germany. But Stalin allowed Britain freedom of
action in Greece, provided a broadly based gov-
ernment including communists was formed in
that country. British troops who landed in Greece
soon found themselves fighting the communist-
organised partisans. The uneasy peace established
by the British force was to be shattered two years
later in 1947 by civil war. Despite Stalin’s prom-
ises to respect the sovereignty and the rights
of self-determination of the nations of central
Europe and the Balkans, in his mind there was
always one overriding qualification: the free
choice of the people would be forcefully set aside
if it led, as was likely, to anti-Soviet governments.
Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia were able after
1945 to assert their independence from Soviet
control. The realities of Soviet ‘freedom’ were
already apparent before the war with Germany
1
THE VICTORY OF THE ALLIES, 1941–5 291
A warm welcome for a GI in Belfort, November
- © Corbis
