The morning Hugh Lunghi came to breakfast

22/04/2009 by admin.

was when he came to talk to the men’s breakfast meeting at the Church on the Heath.  He spoke about his involvement in the historic wartime Conferences (1943-1945) in Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam and Moscow between Winston Churchill, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and Stalin.  These meetings have been much written about; Hugh’s comments gave a refreshing slant.  

He started by reminding us just how much our country is indebted to the Americans.  Without their help the outcome of the last war might have been very different.  Notwithstanding recent difficulties Americans are both warm-hearted and very generous: without Marshall Aid Europe would never have recovered in the way it did. He continued by recounting those occasions when Churchill found Roosevelt particularly difficult and how Churchill often felt sidelined when Stalin and Roosevelt went behind his back.  Like most histories not all the traditionally accepted written accounts of their tripartite dealings are entirely reliable. 

He then gave examples of leading public figures between the two World Wars and the media in the last World War giving very distorted accounts of the Soviet system and Stalin’s leadership.  His great evil, immense cruelty and duplicity were masked by the admiration accorded to the outstanding victories of the Red Army over the German forces.  Those victories, added to the deliberately modest front Stalin presented to Churchill, Roosevelt and other foreign leaders bestowed an image of urbane respectability on ‘Uncle Jo Stalin’ and Russia’s communist system.  Stalin generated great fear in those under him; even his Foreign Minister, Molotov, was heard to stutter when in Stalin’s presence.  Censorship and surveillance were rigid.  In charge of clearing his and other offices of the British Military Mission in Moscow at the end of the War Hugh found and removed some thirty hidden microphones.  A more humorous, yet operationally serious, example was the case of the carrier pigeons carried on arctic route RAF transport aircraft in case of radio failure: they were refused entry or exercise in Russia until they received entry visas – nothing to do with bird flu! 

Hugh pointed to the widespread supposition made in some of the tabloid press and books that towards the end of the War Eastern Europe was carved up at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea and handed over to Stalin by the Western Allies.  In fact Russian troops, the Red Army and the KGB, Secret Police, having driven the German forces out, already occupied much of Eastern Europe. Stalin possessed it without needing to ask. 

Hugh explained that the over-riding objective of both sides in war is usually to bring it to an end as soon as possible.  In February 1945 Russian troops were only 40 miles from Berlin.  In a desperate last throw Hitler aimed to strengthen his front facing the Russians just north east of Dresden by transferring by rail some 30 divisions from  Western and other fronts, as our and Russian intelligence discovered.  The city of Dresden was an important final rail junction for the transfer of those troops.  To prevent the German divisions reaching and holding that front, so prolonging the war, Stalin with his military leaders requested the British and Americans to bomb Dresden and other entrainment points, Berlin, Leipzig and Chemnitz. To achieve the aim of ending the war, still being waged dangerously by Hitler, the Western Allies agreed to Stalin’s request. 

Hugh concluded his remarks by pointing out that although Stalin was the biggest mass-murderer in the whole of human history up to that date, it was Lenin before his early death in 1924, who inspired and instilled into communism its extreme “religion” of hate and murder of political opponents.  Hugh read out the words Lenin wrote in 1915 “We must hate. Hatred is the basis of communism”.  Richard Dexter/Hugh Lunghi  

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