The war that began in September 1939 was a
European war, in contrast to the world war that
ensued when the Soviet Union, the US and Japan
became involved in 1941. Militarily there is an
obvious reason for seeing 1941 as a dividing line.
In Asia, the China War being waged since 1937
was a separate conflict until it was widened into
the Pacific War by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
In Europe Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union
marks a turning point in the course of the war.
But in a deeper sense the global implications of
Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939 were there from
the beginning. Long before Germany declared
war on the US, America was throwing its support
behind Britain and actually engaging in warfare
in the battle of the Atlantic. Then Nazi–Soviet
‘friendship’, affirmed in August 1939, was
nothing but a temporary expedient. Hitler did
not abandon his goal of winning living-space in
the east and conquering ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’.
In 1940 and 1941 Britain on its own was incapable
of inflicting serious damage on Germany.
Was its survival as a belligerent therefore of much
importance? Without the war in the east, it is difficult
to imagine how Britain could have launched
even a destructive bomber offensive against
Germany. Not only was much of the German air
force fighting the Russians, but had the war
against Russia not continued, and so frustrated his
plans, Hitler would have diminished the size of
his victorious continental army and transferred
the main German war effort to building up an air
force which, in sheer size alone, would have overwhelmed
the Royal Air Force. Hitler was never
able to realise this plan as Germany’s war
resources continued to be fully stretched in
holding the eastern front. Britain was the only
Western European democracy left in 1940. Its
refusal to accept the apparent logic of the military
situation saved post-war Western Europe from
suffering the fate either of continued German
overlordship or of a future under Stalin’s Red
Army if, as seems more probable, the Soviet
Union had won the war. Instead democratic
Britain provided the link, and later the base, for
an Anglo-American counter-offensive in Western
Europe that created the conditions for recovery
free from the totalitarian control of the left or the
right. Without Britain still fighting from 1940 to
1941, the likelihood of an American involvement
in the European theatre of the war was remote.
The powers victorious in the Second World
War recognised that they would be faced with
world problems and worldwide confrontations
after the war was over. The future of the millions
who were largely tacit observers of the war, the
subjects of the colonial European empires, or
under Japanese rule, would be dependent on its
outcome. A new world was in the making and its
history would have been different had Germany
and Japan emerged as the post-war superpowers.
The size and destructive capability of the
armies that fought on each side during the Second
World War exceeded even those of the Great War
of 1914–18. Behind the fighting fronts, the industrial
war was waged, pouring out guns, tanks, aircraft
and ships. One of the most intriguing aspects
of the war was that of spies and of science. Despite
spectacular coups, the achievement of the spies
in affecting the course of the war was less than
might have been expected. The success of espionage
and counter-espionage meant that they
tended to cancel each other out. One of the bestknown
illustrations of this was the failure of
Richard Sorge, the master spy working for the
Russians in Tokyo, to convince Moscow that his
information from the German Embassy of Hitler’s
intentions and the timing of the invasion of
the Soviet Union was true. On the Allied side
demonstrable vital espionage success, was the
breaking of the German code machine Enigma,
used by Germany’s armed forces. The Poles had
built a replica and just before the start of the
war passed its secret to the British, who continued
the decyphering work at Bletchley Park. The
intelligence data, codenamed ‘Ultra’, thus helped
Britain and its allies in the air war, in the
Mediterranean and in the North African campaigns,
but most crucially in the battle of the
Atlantic.
The Allies derived huge advantage from their
successful application of science to warfare. Radar
was in use early in the war in both Germany and
Britain; Germany was probably ahead in its development
at the outset of the war. But during
1940–1 small airborne radar sets were produced
in Britain which allowed night fighters to defend
cities during the Blitz. Airborne radar also became
an indispensable adjunct to the Allied bomber
offensive, enabling the bombers to pinpoint their
targets at night. At sea, advanced types of radar
gave the Allies a decisive advantage against
German submarines in the spring of 1943 and
helped to turn the tide of battle in their favour.
But the scientific breakthrough that did most
to shape the future was the atomic bomb; the
decision at the end of the war to use this weapon
brought about the rapid Japanese surrender.
Allied scientists from many nations, British,
American, French, Danish, Italian and German
too (for German refugees played a crucial role),
made the construction of a nuclear bomb possible.
It was eventually in the US that science was
matched by the technical know-how and the production
facilities necessary for its manufacture
were provided. First tested in the empty spaces of
the New Mexican desert, the bomb was dropped
just three weeks later in August 1945 over
Hiroshima.
An early indication of Allied suspicions about
the likely post-war attitude of the Soviet Union
can be seen in the decision not to share the secrets
of nuclear development with the USSR. Indeed,
despite an agreement with Britain, the US sought
to retain a monopoly on the manufacture of these
awesome weapons. The Soviets were well aware
they would need to develop their own atomic
bomb and in 1942, despite the immediate
German threat, pressed ahead vigorously with
their own research. The Danish atomic scientist
Niels Bohr advised Roosevelt that the Russians
would succeed in building their own bomb some
time after the Americans did so. Would it not be
better to share secrets with them and to work for
international control? The Russians made their
own bomb in 1949. The atom spy Klaus Fuchs
had provided some help but the Russians could
eventually have built their own bomb in any case.
It seems unlikely that the course of Stalin’s policy
would have differed much even if the Americans
had passed on the atomic secrets. German atomic
research – despite the eminence of some of the
scientists ready to work for the Nazis – lagged
behind. Hitler, according to the armaments minister
Albert Speer, was not prepared to earmark
the vast resources necessary to make the bomb,
regarding nuclear physics as ‘Jewish physics’.
Instead, the Germans did devote great resources
to the development of new rockets, which by
themselves could have no decisive effect on
the war. The outcome was the pilotless plane, the
V-1, and the advanced supersonic rocket, the
V-2, against which there was no defence when
it came into use in 1944.
In the summer of 1940 it was difficult to see how
Germany’s victorious armies would ever be
defeated. But by attacking the Soviet Union in
June 1941 and then declaring war that December
on the US the balance potentially swung against
Germany. Allied superiority was only potential in
the sense that it depended on Britain and Russia
not being defeated. The US would make its military
weight felt in Europe only in 1943 and
1944.
For Britain the danger of invasion finally
passed in 1941. With Germany fully engaged in
the east, there remained no possibility of mounting
an invasion of the British Isles as well. But
this did not mean that there was no longer any
danger that Britain might be forced to submit. It
remained beleaguered, dependent for longerterm
survival on supplies reaching it from overseas,
above all from the US. Britain’s own
resources, great though they were when fully
mobilised, were not sufficient both to sustain the
war effort and to feed all the people. For Britain’s
success in mobilising its material and human
resources much credit must go to Ernest Bevin,
a leading trade unionist who had entered
Churchill’s national government as minister of
labour in 1940. The British people accepted an
unprecedented degree of direction of labour and
of rationing. Even so, supplies from overseas
became increasingly essential. Lend-Lease made
possible the purchase of war supplies in the US
without payment of cash. But they still had to
reach Britain.
The conflict at sea, the battle of the Atlantic,
was therefore as vital to Britain as the land battles
had been to France in 1940. The sinkings by
German U-boats in 1941 and 1942 could only be
made good by the output from US yards. Before
Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Hitler had
given orders that American vessels supplying
Britain and their escorting US warships were not to
be attacked. His hands had been tied. After Pearl
Harbor he welcomed the outbreak of war between
Japan and the US, and declared war on the
Americans himself, removing the restrictions on
the U-boat war in the Atlantic. Now, he thought,
Britain would be forced to its knees. In November
1942 U-boats sank 729,000 tons, and for the year
as a whole almost 8 million tons or 1,664 ships.
These losses were inflicted by about 200 submarines
and could no longer be made good. The
tide was turned in the spring of 1943. By the end
of May airpower, improved radar and ‘Ultra’ practically
drove the U-boats from the Atlantic. The
submarine had been the greatest threat. Germany’s
surface fleet was not sufficiently strong to challenge
Britain’s supremacy. Hitler’s battleships were eliminated
after some spectacular engagements. The
Graf Spee sank in 1939, the Bismarck in 1941 and
the crippled Tirpitz by air attack in 1944. Supplies
were carried across the Atlantic by convoys. By far
the most hazardous route for these merchant vessels
was from Scotland and Iceland to Murmansk
to aid Russia. But by the end of 1943 not only had
the Germans lost the battle of the seas, they had
also sustained defeats on land from which there
would be no recovery. The darkest years of the war
were over for Britain. Churchill’s contribution to
maintaining British morale would be difficult to
overestimate.
Britain’s warfare with Italy and Germany on land
in 1941 and 1942, judged by the numbers of men
engaged, was secondary when compared with the
millions of German and Russian troops locked in
battle in the Soviet Union. Yet strategically the
region of the eastern Mediterranean, known
loosely as the Middle East and lying between
neutral Turkey and the Italian colony of Libya,
was a vital one. During the inter-war years it was
dominated by Britain and France not as outright
colonial powers but as the powers holding League
Mandates. Both Britain and France had problems
with their Mandates. From 1936 onwards, Arab
militancy forced Britain to station 30,000 troops
in Palestine. But after the British government’s
decision in 1939 to restrict the immigration of
the Jews there was relative calm until 1944.
Hitler’s Arab policy was ambiguous. While
welcoming Arab hostility to Britain, the Nazis
were not prepared to give unequivocal promises
of future independence to the Arab states. But
Arab attitudes were determined by Arab hostility
to Britain and France as the occupying powers.
Thus Egypt, nominally independent, and though
being ‘defended’ by Britain, was pro-German
during the war and was actually occupied by
Britain. Iraq, Britain’s Mandate, achieved independence
in 1930 under British sponsorship but
was closely linked to Britain economically and
militarily. What was important to Britain was that
Iraq and its eastern neighbour, Persia, were the
major suppliers of oil in the region.
Britain’s Middle Eastern dominance was seriously
threatened in 1941 by Germany. Germany’s
victory over France stimulated Arab nationalism.
The Vichy French authorities in the Lebanon and
Syria, moreover, were not pro-British in their sympathies;
while in Iraq, a group that favoured
Germany staged a military coup and drove out the
regime in power, which had been friendly to
Britain. Turkey, fearful of German power, decided
on neutrality and so did not, as expected, join
Britain. If Hitler had followed his Balkan campaigns
in the spring of 1941 by advancing into the
Middle East, there would have been no sufficiently
strong British forces to oppose the Germans.
