WINSTON CHURCHILL, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin were all exhausted old men in early 1945 as the war in Europe ground to a brutal end.

There was still much killing to do, notably by the Russian “liberators” who took up where the Nazis had left off in Poland, engaging in wholesale rape and slaughter. But with the war as a backdrop, the three Allied leaders sat down at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945 to construct a peace formula and to carve up the territorial spoils.

Yalta has been blamed for many things, not least the continued enslavement of Poland, effectively handed over to Stalin’s empire. But, as Michael Dobbs astutely and dramatically portrays in Churchill’s Triumph, the real story of Yalta was the mighty tussle between the three men upon whose political skills and strength of character the rest of the world would depend.

Interwoven into the eight days of machinations at Yalta, all authentically based on the events at the time, Dobbs tells the story of a Pole, Marian Nowak, an aristocrat and former officer in his country’s finest cavalry regiment, who is posing as a plumber to gain access to Churchill.

He berates the great man for failing to save his country, provides him with intelligence titbits gleaned from staff at the conference about what Stalin and Roosevelt are up to in secret, and pleads, unsuccessfully, to be smuggled to England.

Throughout the story, the fate of Poland is the key to the human drama. As the leaders struggle to agree the wording for a deal on a postwar world, the Polish town of Piorun, from which Nowak had adopted his new identity — that of the mayor’s son — is going through its final death throes.

Abused by their German captors, the people of this small community are awaiting a new fate, the arrival of Russian troops who hated the Poles as much as the Germans did; Piorun is a microcosm of the fate that befell the rest of Poland.

Churchill, exhausted but sustained by an inexhaustible supply of whisky and an irascible butler, Frank Sawyers, realises as the conference progresses that he is going to be unable to save Poland from Stalin’s empire building.

Free elections are guaranteed as part of the Yalta package but nobody trusts the Russian leader.

Churchill knew that he had failed: “He had come to Yalta in the guise of one of the most mighty men on the planet, yet the young Pole (Nowak) had made him realise that it was little more than a sham.”

The novel is a triumph because of the author’s fine appreciation of history and his meticulous eye for detail in the way that he develops the verbal battles between the three leaders, allies, yet fighting their own corners: Churchill desperate to fend off the approaching Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe; Roosevelt, the dreamer whose ambition was to create a United Nations to prevent any future world war; and Stalin, intent on the total destruction of Germany and redrawing the borders of Poland.

“The war isn’t over yet. Still a lot more killing to be done, Prime Minister. Perhaps another million or two?” Stalin suggests to Churchill as they face each other on the fourth day of the conference.

Away from the conference table Churchill is a man at war with himself and with most of his staff and aides. He is also unashamed at being seen naked by anyone who enters his room. Dobbs notes that Churchill was once seen in the buff by Roosevelt.

This is historically true, although not at Yalta; it was in Washington, when Roosevelt arrived in his wheelchair at the door of Churchill‘s bedroom in the White House where he was staying, to be greeted by a naked Prime Minister with the words: “You see Mr President, I have nothing to hide.”

At Yalta, there were hidden plots going on throughout the eight days. Churchill, struggling to preserve Poland’s integrity as a nation, could not even trust Roosevelt, his close and beloved friend. Churchill’s real triumph at Yalta had to wait another 45 years before it bore fruit, when Poland finally shook off its Communist chains after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

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