Instead, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June
1941. Germany might nevertheless have reached
Persia and the Persian Gulf by way of southern
Russia. But Russia’s defence of the Caucasus
blocked that path. Britain, meanwhile, despite its
militarily weak position, decided on offensive
action. Together with Free French troops, a relatively
small British force invaded Syria and the
Lebanon and overcame Vichy French resistance.
Britain intervened in Iraq and restored the pro-
British regime. Persia was also invaded in conjunction
with the Russians. In Persia and the Arab
world, including Egypt, Britain had secured its
strategic interests by force against local political
nationalist groups. From Britain’s point of view,
Arab national feelings could not be permitted to
jeopardise the war effort.
In North Africa on the western frontiers of
Egypt, British and Dominion troops fought the
Axis. The fortunes of this desert war varied dramatically
until October 1942 when the battle of
Alamein finally broke the offensive power of
General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps.
General Bernard Montgomery had built up an
army of 195,000 men with a thousand tanks,
almost double the size of the German–Italian
army. At Alamein he outgunned and outwitted
Rommel, who had to withdraw hastily.
Britain’s Alamein victory ended the disastrous
sequence of British defeats. A trap was sprung.
Rommel’s line of retreat was being simultaneously
cut off by Anglo-American landings in his rear.
There had been much inter-Allied dispute on
where an Anglo-American force could best strike
against Hitler’s Europe in 1942. Roosevelt and
the American generals favoured an assault on
France. Their reasoning was political as well as
military. Stalin was pressing for a ‘second front’ to
relieve pressure in the east by forcing the Germans
to transfer forty divisions to the west. But the
Americans were quite unrealistic about the time
needed for so difficult an undertaking. An unsuccessful
commando raid on Dieppe in August 1942
showed how hard it would be to establish a
bridgehead. Shortage of landing craft meant that
no more than ten Allied divisions could have been
sent across the Channel in 1942. Churchill and
the British chiefs of staff were in any case opposed
to a premature invasion of France. Agreement was
eventually reached that an Anglo-American force
should land in Vichy French North Africa in
November 1942. General Dwight Eisenhower
commanded this whole operation, codenamed
Torch. At first the Vichy French forces resisted the
landings but then agreed to an armistice. The
Allies were thus able to occupy French Morocco
and Algeria virtually unopposed.
Hitler responded to the Allied invasion of
North Africa by sending his troops into the hitherto
unoccupied regions of Vichy France. Britain
had always feared that this would happen and that
the French fleet would then fall into German
hands. In fact the French fleet in Toulon eluded
a German takeover by scuttling itself. Hitler also
sent in troops from Sicily to occupy French
Tunisia in North Africa. Rommel, meanwhile,
fought and retreated westwards from Libya. The
real fighting between the Allies and the Italian
and German forces then occurred in Tunisia and
lasted until May 1943, when a total of 150,000
troops (both Italian and German) finally capitulated.
It was a major victory for the Anglo-
American forces. Even so, the scale of the fighting
in North Africa cannot be compared with that of
the Russian front. Here, the main war on land was
being waged.
On 22 June 1941 the greatest military force ever
assembled invaded the Soviet Union with almost
3.6 million German and Axis soldiers, 3,600 tanks
and 2,700 planes. This included fourteen
Romanian divisions. With the Panzers racing
ahead in best Blitzkrieg tradition, the Soviet
armies in the west were to be smashed by a threepronged
attack. The Germany army was divided
into three groups – north, centre and south. The
army of the north drove through the former
Baltic states with Leningrad as its goal. The army
of the centre made its thrust in the direction of
Smolensk and Moscow, and the army group
south invaded the Ukraine.
The purpose of these deep thrusts was to
encircle and to destroy the Red Army in western
Russia, and to prevent a Russian retreat into the
vastness of Soviet territory. The victorious
German armies expected to control European
Russia from the Volga to Archangel. A ‘military
frontier’ could then be established against Asiatic
Russia, where the Japanese ally later might be
encouraged to colonise parts of Siberia.
Territorially, Germany almost achieved her objective
of conquering the whole of European Russia
in 1941 and 1942. Yet the Soviet Union was not
defeated and the Blitzkrieg turned into a war of
attrition, during which the greater Soviet reserves
of manpower and the increasing output of her
armament industry turned the tide of the war
against Hitler’s Germany.
After the initial and spectacular victories of the
battles of the frontiers during the first weeks of the
war, when the Germans took hundreds of thousands
of Russian prisoners and whole Russian
armies disintegrated, the German generals and
Hitler disagreed on which of the three offensives
was to be the main effort. Thus already in August
of 1941 the basic weakness of Germany’s latest
Blitzkrieg became evident. Speaking to Goebbels
on 18 August, Hitler bitterly complained about
the failures of military intelligence before the war.
Instead of the expected 5,000 tanks, the Soviets
disposed of 20,000. Goebbels reflected that had
the true strength of the Soviet Union been
known: ‘Perhaps we would have drawn back from
tackling the questions of the East and Bolshevism
which had fallen due.’ What a momentous ‘perhaps’,
on which the whole course of the war was
to depend! During the first six weeks the Germans
lost 60,000 dead; newspaper columns in Germany
were filled with small black iron crosses announcing
a son or husband fallen for Führer and
Fatherland. As the Germans penetrated the Soviet
Union the already vast front from the Black Sea to
the Baltic of more than 1,000 miles lengthened
even further. The same tactics that had worked
in the ‘confined’ space of France failed in the
vastness of the Soviet Union. Though Stalin was
completely stunned by the German attack, not
expecting it, despite all warnings, to be launched
before 1942, huge Russian reserves of manpower
and the setting up of industrial complexes beyond
the Urals meant that the Soviet military capacity
to resist was not destroyed.
But Stalin’s fear of provoking Germany by taking
adequate preparatory measures had left the
Soviet armies unprepared and exposed to German
encirclements at the outset. The Germans captured
more than 3 million prisoners between June
and December 1941. But if the Soviet Union
could avoid actual defeat in 1941 and 1942 it
would then become impossible for the German
armies to defeat the more numerous Soviet
armies, whose weapons matched, and in the case
of the T-34 tank even outclassed, those of the
Germans. First the autumn rains and the mud and
then the winter weather caught the German
armies unprepared. Not only did the troops freeze
during the particularly severe winter of 1941–2,
but much of the mechanised equipment became
unusable in the Arctic frosts. Russia’s two greatest
cities, Leningrad and Moscow, were the goals of
the central and northern German armies.
Leningrad was almost surrounded by the Germans
and the Finns.
The siege of Leningrad is an epic of the
Second World War. It lasted from September
1941 to January 1944. During the siege 641,803
people died from hunger and disease alone. The
Soviet spirit of resistance was not broken. Almost
three-quarters of a million German troops were
bogged down around the city for 900 days. The
Germans were also denied the capture of
Moscow, although they reached the southern
suburbs. Germany’s defeats were not due to
‘General Winter’ alone, but to the skill and
heroism of the Soviet forces facing the invaders.
The German high command was forced to admit
that for the first time a Blitzkrieg had failed. The
war was not over in the east; the war of attrition
that had defeated Germany in 1914–18 and
which Hitler had done everything to escape, was
just beginning.
There are occasions when secret intelligence
plays a crucial role in war. The Soviets had a spy
in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, a German press correspondent
who had predicted the date of the
German attack almost to the day. The warning
appears to have fallen on deaf ears. But when he
passed on the information that the Japanese
would strike south and not attack the Soviet
Union just before his arrest as a spy, and Japanese
military inactivity confirmed his tip off, Stalin,
though still suspicious, gradually withdrew those
troops facing the Japanese after the Siberian
campaigning season was over (Sorge was imprisoned
and executed in 1944). With the help of
these troops and other reinforcements, Marshal
Zhukov, the most outstanding general on the
Soviet side during the war, organised the defence
of Russia’s capital. In December 1941 fresh Soviet
divisions counter-attacked and the Germans were
forced to give up territory, but their own retreat
was orderly. They were not routed or captured in
huge numbers as the Russians had been. Although
the Russians did not yet enjoy superiority in men
or materials on the Moscow front, the Germans
were severely disadvantaged by the length of and
lack of adequate rail and road supply lines to their
own troops.
Stalin’s mistakes in carrying on the Russian
offensives in the spring of 1942, believing the
German armies virtually beaten, led to major military
disasters on the Kharkov front in the south
in May and June 1942 and in the Crimea.
Hundreds of thousands more Soviet troops were
lost. Stalin, expecting the Germans to renew their
main drive on Moscow, concentrated Russian
reserves on the central front. Instead the main
German blow was delivered in the south. The
Crimea, including Sevastopol, was taken. The
Germans drove forward to the city of Stalingrad
on the Volga, intending to cut off the whole of
Russia south of that city including the oil-rich
Caucasus, which formed the gateway to Persia.
In the ruins of Stalingrad the Russians, fighting
from house to house, made their stand. The
battle lasted from mid-August to mid-November
1942. Stalin and Hitler were locked in a titanic
proxy struggle for supremacy. Hitler decided that
Stalingrad would be taken come what may and
that Germany would not withdraw. Stalin sent
Zhukov to mastermind the defence of the city
regardless of casualties. Most of the city was taken
by the Germans in October, and the Russian
defenders’ reinforcements were limited as fresh
divisions were being husbanded in preparation for
a great counter-offensive. On 19 November 1942
the Russians launched their attack and encircled
the 250,000 men of Germany’s Sixth Army fighting
in Stalingrad. Hitler ordered the Sixth Army
to stand fast. Losing the opportunity to link up
with the German armies to the rear, it was
doomed. Fierce fighting continued until 2
February 1943. A total of 91,000 survivors surrendered,
including Field Marshal von Paulus
who capitulated earlier, on 31 January. The
Wehrmacht had been decisively defeated, and,
more than that, the myth of Hitler’s infallible military
genius had been exploded. The world knew
Stalingrad marked a turning point in the war.
Soviet strength would increase as Germany’s
diminished. By the summer of 1943 the Russians
had also won superiority in the air, with thousands
of planes engaged on each side.
Had there been wholesale defections from
the forced union of Soviet socialist republics the
whole prospect of the war might have changed.
The almost unbelievable number of prisoners that
the Germans took in 1941 suggests not only military
defeat but also large-scale desertions. But
Hitler resisted those of his advisers who wished
to utilise this anti-communist and anti-Russian
sentiment. The peasants hungered for land and
for release from the collective farms. A captured
Russian general, Andrei Vlasov, offered to raise an
army from prisoners of war to fight Stalin’s
Russia. But Hitler’s racist fanaticism stood in the
way of winning the war by these means. European
Russia was designated as colonial territory, eventually
to be depopulated as necessary to provide
room for the new German settlers. The Slavs were
‘subhumans’; nearly 3 million were sent to
Germany to work as slave labour. With the
Germans ransacking the Russian territories they
occupied, the early welcome that they received
turned to hatred. Partisan resistance increased
behind German lines and was met by ruthless
terror. Only too late in 1943 and 1944 did
Himmler try to change a German policy bound
to alienate the local population and to recruit for
the German army from among the minorities.
Meanwhile Stalin skilfully appealed to Russian
patriotism and encouraged all the peoples of the
Soviet republics to turn out the invaders.
Hitler tenaciously clung to one hope even when
surrounded in his bunker in burning Berlin in
April 1945, that the ‘unholy’ and unnatural
alliance between Britain, the US and the Soviet
Union would fall apart and that the Western
powers would recognise that he was fighting the
common Bolshevik enemy. Though Churchill,
more so than Roosevelt, foresaw that there would
be post-war conflict with the Soviet Union, his
conviction of the need to destroy the evils of
Nazism was unshakeable. The holding together of
the grand alliance was a precondition of victory.
Was this also Stalin’s perception of British
policy? Did Stalin, pathologically suspicious of the
motives of all possible enemies, have any faith in
Britain’s determination to fight Hitler’s Germany
to the finish? Despite Churchill’s immediate and
unqualified promise of support the moment the
Germans invaded Russia, suspicion of any antagonist
past, present or future was second nature to
Stalin. The continuing delays in the opening of a
second front in France through 1942, then 1943,
must have confirmed his fears that the reason for
delay was mainly political not military. He bitterly
complained to Churchill, charging him with
breaches of faith. He may well have concluded
that the West was deliberately prolonging the war
to weaken the Soviet Union in the bloodbath of
the eastern front in order to dictate the future
from a position of strength. The longer European
Russia remained in German hands, the more difficult
it would be to re-establish communist
autocracy over the non-Russian peoples. Hence it
became for Stalin almost a test of Britain’s good
faith that Russia’s right to its 1941 frontiers
should be accepted by Britain and the US and not
become a matter of negotiation after the war was
won. The 1941 frontiers included the additional
territory the Soviet Union had acquired as a result
of the deal struck with Nazi Germany: eastern
Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and northern
Bukovina, and also the territories taken from
Finland after the Soviet–Finnish War.
The British position at first was to reject any
frontier changes until after the war was over and
peace negotiations took place. Roosevelt, mindful
of his own Polish minority in America and of the
condemnation of the ‘secret deals’ of the First
World War, at first resisted even more firmly
European frontier discussions. But Churchill and
Eden were anxious to appease Stalin at a time
when the Red Army was bearing the brunt of the
war on land. An Anglo-Russian agreement for
jointly waging war against Germany had been
signed in Moscow on 12 July 1941; on 26 May
1942 it was replaced by a formal twenty-year
alliance. Churchill also responded courteously to
Stalin’s angry and wounding messages about the
lack of a second front. But there was much apprehension
in London that Stalin might lose confidence
in his Western allies and strike a deal with
Hitler. Everything was avoided that might add to
his suspicions. This had one important consequence.
Discussions with emissaries from the
German resistance, or with representatives sent by
Himmler’s SS to bargain over the lives of the
Hungarian Jews, were avoided for fear that they
would compromise Britain and lead Stalin to the
wrong conclusion that a separate peace was being
considered.
Among Hitler’s entourage were advisers and
allies who urged him to seek a separate peace with
the Soviet Union. But the struggle against the
Bolsheviks and Jews lay at the core of his ideology.
He rejected peace with his arch-enemies though
he admired Stalin’s ruthlessness. His barbarity in
Russia and the carrying through of the Final
Solution while the war was being lost militarily
show that ideology ultimately dominated Hitler’s
actions when Realpolitik would have served the
interests of the Third Reich. As for Stalin it is possible
that he welcomed the West’s belief that he
had an alternative to war with Germany for it
would make Britain and the US more willing to
accede to Russia’s military and political demands.
The question of the future of Poland was
the most difficult for Britain and the US to solve.
The Polish government in exile demanded that the
independence of its state be restored within the
frontiers of 1939, that is of pre-war Poland.
But Stalin had already annexed and incorporated
in the Soviet Union the portions of Poland
occupied in September 1939 and insisted on a
post-war Poland ‘friendly’ to the Soviet Union.
With the Red Army inevitably overrunning
Poland there was, in effect, little the US and
Britain could do to force Stalin to renounce territory
which he claimed as Soviet already. The
Polish government in exile in London was in a
hopeless situation. General Sikorski, who headed
the Polish government in exile in London, had at
first tried to work with the Russians. He had
signed an agreement for Russo-Polish cooperation
with Stalin in 1941 but, from the first, two
issues clouded Polish–Soviet relations: the question
of Poland’s eastern frontier and the thousands
of missing Polish officers who should have
re-emerged from Russian prisoner-of-war camps
after the 1941 agreement had been concluded.
The corpses of Polish officers found by the
Germans near Smolensk in the Katyn forest provided
a grisly explanation for their disappearance
and ruptured relations between the Polish government
and the Kremlin in April 1943. The
Russians formed their own Polish military units
and an embryonic rival Polish government, the
Union of Polish Patriots.
The fate of Poland was virtually decided at
the first summit conference when Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin met in Teheran in Persia
from 28 November to 1 December 1943. There
was no formal agreement, but Churchill agreed
on behalf of Britain, and Roosevelt personally
acquiesced too, to the Soviet Union’s retaining
eastern Poland as far as the Curzon Line (the
armistice line between Poland and Russia proposed
by the British foreign secretary Lord
Curzon in 1920) and that Poland should be
compensated with German territory east of the
rivers Oder and Neisse. At the Yalta Conference
more than a year later (4–11 February 1945),
with Poland by then overrun by the Red Army,
despite some ambiguities in the official declarations
Stalin secured his territorial ambitions at
Poland’s expense. For his part Stalin promised
that he would allow all the liberated peoples in
Eastern and central Europe to choose their own
governments freely and democratically. Power
had passed to a Polish provisional government
which was based in the Soviet Union and which
some ‘London’ Poles were permitted to join. At
Teheran and Yalta, military needs and realities, as
well as hopes for post-war cooperation, decided
Churchill and Roosevelt to accept Stalin’s
demands that Soviet conditions concerning the
future frontiers of Russia be met in all but formal
treaty form before the conclusion of the war.
Until 1945 there was little link between the
war waged in Europe and Africa and the war
waged by Japan, Britain, China and the US in
eastern and south-eastern Asia. The Soviet Union
was not a party to the Pacific war until shortly
before its end. Japan and the Soviet Union signed
a neutrality treaty in April 1941 and the two countries
remained at peace until Russia declared war
on Japan just one week before Japan’s surrender.
Roosevelt and Churchill never wavered from their
early determination after Japan’s attack on Pearl
Harbor in December 1941 that despite the military
disasters in eastern Asia the defeat of
Germany must come first. Japan’s victories came
as a tremendous shock to British and Dominion
public opinion. The Western empires of the
Dutch, French and British and the American hold
on the Philippines collapsed in just a few weeks
and the whole region fell for the first time under
the control of one power, Japan.
In Malaya, Britain had constructed the
Singapore naval base and Churchill had insisted
on sending to it two battleships, the Prince of
Wales and the Repulse, intending thereby to deter
the Japanese from going to war. In Malaya the
British commanded 89,000 troops, including
37,000 Indian, 19,000 British and 15,000
Australians. In the Dutch East Indies 35,000
Dutch regular troops were stationed. The
Americans had posted 31,000 regulars to the
Philippines. But the British, Dutch and American
troops were poorly equipped. Air defence in
particular was inadequate, which gave the
Japanese a decisive advantage. Almost immediately
after the outbreak of the war the Japanese
sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse from the
air. There were now no battleships left to oppose
them. The attack on Pearl Harbor had knocked
out the capacity of the US fleet to challenge
Japan’s offensive. The capture of Guam and Wake
Islands denied the US naval bases beyond Hawaii.
In Malaya the well-equipped and skilfully led
Japanese army began the invasion on 8 December
and, though only 60,800 in strength, overwhelmed
the British defence forces, which finally
capitulated in Singapore on 15 February 1942.
Some 62,000 troops under British command
surrendered, a stunning military defeat when
added to the shock provoked by the sinking
of the Repulse and Prince of Wales. The fall of
Singapore was also a great psychological blow
which undermined the faith of Asian peoples in
‘white’ superiority.
General Douglas MacArthur defended the
Philippines. The Japanese gained air control and
their invading army defeated the Americans, who
withdrew to the Bataan peninsula in January
1942; the Americans finally had to surrender their
last fortress defence on 9 April with 70,000
troops, a disaster comparable to Singapore, except
that the defence had been long drawn out and
skilfully conducted. Simultaneously with the invasion
of Malaya, another Japanese army crossed
from Thailand into Burma and by the end of April
had driven the weak British forces into India. The
Dutch East Indies were captured between January
and March 1942. Throughout these five months
of victorious campaigns the Japanese had suffered
only some 15,000 killed and wounded and
had taken more than ten times as many Allied
troops prisoner. The whole of south-east Asia had
fallen under Japanese domination.
British rule seemed to be threatened now at
the very heart of the empire, British India. The
position was regarded as sufficiently desperate for
the British Cabinet to send out Sir Stafford Cripps
with a promise to the leaders of the Indian
Congress Party that India would be granted independence
after the war. A constituent assembly
would be called to decide whether it would
remain within or outside the Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, during the war, the Congress Party
would be granted some participation in, but not
control of, government. Congress rejected the
proposals, partly because Cripps also offered to
the Muslim League the possibility of secession for
the predominantly Muslim parts of India (later
Pakistan). Gandhi, India’s greatest voice of nonviolent
opposition, now called on Britain simply
to ‘quit India’. He expected non-violence to
defeat Britain and Japan and to win India for the
385 million Indians. The viceroy of India reacted
with repression and arrested the Congress leaders
and Gandhi. India did not rise against the British,
and the Indian army fought under British
command against the Japanese. The Japanese also
created an Indian ‘liberation’ army from prisoners
of war mainly taken at Singapore and founded
the Indian Independence League. In 1943 an
Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose, expresident
of the Indian Congress, took over the
Indian ‘government’ operating with the Japanese.
Though Bose had a good deal of success among
Indians beyond British control, his impact within
India was limited and never threatened British
rule. The problem of Indian independence was
now shelved until the war was won.
Militarily the Japanese expansion in the Pacific
and south-east Asia was checked by the summer
of 1942. In the naval battle of the Coral Sea in
May 1942 Japan’s thrust towards Australia was
blunted when the Japanese attack on Port
Moresby in New Guinea was called off as a result
of the naval engagement. Far more serious for the
Japanese was the failure of their attack in June on
the American-held Midway Island. Admiral
Yamamoto was in overall command of the most
powerful fleet of battleships, aircraft carriers,
cruisers, destroyers and submarines the Japanese
had ever assembled. Its task was not only to cover
the Japanese landing force, but to destroy the
remaining US Pacific fleet. Yamamoto had separated
his fleet. It was a naval battle dominated by
the aircraft carriers on both sides. The Japanese
lost four of their eight carriers, the Americans
only one, before Yamamoto’s main fleet could
join the engagement. Yamamoto decided to break
off the battle and from then on had lost the initiative
in the Pacific. It was now certain that the
American war effort, once fully developed, would
overwhelm Japan eventually. Just as in Europe,
where Hitler’s Blitzkrieg had failed finally in
1942, so did Japan’s oriental Blitzkrieg now fail
in its purpose of forcing its principal enemies to
accept Japan’s claim to predominance in eastern
and southern Asia.
The American counter-offensive in the Pacific
began in August 1942 with the American attack
on the tiny Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal,
one of the Solomon group of islands. The fighting
between the American marines and the
defending Japanese was ferocious and casualties
on both sides were heavy, until the Americans
overwhelmed the fanatical defenders. This was to
become the pattern of the remorseless Pacific war
until Japan’s surrender.
The Japanese war with Britain, the Dominions
and the US brought relief to the Chinese, who
had been at war with the Japanese alone since
1937. Chiang Kai-shek now avoided active battles
with the Japanese as far as possible. His eyes were
firmly set on the future when, with the Anglo-
American defeat of the Japanese, he would gain
mastery over all China, including the communists,
his theoretical allies against Japan. Despite
the growing corruption of the Kuomintang and
the inefficiency of Chiang Kai-shek’s armies, the
US based its hopes for the future peace and
progress of eastern Asia on the emergence of a
strong and democratic Chinese Republic linked
in friendship to the US. Roosevelt did not wish
to see the restoration of the pre-war special rights
of Europe in China or the re-establishment of the
European empires in eastern Asia. In January
1945 he expressed his hopes to his secretary of
state that US policy:
was based on the belief that despite the temporary
weakness of China and the possibility of
revolutions and civil war, 450 million Chinese
would someday become united and modernised
and would be the most important
factor in the whole Far East.
The problem during the last two years of the
land war in Asia was to get Chiang Kai-shek’s
armies to put up any resistance at all to the
Japanese, who renewed their offensives and occupied
large new areas of eastern China in 1944.
The Japanese overran the American-built airfields
from which they had been bombed. Chiang Kaishek,
meanwhile, positioned half a million of his
best troops in the north to contain the communists
and was preserving his armies for a future
war of supremacy in China after the Western
powers had defeated Japan. Throughout 1944
the tension between Roosevelt and Chiang Kaishek
grew. Roosevelt had little faith in the
Chinese leader. He wished to force on him the
appointment of an American general to command
all the Chinese armies and to bring about effective
cooperation between the communists and the
Kuomintang against the Japanese. A China policy
that would reconcile China and serve America’s
global interests continued to elude the US.
During the course of 1943 the tide of war turned
decisively against Japan, Italy and Germany. The
enormous industrial resources of the US alone,
when fully mobilised for war, exceeded all that
Germany, Japan and their allies could produce
together. The Soviet Union and Russia were by
now more than a match for the military strength
Germany had built up in the east. It was only the
tenacity and skill of Germany’s armies, despite
Hitler’s disastrous interferences as at Stalingrad,
that enabled Germany to stave off defeat for so
long. Germany did not collapse even when the
ordinary man in the street knew the war was lost
and had no confidence left in Hitler’s promised
‘wonder’ weapons. They fought to the bitter end,
until Hitler had shot himself and the crushing
superiority of the Allied armies closing in from all
sides made further resistance a physical impossibility.
Until close to the end of the war, Hitler’s
regime could still successfully terrorise and kill
anyone who openly refused orders to fight to the
last. Equally important was German fear of
Russian conquest and occupation. Nazi propaganda
had successfully indoctrinated the German
people into believing that the Russian subhumans
from the east would destroy, loot and kill and that
it was better to die resisting than to fall into
Russian hands. Early experiences of the Russian
armies when they first invaded East Prussia
appeared to confirm this belief.
But a separate peace with the West, the principal
hope of those who had plotted against
Hitler during the later stages of the war, was not
a possibility. In practice the Western Allies could
follow no other policy than to demand that
Germany must surrender unconditionally on all
fronts simultaneously. The actual phrase ‘unconditional
surrender’ emerged during discussions
between Roosevelt and Churchill when they met
at Casablanca in January 1943 to coordinate and
agree on Anglo-American strategy. Roosevelt
gave it official public backing in speaking to the
press. It meant that Britain and the US would not
entertain any bargaining over peace terms with
Germany, Italy and Japan and would fight until
complete military victory had been achieved.
It has been argued that the call for unconditional
surrender made the enemies of the Allies
fight more fanatically to the bitter end and that
the war might have been shortened by a more flexible
Allied attitude. The evidence of Germany’s
and Italy’s behaviour in 1944 and 1945 does not
support this view. The Italians were able to overthrow
Mussolini and in fact negotiate their surrender,
whereas Hitler’s grasp over Germany
remained so complete, and his own attitude so
utterly uncompromising, that no negotiated peace
was possible short of Germany’s total collapse,
even if any of the Allies had desired to negotiate
for peace. The advantages of having proclaimed as
a war aim ‘unconditional surrender’ on the other
hand were solid. Allied differences on how to treat
a conquered Germany could be kept secret
since the Allied public had been satisfied by the
demand of ‘unconditional surrender’. Moreover,
Roosevelt and Churchill hoped that the call for
unconditional surrender would reassure Stalin in
the absence of an early second front. In January
1943 Britain’s and America’s military effort on
land did not compare with that of Russia, where
the final phase of the Stalingrad battle was raging.
Within the Grand Alliance, or United Nations
as all the countries fighting Germany came to be
called, there was an inner Anglo-American
alliance. A joint strategic body, the combined
chiefs of staff, was set up soon after Pearl Harbor
to provide a forum for debate on strategy and
eventual decision-making. Joint Anglo-American
commands were created as necessary. There are
no parallels in modern history of such close coordination
of policy as was achieved by the US and
Britain during the last three and a half war years.
It was based on the trust and working relationships
at the top between Roosevelt and Churchill.
Stalin would never have agreed to a joint
command, and the Soviet Union remained an
outsider fighting its own war with Germany,
which engaged in 1942 and 1943 two-thirds of
the total number of German divisions.
Joint Anglo-American planning bodies did not
mean, however, that there was perfect harmony.
The American military argued for a concentration
of all effort on the earliest possible cross-Channel
attack on France and so a blow at Germany’s
vitals. Churchill and his British military advisers
warned against any premature landings, which
might fail. Roosevelt, fearful in 1942 of the possibility
that the Soviet forces might collapse unless
some of the German forces were diverted, was
inclined to listen to Stalin’s appeals more sympathetically.
Churchill mollified Stalin, convincing
him that the projected landings in Vichy North
Africa were a genuine second front. The successful
completion of these operations in May 1943 was
too late to allow for a switching of resources necessary
to mount a cross-Channel attack in 1943.
Churchill argued in favour of a Mediterranean
strategy and attacking Italy, the ‘soft underbelly’
of the Axis. Churchill’s reasons were based on his
appraisal of military alternatives. The Germans
were weakest in the Mediterranean and if the
Allies carried the war into the Balkans then the
German armies would be trapped between them
and the Russians. The Allies, moreover, would be
able to link with Tito’s Yugoslav partisans. The
Americans wanted to concentrate all forces on an
attack on France, but agreed that the North
African forces could be used to invade Sicily next.
The rapid fall of Sicily to the Anglo-American
forces in July 1943 marked the end of Mussolini’s
hold on power. The fascist leaders and King
Victor Emmanuel could see the writing on the
wall. The way out for Italy was to jettison the
German alliance and to change sides if possible.
Military defeat and the imminent invasion of Italy
had weakened Mussolini’s position sufficiently to
make it possible to overthrow him. The duce was
dismissed from his office not by a popular revolution
but by the king and his fascist collaborators
on 24 and 25 July 1943. He was then
imprisoned until rescued by the Germans. The
king appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio as
Mussolini’s successor. But Badoglio and the
fascist leaders failed to save Italy from becoming
a battleground. Despite the promise to continue
the war, German suspicions were aroused and
reinforcements were sent to Italy. The new
regime held secret negotiations with the Allies,
but did not persuade them to land in northern
Italy to enable the Italians to avoid a German
occupation. The Anglo-American plan envisaged
occupying only southern Italy. This made it possible
for the Germans to seize the remainder of
Italy when Italy’s surrender was made public on
8 September 1943. Naples was reached by the
Allies on 1 October. The Germans by then had
established a strong defensive line across the
Italian peninsula. The king and the Italian government
fled south behind the Allied lines and
then declared war on Germany, while Hitler
restored Mussolini to act as a puppet dictator over
the republic he had proclaimed. Until the close
of the war in May 1945, the Allied armies had to
fight their way gradually north, piercing heavily
fortified lines which the Germans created in their
path. Meanwhile, a guerrilla war was fought in the
north by the partisans, whose aim was not only
to drive out the Germans but also to bring about
radical social change in Italy.
Mussolini did not survive the military defeat
of his ally. Captured by Italian partisans, he,
together with his mistress, was hanged in public
by them. The Italian campaign did not prove to
be a rapid success and entailed some of the heaviest
fighting of the war. But Hitler’s decision to
defend Italy and so keep the Allies as far as possible
away from south Germany diverted many
divisions to its defence and to the defence of the
Balkans, which had become vulnerable.
While in July 1943 the British and American
armies invaded Sicily, the largest tank battle of the
war was being waged at Kursk on the Russian
front. The German attack on the Russian salient
was beaten back by Marshal Zhukov. It was the
last occasion on which the Germans were able to
mount a major offensive in Russia. Both sides suffered
huge casualties, but the Russian armour had
proved superior and the Russians, unlike the
Germans, could make good such losses. Successive
Russian offensives drove the German armies back
in heavy fighting into Poland, but they halted the
Russians on the River Vistula. The Warsaw rising
(1 August–2 October 1944) did not induce the
Red Army at all costs to reach the Polish capital.
In mid-September Russian attempts to advance
were repelled by the Germans, who remained in
control of Warsaw until the end of the year.
Further south, Russian armies advanced from the
Ukraine into Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and
Hungary. As in Italy, new governments attempted
to change from the German to the Russian side.
But the Germans were still strong enough to
remove the Hungarian Regent Admiral Horthy
from power and to make a stand against the
Russian armies. Budapest did not surrender to the
Russians until February 1945. But Hitler could no
longer in 1944 place the bulk of his armies to
defend the eastern front.
On 6 June 1944 under General Dwight
Eisenhower’s supreme command the successful
cross-Channel invasion of France began. The
tremendous obstacles to this enterprise had been
overcome by meticulous planning and brilliant
execution. Beaches and bases were won and by
the end of July 1944 1.5 million men had been
landed in France. After the battle of Normandy,
Paris was taken on 25 August and the German
troops were pursued as they retreated from
France. A landing in southern France against the
depleted German forces there enabled the Allies
rapidly to liberate most of France. The Allies
reached the southern Netherlands and the northern
Franco-German frontier between Aachen and
Trier in September.
Meanwhile Hitler had launched his promised
wonder weapons, the pilotless aircraft-bomb, the
V-1, and the missile bomb, V-2, against London.
The attacks by these new weapons on London
and Antwerp in the summer and autumn of 1944
did much damage but could not alter the course
of the war. The last of these ingenious bombs hit
Antwerp in March 1945.
One problem that could not wait any longer for
solution was who was to be recognised as representing
the free government of France. There
could be no question that Pétain’s Vichy regime
had forfeited all its claims by collaborating with
the Germans. Of all the countries that had been
overrun by the Germans, France was the only
indubitable pre-war great power. Yet ironically it
was the one ally not represented by a government
in exile in London. The Free French, who had
rallied to General de Gaulle in 1940 and formed
their own administration in London, were recognised
only as the French Committee of National
Liberation. De Gaulle felt his inferior status
deeply. But his status corresponded to reality in
that the majority of people in France and in the
French Empire accepted Pétain’s authority. Not
that this would have stopped the British and
Americans in wartime from according recognition
to de Gaulle. Expediency, however, persuaded
them not to challenge Vichy France openly. A
powerful French fleet after all was still in Vichy
hands in 1942. When the Allies made their North
African landings in November 1942, Operation
Torch, it was with the Vichy authorities there that
secret negotiations were conducted to avoid the
hostility of the French army units stationed there.
Admiral Darlan, who happened to be in Algiers,
decided to support the Americans. Soon after that
he was assassinated. De Gaulle was regarded as
something of an embarrassment; but despite
Allied intrigues he succeeded in reasserting his
leadership over all the Free French.
Roosevelt was particularly averse to committing
himself to de Gaulle, who reacted by asserting
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 incongruous.
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 rankled
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 frustrated
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 practically
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 division
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 agreement
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 government
including communists was formed in
that country. British troops who landed in Greece
soon found themselves fighting the communistorganised
partisans. The uneasy peace established
by the British force was to be shattered two years
later in 1947 by civil war. Despite Stalin’s promises
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
was won. A division of Europe was emerging
between the Soviet-controlled territory of eastern,
central and south-eastern Europe and the West.
Roosevelt’s hope of achieving some solid
understanding between the three world powers,
Britain, the Soviet Union and the US, was
severely tested by Soviet behaviour in 1944 and
1945. He pinned his hopes on creating a new
international organisation – the United Nations –
under the tutelage and based on the agreement
of Britain, the Soviet Union and the US. But
Stalin was making unreasonable demands. All
sixteen Soviet republics were to be among the
founder members of the United Nations. He also
insisted that the six permanent members of the
proposed council of the United Nations should
be able to exercise an all-inclusive veto, that is to
say, have the right to a veto when disputes were
being dealt with in which they themselves were
involved. The Dumbarton Oaks Conference,
which had met to organise the United Nations,
thus, ended in September 1944 without agreement
on these vital issues. What was seen as
Stalin’s intransigence brought the US and Britain
more closely together.
In Quebec, Churchill and Roosevelt met that
same month, September 1944, to devise their
joint military and political strategy. Plans were
made to move troops from Italy into Istria and
Austria ahead of Russian troops. To help Britain
economically, Roosevelt also agreed to continue
Lend-Lease during the time that would elapse
between the defeat of Germany and the defeat of
Japan. Britain’s likely post-war economic weakness
was thus foreshadowed: Britain would not
remain an equal superpower with the US and the
Soviet Union. Britain and the US next agreed to
cooperate in the military and civilian development
of atomic energy and, significantly, to exclude the
Soviet Union from sharing this information.
The future of Germany was another subject
of primary importance discussed at Quebec.
Roosevelt’s advisers had prepared both a ‘soft’
plan for peace terms and the famous plan associated
with the name of the secretary of the treasury,
Henry Morgenthau, which intended to
deprive Germany of its major industries, reduce
the German standard of living and turn it into an
agricultural country. At first Churchill was violently
opposed to this ‘hard’ option. It would too
clearly be repeating the error of the First World
War. A prosperous Europe could not develop
without German economic recovery. But in
return for concessions for the continuation of
American economic aid to Britain he finally
assented to ‘converting Germany into a country
primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character’.
What were Roosevelt’s motives in advocating
a course that would have been so disastrous
for European recovery? He spoke of punishing
the German people for their wars of aggression;
more important to him was to win Stalin’s cooperation
by reassuring the Soviet leader that the
Western Allies would not try to rebuild Germany
as a bulwark against Russia. In the autumn of
1944 Roosevelt’s hand was strengthened by his
re-election as president. He would not have to
enter peace negotiations without the certainty of
public support as Wilson had done in 1919.
At Yalta in February 1945 Stalin, Roosevelt and
Churchill finally met together again for the first
time since Teheran. Roosevelt and Churchill
arrived with some 700 officials. The photograph
of the three leaders in front of the tsarist Livadia
Palace implied an equality that did not exist.
Roosevelt as a head of state was seated in the centre
flanked on his left by Stalin and on his right by
Churchill. Roosevelt’s exhaustion and illness were
plain to see, a shocking transformation from the
confident president pictured only fifteen months
earlier at Teheran. He was in a hurry and wanted
the conference to be quickly over. He telegraphed
to Churchill that it ought not to last more than
five or six days. Churchill replied, ‘Even the
Almighty took seven.’ In the event it lasted eight
days from 4 to 11 February 1945.
Roosevelt was determined to come to terms
with the Soviet leader and saw in Churchill almost
as great an obstacle to establishing a good postwar
partnership between them as Stalin himself.
He had been reluctant to meet Churchill in Malta
before flying on to the Crimea for fear that Uncle
Joe would interpret this as the Anglo-Saxons
ganging up on him. The peaceful future of the
world rested, as Roosevelt saw it, on a good
Soviet–American understanding founded on
trust. He regarded Churchill’s ‘Victorian’ imperialism
and his lifelong anti-communism as outdated
in the post-war world.
As for Churchill, he felt keenly on the eve of
Germany’s defeat that Europe was in danger from
the overbearing, immensely powerful Russian
bear. He was looking to a less rosy future than
Roosevelt was, in a world in which a United
Nations organisation could no more be relied
upon to preserve peace with justice than the
League of Nations had been. He wanted to dilute
the bilateral relationship between the US and
Russia that Roosevelt was trying to establish.
Conscious of Britain’s comparative weakness,
Churchill tried to bring in another European ally,
France. He failed. De Gaulle was not invited and
would henceforth refer to the Yalta carve-up with
bitterness and blame the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ for it.
The only concession Churchill did win, finally
gaining Roosevelt’s support for it, was to secure
for France participation on the Allied Control
Commission for Germany, which was to coordinate
Allied rule over the defeated Reich. France
would thus have its own occupation zone and its
own sector in Berlin. On reparations there was an
acceptance that the Soviet Union had a special
claim but the final amount was left to a commission
to propose. Perhaps the most significant thing
about Yalta was what was not discussed and
agreed. The question of Germany’s future was
really shelved. Churchill and Roosevelt had moved
away from turning Germany into a ‘pastoral’ country.
The dismemberment of Germany was not now
determined. The destitute plight of the Germans,
so Stalin may well have calculated, would strengthen
communism throughout Germany. To gain
material ends, he was ready to make promises that
would appear as major concessions. He agreed to
modify the Soviet stand on the organisation of the
United Nations, whose success was closest to
Roosevelt’s heart. But Roosevelt had incautiously
told him that American troops would be withdrawn
from Europe within two years. Stalin therefore
knew that he had only to wait until 1947; no
military threat would then be able to stop him
from doing whatever he then deemed to be in the
Soviet interest.
The debate about Poland occupied much of
the conference and was the most vexed. History
did not have the same meaning for Churchill,
Roosevelt and Stalin. Stalin looked at the frontiers
of post-Versailles Europe through different
eyes. For the West, 1937 was the last year that
was ‘normal’, when the political geography of
Europe reflected the peace settlements reached
after the First World War. After 1937, Hitler first
blackmailed the West and then redrew the map
of Europe by force. For Russia, international
injustice pre-dated Hitler and had occurred after
it had lost the war in 1917. The settlement then
of the post-1918 Versailles era represented the
humiliating acceptance of the superior force of
the capitalist West at a time of Soviet weakness.
From its own perspective, the Soviet Union
had simply not in its infancy had the necessary
strength to regain Russia’s ‘just’ frontiers. And so
it had to acquiesce in the detaching of the Baltic
provinces, which became independent states –
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Large territories
were also carved out of what was formerly imperial
Russia to create the Polish state, which
included many Ukrainians and White Russians.
Bessarabia was detached and added to Romania.
As Stalin saw it, the frontiers of 1918–20 were
those imposed on Russia; they were neither ‘just’
nor settled. He took advantage of the war
between Germany, Poland, Britain and France in
1939–40 to put right what he believed were past
wrongs by first making deals with Hitler. By
1941, with the absorption of eastern Poland, the
three Baltic states and Bessarabia, Russia had
regained most of its ‘historic’ frontiers. Stalin
claimed that the Russian frontiers of 1941 should
be regarded as the settled ones and not those of
1921 or 1937; he was prepared to consider only
minor concessions. With remarkable consistency,
he took his stand on this issue in discussions and
negotiations with his Western allies from the earliest
to the last months of the war.
The Czechs in 1943 had arranged their own
settlement over the frontiers and future government
of their country. Benesˇ, head of the exiled
government in London, after the Munich experience
of 1938 was not prepared to rely on Western
support again. He did not allow a confrontati
to develop between the communist-led Moscow
Czechs and the London Western-oriented Czechs
and accepted Soviet conditions and loss of territory.
But the Poles in London had not made their
peace with Moscow. On the contrary, relations
between the Polish government in exile and
Moscow were little short of outright hostility, and
had been aggravated by the establishment in
Lublin of a communist-dominated provisional
government.
Beyond Russia’s frontiers the smaller nations
in an arc from the Baltic to the Balkans had
recently acted, in Stalin’s view, as the springboard
of aggression from the West against the Soviet
Union. He insisted to Roosevelt and Churchill
that they must not be allowed again to serve as
hostile bridges to the heart of Russia. Soviet security,
he emphasised, would depend on guarantees
that they would be ‘friendly’ to the Soviet Union
and would act in cooperation with it. What,
however, did ‘friendly’ mean? To Stalin it meant
that they could not remain capitalist, with anti-
Russian governments based on the kind of society
that had existed before the war; only societies
transformed by a social revolution would be
‘friendly’ in the long term. The Western leaders
rejected this link between the social and economic
composition of the Soviet Union’s neighbours
and its own security. They in turn insisted on free
elections, meaning that the people of the nations
in question should be allowed to choose the kind
of government and society they desired.
The prospect of reconciling these opposite
views was slight. From Stalin’s point of view the
West had no business to dictate the social and
political reconstruction of Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Romania, Bulgaria or Hungary, any more than he
himself wished to dictate the shape which the societies
and politics of France, Italy, Belgium and the
Netherlands should take. In these countries,
Moscow had instructed the communist parties to
work constructively in coalitions dominated by
non-communists. He expected a quid pro quo.
The West saw the issue in simple terms of democracy
and self-determination.
For the Polish government in London the relationship
with the Soviet Union was one of understandable
enmity. The Russians had invaded
Poland in September 1939 and now were annexing
a large part of eastern Poland. The mass
graves of 4,421 Polish officers, shot in the back
of the head by the Russians, had been discovered
in 1943 in the forests of Katyn by German occupying
forces and exploited by Joseph Goebbels
for Nazi propaganda purposes. This unforgettable
atrocity tormented Polish–Soviet relations.
During the Second World War, Poland had been
the conquered nation which, with Russia, had
endured the most. Should it also become the
nation that would now be made to suffer the consequences
of victory? Britain and the US agreed
at Yalta to accept the Curzon Line, with some
deviations, as Poland’s eastern frontier, thus
giving a third of its pre-war territory to the Soviet
Union. This, the London Polish government felt,
was a betrayal. Churchill and Roosevelt had been
driven to the reluctant conclusion that they had
no realistic alternative. The Red Army occupied
Poland and could not be forced to withdraw
unless the Anglo-American armies were prepared
to fight. Stalin for his part was well aware of the
bitterness of the Polish government in London,
which constituted an obvious danger to the
Polish settlement he had in mind. The Poles were
traditionally anti-Russian. They would not be
allowed to assert their freedom at Russia’s
expense.
The major tussle was over the western boundary
of Poland. Stalin had promised the communist
Lublin government that the frontier would be
marked by the western Neisse. It was agreed that
Poland would receive Pomerania and the larger
half of East Prussia. Churchill and Roosevelt held
out for the eastern Neisse, which would not have
assigned the whole of Silesia to Poland in addition.
This question was left open to be settled
later. These territories were only to be ‘administered’
by Poland until the conclusion of a final
peace treaty with Germany.
Despite these calculations Stalin signed the
Declaration on Liberated Europe at Yalta. According
to its provisions the Allies would act as
trustees, reaffirming the principle of the Atlantic
Charter – the right of all peoples to choose the
form of government under which they would live
– and ensuring the restoration of sovereign rights
and self-government to those peoples who had
been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor
nations. Interim governments representing all
democratic elements were to be set up, followed
later by governments established ‘through free
elections’. This apparently unambiguous undertaking
was ambiguous after all because it permitted
only ‘democratic and anti-Nazi parties’ to put
up candidates. The Soviet Union twisted this to
suit its own purpose of securing communistdominated
governments.
Churchill and Roosevelt wanted more specific
arrangements for Poland to ensure that the Lublin
provisional government, subservient to Moscow,
would be replaced by a broad coalition, including
exiled Polish leaders from the London-based government.
The British and American ambassadors
in Moscow, together with the Soviet foreign minister
Vyacheslav Molotov, were to facilitate negotiations
between the rival Polish governments in
Lublin and London. Once a unified provisional
government had been established, free elections
were to be held. The suspicious Stalin had agreed
to this for the sake of Allied unity before the final
defeat of Germany. As the Red Army was in occupation
of Poland he held all the cards and believed
that there were enough loopholes in the Yalta
agreement to ensure Soviet control in reality. For
the Soviet Union an independent Poland in the
post-war world was likely to be a hostile Poland,
so its future was, for Stalin, a critical issue. Yalta
had only papered over the cracks between West
and East.
One reason why Roosevelt had been conciliatory
in dealing with Stalin, frequently isolating
Churchill, was his anxiety to secure Soviet help
against the large Japanese armies deployed in
China and in the Japanese home islands. The
future of the atom bomb was still in doubt.
Roosevelt told Stalin nothing about the progress
that had been made. Actually, through agents,
Stalin was already well informed. But it still
appeared likely in February 1945 that the defeat
of Japan would require bitter fighting, culminating
in the invasion of mainland Japan, fanatically
defended by the Japanese. Stalin at Yalta agreed
to the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific war
two or three months after the defeat of Germany,
but he named his price. With American lives at
stake, Roosevelt did not allow anti-imperialist
sentiments to stand in the way. Stalin demanded
that Japan should relinquish southern Sakhalin
and the Kurile Islands and that China should
concede the warm-water port of Dairen and use
of the Manchurian railway. The former imperial
rights that tsarist Russia had enjoyed in China
before 1904 were to be restored to the Soviet
Union. The Chinese were not consulted, though
in one part of their secret agreement it was stated
that Chiang Kai-shek’s consent was to be secured;
but elsewhere, inconsistently, another paragraph
was included: ‘The Heads of the three Great
Powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet
Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after
Japan has been defeated.’ Stalin also promised to
support efforts to bring about the cooperation
of the Chinese Nationalists and the communists.
For him this had the advantage of preventing
the far more numerous Nationalists from simply
attempting to wipe out the communists once the
war with Japan was over.
Although Roosevelt had conceded Soviet predominance
in Manchuria, he believed he had
done his best to strengthen the post-war position
of a weak China and that he had reduced the risk
of civil war. The actual consequences of his
diplomacy turned out differently and Harry S.
Truman, his successor, did not welcome the lastminute
Soviet declaration of war on Japan.
Roosevelt in public spoke of Yalta as a triumph
and a new beginning that would see the replacing
of alliances and spheres of influence by the
new international organisation of the United
Nations. In private he was far more doubtful
whether Stalin would fulfil what he had promised.
But the war against Japan was still to be won and
in the new year of 1945 he would contemplate
no confrontation with the Soviet Union in
Eastern or central Europe. Cooperation with
Russia was possible, he believed, but he was at
one with Churchill in concluding that firmness
in dealing with Stalin was equally necessary.
Roosevelt was not duped by Stalin but he could
see no peaceful future unless coexistence could
somehow be made to work. It was best to express
confidence rather than misgivings.
Churchill’s conscience was troubled by the
Yalta agreement, which had once again partitioned
a brave wartime ally, Poland. The shadow of
appeasement, of Munich and Czechoslovakia lay
not far behind and there was discontent in the
House of Commons where a hard core of votes
were cast against what had been concluded at
Yalta. Poland was potentially damaging politically,
a sensitive spot for Churchill at home. Internationally
that spring of 1945, with the defeat of
Germany in sight, his apprehensions also grew, as
he contemplated a prostrate Western Europe and
Britain being left to face the Soviets alone. The
Americans, he feared, would withdraw to concentrate
on the war in the Pacific. At Yalta, he had not
been able to influence the outcome as the third
and equal partner, because Roosevelt and Stalin
had negotiated directly with each other. The
Soviets had secretly agreed to help defeat Japan so
it was tempting, especially for the Americans, to
appease the Soviet Union in Europe. In the war
theatre, General Eisenhower also appeared too
trusting of the Russians, ready to concert military
strategy with his Soviet counterparts, rather than
to occupy as much of northern Germany as could
be captured and then to drive on to Berlin, as
Churchill urged in March 1945.
Stalin meanwhile was accusing the West of
secretly arranging for the German armies to stop
fighting on the western front while they continued
to resist the Russians ferociously all along the
eastern battle zones. This was indeed partially
true. The German forces were disintegrating in
the West, with many soldiers deserting. Cities and
towns surrendered to Anglo-American forces, disobeying
Hitler’s senseless orders to fight to the
last, and the German high command would have
liked to reach a separate military surrender in the
West. This was rejected. This did not mean that
Churchill was complacent about the threat he
discerned from the Soviet advance deep into
Western Europe.
Churchill kept up a barrage of warnings in
telegrams to Roosevelt. He urged that Stalin
be treated firmly and made to adhere to the
Yalta engagements. Churchill cabled Roosevelt,
‘Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose
her freedom?’ For Roosevelt, too, the Poles were
a sensitive domestic political issue: there were 6
million Americans of Polish descent in the US.
But at the time he was anxious to secure Soviet
cooperation to found the United Nations. He was
therefore inclined to more conciliatory tactics to
avoid alienating Stalin and so jeopardising his
vision of a new world order. He also wanted to
make sure of the promised Soviet help against
Japan. Nevertheless, he joined Churchill in firm
appeals to Stalin.
On 12 April 1945 Roosevelt suffered a stroke
so severe that he died shortly afterwards. He had
responded with a growing sense of urgency to
the threat posed by the totalitarian states. He
recognised that freedom and democracy were
being endangered throughout the world. His
‘Quarantine’ speech in 1937 had marked an
important stage in his realisation that domestic
problems at home would have to take second
place to world problems. Working within the
context of an overwhelming isolationist sentiment,
Roosevelt had provided the indispensable,
if at times devious, leadership which placed on the
American people the burden of accepting the role
of the US as a superpower. In his post-war plans
he worked for Soviet–American understanding,
and for the creation of a viable United Nations
organisation. He placed the US on the side of
independence for the peoples of Asia, including
the dismantling of the European empires.
He pinned his hopes on China achieving unity
and stability. In Western Europe he was ready
to provide American support to bring about a
recovery that would enable these liberated
nations, together with Britain, to safeguard their
own freedoms. But he was under no illusions that
all this had already actually been achieved. The
behaviour of Stalin’s Russia filled him with
anxiety, yet it was an anxiety not without hope
for the future. For all his limitations, Roosevelt’s
contribution to the reorientation of America’s
vision of its responsibilities in the world was all
important. The news of his death came as a shock
to the world. A half-crazed Hitler buried in his
Berlin bunker saw it as the miracle that might save
his Reich from defeat. By then the final offensives
in the east and west were striking into the heart
of Germany.
In March 1945 the American and British
armies crossed the Rhine. During April they
passed well beyond the military demarcation
zones agreed at Yalta. Suspicion of Russian intentions
was high and Churchill urged that the
Anglo-American forces should withdraw only
when the Russians had fulfilled their undertakings.
It had been agreed that Berlin, although
deep within the Russian zone of Germany, should
be occupied jointly by the US, Britain and the
Soviet Union, as well as France. But would the
Soviets, once they had taken Berlin, honour their
obligations?
The final Soviet offensives began in January
1945. Hitler ordered fanatical resistance on all
fronts and the adoption of a ‘scorched earth’ policy.
If Germany were not victorious, he concluded,
the German people had not proved themselves
worthy of the ideals of the Aryan race. He thus
condemned Germany to senseless destruction.
With Goebbels and Bormann at his side, he issued
streams of orders from his underground headquarters
in Berlin. But his orders were no longer
unquestioningly obeyed. Armaments Minister
Albert Speer attempted to prevent Germany’s
industry from being totally destroyed. He was
looking beyond Hitler and defeat to Germany’s
recovery. Himmler tried to save his neck by seeking
to negotiate an end to the war. Göring, who
was in southern Germany, fancied himself as
Hitler’s successor, but an angry Hitler ordered the
field marshal’s arrest. The Reich ended in intrigue,
ruins, bloodshed and shabby farce. Hitler concluded
his life marrying his mistress, and on 30
April they both committed suicide. Goebbels and
his wife then killed themselves with all their children.
On 2 May Berlin surrendered to Soviet
troops. Despite Germany’s rapid disintegration,
Admiral Karl Dönitz, nominated by Hitler as new
leader of the Reich, took over as head of state,
observing legal niceties. He even formed a new
‘government’. It lasted but a few days. On 7 May
Germany unconditionally surrendered on all
fronts. Britain and the US now confronted the
Soviet Union amid the ruins of continental
Europe. Thus began a new era of international
realities and conflict.
The sudden death of Roosevelt was a great blow
for Churchill. While the prime minister’s influence
over the peace settlements had diminished,
his special relationship with Roosevelt, an old
friendship and appeals to past loyalties still
counted for something. But would the new inexperienced
president listen to the advice of the
elder statesman, as Churchill now directed his
warnings about Russia to Truman? He sent a
cable to Truman expressing his foreboding that
an ‘iron curtain is being drawn down on their
front’, his first use of this phrase, which was to
become famous later when he uttered it in public
at Fulton in March 1946. He wanted Truman to
come to London to coordinate a showdown with
Stalin at a new conference. Truman rejected the
idea as signalling to Stalin that the Anglo-
Americans were ganging up against him.
Churchill further urged Truman to delay
implementing the agreements reached on the
respective occupation zones of Germany and not
to withdraw the Allied forces which held territory
deep in the zone assigned to the Soviet Union. It
would be a bargaining counter and at least force
the Russians to relinquish control over the whole
of Berlin. But Truman was his own man. He was
not enamoured of the Russians, to put it mildly,
yet he was determined to honour previous agreements,
so that he could hold Stalin, so he
thought, to what the Russians had undertaken. If
Churchill had prevailed, the Cold War would
have begun earlier, more of Germany would have
been kept out of the Soviet sphere, and the West
would not have become entangled in Berlin;
alternatively, Stalin would have had to give way
in central Europe. But a major difficulty of standing
up to the Russians at this early date was public
opinion in the West, where an unbounded admiration
was felt for the Red Army, which had
played the major role on land in the defeat of the
Wehrmacht.
Far from coordinating policy with Churchill,
Truman sought a direct Soviet–American understanding
on all the issues not settled at Yalta, to
which end he sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow in
May 1945. Churchill was upset by this move,
which left Britain out in the cold. He was anxious
to secure settlements with the Soviet Union concerning
frontiers and spheres of influence before
the British and American armies on the continent
had been demobilised, for he feared that if such
settlements were delayed the Russians would be
able to do what they wanted. Truman and his
advisers were more anxious to establish the
United Nations as an institution that would
ensure peace and solve all future world problems.
It was a case of realism versus idealism.
The conference to negotiate the United
Nations Charter convened in San Francisco on 25
April 1945. The Americans feared that the UN
would be stillborn unless Russian cooperation
could be won. The problem of how the veto
would operate on the Security Council had not
finally been settled at Yalta, and Molotov’s widening
of its application was creating difficulties. It
was common ground that the five permanent
members – the US, the Soviet Union, Britain,
France and China – could veto any action; the
dispute was about whether the veto also applied
to a discussion, an examination or a recommendation
concerning an issue brought before the
Security Council. If it did, any one of the permanent
members could stop a dispute from even
being considered. The Russian attitude, however,
was understandable given that the West looked
like enjoying a permanent majority in the General
Assembly. In addition the question of whether
any government could represent Poland raised
the unsolved Polish question once more.
It was to straighten out these and other differences
that Truman sent Hopkins to Moscow in
May. At their meetings, Stalin cleverly tried to
drive a wedge between the US and Britain, while
Hopkins listened sympathetically. Stalin certainly
got the better of the bargain. His concession that
the Polish government would be widened by the
admission of some of the London Polish leaders
still left the communists in a dominant position.
Hopkins meanwhile accepted as sincere Stalin’s
promise not to interfere in Polish affairs, especially
during the holding of ‘free elections’, and to
show respect for individual rights and liberties.
Yet when Stalin refused to release Poles he had
arrested for what he described as ‘diversionist’
activities, the reality behind the words became
only too clear. Hopkins was also anxious to gain
confirmation of the secret agreement concerning
the Far East reached at Yalta. Stalin promised to
attack the Japanese on 8 August 1945 and to
respect Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria. On the
veto issue which was blocking progress on the
UN Charter, Stalin made genuine concessions
and the final agreements reached in San Francisco
represented a complicated compromise of the
American and Soviet view. It made possible the
completion of negotiations for the Charter on 25
June 1945.
Hopkins returned from his mission in early
June, with the way now clear for the summit
meeting in Potsdam. Truman’s idea that he
should meet Stalin alone before being joined by
the British prime minister was angrily rejected by
Churchill, who was adamant that he was not ‘prepared
to attend a meeting which was a continuation
of a conference between yourself and
Marshal Stalin’. He insisted on a simultaneous
meeting on equal terms.
The Potsdam Conference was the final conference,
and the longest, of the Grand Alliance. It
lasted from 17 July to 2 August 1945, forming a
bridge between the world at war and the coming
peace. Churchill had hoped Britain would recapture
its lost influence, that the inexperienced new
president would listen to the elder statesman. De
Gaulle was again snubbed; although France was
to become a member of the Control Commission
for Germany, French representatives were not
invited to join in discussions over Germany.
Agreement was reached on many post-war issues,
especially the Allied treatment of Germany, but
suspicion between the Allies had grown. The military
necessity of holding together was gone. The
relationship between East and West lacked trust
and, in the personal contact between the big
three, Churchill, later Clement Attlee, Truman
and Stalin, the old sense of comradeship was
lacking. Despite the rounds of dinners and receptions,
there was a palpable absence of warmth.
Averell Harriman, US ambassador in Moscow,
tried to make a friendly remark to Stalin at
Potsdam: ‘Marshal, you must be very proud now
to be in Berlin.’ He received the rather disconcerting
reply, ‘Tsar Alexander got to Paris’.
Distrust was to widen as the agreements reached
at Potsdam were broken. The West accused the
Soviet Union of bad faith; this made little impression
on Stalin, who faced the enormous task of
rebuilding the Soviet Union and tightening the
dictatorial reins once more so that his regime
would survive the capitalist external threat which
he perceived.
Stalin did not trust the West and the West did
not trust him. That was very clearly shown by the
fact that Britain and the US had been building
the atomic bomb in great secrecy, without sharing
their knowledge with their Soviet ally during
the war. The Russians, too, had been secretly
engaged on making a bomb, but the Americans
got there first. After hearing that an experimental
bomb had been successfully tested in New
Mexico on 16 July, Truman obliquely referred to
this success in talking to Stalin, without specifically
mentioning that an atomic bomb would soon
be dropped on Hiroshima. Stalin did not betray
his anxiety that the US had tilted the balance of
power in its favour. Churchill was elated. The
atomic bomb would redress the balance: despite
the strength of the Red Army, Stalin no longer
had all the cards in his hands. After Stalin had
returned to the Kremlin, he ordered Soviet
scientists to redouble their efforts to make a
Soviet atomic bomb. Now that the world knew it
could be done, the basic obstacles were more
industrial than scientific, the difficulty of extracting
the fissionable materials. Klaus Fuchs helped
the Soviet scientists to reach their goal in
1949, but they would no doubt have solved the
problems, without him, albeit later.
On the whole Stalin could be well satisfied
with the outcome of the conference at Potsdam.
Churchill did not stay to the end. He returned to
be in London when the outcome of the general
election was announced. He was replaced on 28
July in Potsdam by Clement Attlee and the
redoubtable Ernest Bevin, the new foreign
secretary, who in the last days of the conference
conducted most of the negotiations for Britain.
Truman also left most of the critical bargaining
to his secretary of state James Byrnes. The Polish
issue once more proved highly contentious. There
was much argument about Poland’s western frontier.
To the end Stalin insisted on the western
Neisse, facing the West with a fait accompli. Bevin
and Byrnes had to accept this but did so with the
proviso that these German territories were only to
be ‘administered’ by Poland and a final settlement
of the western frontier would have to await the
signature of the peace treaty with Germany. In
fact, the provisional was to prove permanent.
The Polish agreement was part of a deal
whereby the Soviet Union reluctantly accepted
the American proposal on reparations. From a
reparations point of view, Stalin had wanted to
have Germany treated as a whole so that he could
participate in spoils from the West and the industrial
Ruhr as well as take away all that could be
moved from the Soviet zone. But he had to be sat-
isfied with a formula that left each of the occupying
powers to take reparations from its own zone.
The reparation claims of Poland, too, would have
to be met from the Soviet share. In addition, the
Soviet Union would receive 10 per cent of industrial
capital equipment taken as reparations by the
West and a further 15 per cent in exchange for
food and raw materials from the east. The agreement
soon led to bitter recriminations.
Stalin did better on the question of the reconstituted
Polish government. The London Poles
were pressurised into accepting a settlement that
incorporated some London ministers in the
communist-dominated government in Warsaw.
Poland would not emerge again from communist
rule and Soviet domination for two generations.
The redrawing of Poland’s frontiers only ratified
what had already happened on the human
level. Millions of Poles moved west to the Polish
side of the Curzon Line. Millions of Germans,
too, had fled westward from the Red Army and
the Polish forces, as well as from the German
territories now under Polish rule and from the
Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia. Young and old
were driven out with only the possessions they
could carry. The Russians, Poles and Czechs, after
the way they had been treated under Nazi occupation,
were now indifferent to the suffering of
the Germans. Retribution fell on guilty and innocent
alike and many Germans perished from the
hardships of migration. When, at Potsdam, the
Allies recorded their agreement that the ‘transfer’
of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and
Hungary should be carried out ‘in an orderly and
humane manner’, the West was therefore doing
no more than expressing a pious hope largely after
the event.
A central issue at Potsdam was the need to
reach agreement on the treatment of Germany.
The idea of dividing Germany into a number of
separate states was finally abandoned. But the
principles on which control of Germany were
based were contradictory from the start: the Allies
sought to treat Germany as one while at the same
time partitioning it into zones of occupation. The
Allied Control Council was supposed to oversee
Germany as a whole, but each of the commandersin-
chief in his own zone had complete authority
as well. The plan to establish ‘central German
administrative departments, headed by State
Secretaries . . . in the fields of finance, transport,
communications, foreign trade and industry’,
but under the direction of the Control Council,
proved impossible to carry through as long as
each occupation zone fell under the separate
control of one of the four Allies. There was to be
‘for the time being’ no central German government,
but local self-government and democratic
parties were encouraged. On the one hand, the
Allies agreed that during the occupation ‘the
German economy shall be treated as a single economic
unit’; on the other, reparations were a matter
for each occupying power to settle in its own
zone.
In practice, the immediate consequence of all
these decisions was to move towards the division
of Germany into four separate zones. Four years
later, the three Western zones would combine
and create a democratic Western central government,
and a communist regime would be
imposed on the Soviet Eastern zone. There were
some areas of agreement, however; the trial of war
criminals, the destruction of Nazi ideology, the
complete disarmament of Germany, and control
of such German industry as could be used for war,
led to no real differences at Potsdam. But already
the West and the Russians were compromising
these principles. German scientists were too valuable
a ‘war booty’ to be punished as Nazi war
criminals. Rocket scientists who had perfected the
V-1 and V-2 in Peenemünde were, despite their
past, seized by the Americans and bribed to contribute
their know-how to Western military technology.
Many who should have been convicted of
war crimes prospered instead in the West and
worked for the US in the space race. Other
German rocket scientists were captured by the
Russians and assisted in Soviet missile development.
In the Cold War, ex-Nazis with expertise
in military intelligence were recruited by both
sides. Former Wehrmacht officers served both
NATO and the Warsaw Pact armies. These were
some of the darker aspects of what happened in
the aftermath of the victory over Germany.
Austria was separated once more from
Germany and was fortunate to escape reparations.
Austrian guards in concentration camps had not
behaved with any less bestiality in the SS than
their German counterparts, nor can a distinction
be drawn between Austrian and German members
of the Wehrmacht. Austria was allowed to
establish a central government but was occupied,
like Germany, and divided into four zones,
American, British, French and Soviet, with
Vienna under joint control.
The Potsdam Conference established a
Council of Foreign Ministers which, it was
expected, would normally meet in London. Its
main task was the preparation of peace treaties
with Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and
Finland. A peace settlement with Germany was
also mentioned, but it seemed a distant prospect
in 1945 since it required the prior establishment
of a German government with the consent of the
Allies. Only those countries that were signatories
to the terms of surrender of each state would be
allowed to participate, with the exception of
France, which was admitted to discuss peace
terms with Italy. During the eighteen months of
its existence and after much acrimony, peace
treaties with all these states except Germany were
agreed. The Council, which still represented the
wartime alliance, came to grief over the German
question, and the Cold War began.
Potsdam marked the beginning of the end of
any hope that the wartime alliance would outlast
the defeat of Germany, Italy, Japan and the minor
Axis allies and, as Roosevelt had hoped, continue
to safeguard the peace. It had achieved victory
over the most powerful and barbaric threat ever
faced by Russia and the Western democracies in
modern times. The year 1945 marks a division in
world history. This side of it the West once more
perceived the Soviet Union as its most dangerous
enemy. But this division should not obscure what
lies on the other side, what the civilised world
owes to the sacrifices made by the Soviet Union,
by China, by Britain and by the US, the great
powers of their day which saw the struggle
through together.
No one expected that the Japanese would be
forced to surrender within three months of the
Allied victory in Europe. In fighting as savage as
any in the Second World War, the US navy, the
marines and the army, under the command of
Admiral Nimitz, had pushed the Japanese back
from one tropical island base to the next. By the
summer of 1943 the Japanese had been forced on
to the defensive. A year later the Americans were
closing in on Japan, capturing Saipan, Tinian and
Guam. Meanwhile a Japanese offensive from
Burma into India was halted by British and
Dominion troops. In October 1944 General
MacArthur began the attack on the Philippines.
There ensued the last great naval engagement of
the Second World War – the battle of Leyte Gulf.
The Japanese navy had planned a counterblow to
destroy MacArthur’s supply line and then his
army. With the defeat of the Japanese navy in
Leyte Gulf the US had won command of the sea
in Japan’s home waters.
In the central Pacific, Nimitz advanced from
Saipan to the island of Iwojima and then in the
fiercest fighting of the war, lasting from April to
June 1945, attacked and captured Okinawa, an
island in the Ryukyu group just 500 miles from
Japan. Japan’s cities were being systematically
reduced to rubble by the fires caused by constant
air attacks. In south-east Asia, Admiral Lord
Louis Mountbatten commanded the Allied forces
which between December 1944 and May 1945
recaptured Burma from the retreating Japanese.
But, skilfully as this campaign was conducted, it
was secondary in its impact on the war. The
Americans in the Pacific were thrusting at the
heart of the Japanese Empire.
In 1944 the Japanese military and naval leaders
knew the war could not be won. Yet even as late
as May 1945 they hoped that the evidence of
Japan’s fanatical defence at Okinawa and elsewhere
would deter the Allies from invading Japan
itself, where the Allies, for the first time, would
have to come to grips with large Japanese armies.
Rather than lose thousands of men, might not the
Allies be prepared to offer reasonable terms?
Those advisers of the emperor who were in
favour of an immediate peace were not strong
enough to assert themselves openly against the
military and naval leaderships. But war supplies,
especially oil, were rapidly running out and
Japan’s situation was deteriorating fast. By July
1945 even the military accepted that it was worth
taking the initiative to explore what kind of peace
terms the Allies might put forward. Approaches
were made to the Soviet Union to act as mediators.
The Soviets refused brusquely to help
Japan to a negotiated peace. With the prize of
Manchuria promised at Yalta, Stalin had his own
reasons for wishing to prolong the war long
enough to enable the Red Army to advance into
Manchuria. Nevertheless, Stalin did inform
Churchill of Japanese overtures when they assembled
with Truman at the Potsdam Conference in
July 1945, urging that the Allies should insist on
‘unconditional’ surrender.
But Churchill pressed moderation on Truman
to save American and British lives. The upshot
was that Truman and Churchill on 26 July issued
an ultimatum to Japan setting out basic conditions
of peace. They called for the unconditional
surrender of the Japanese military forces. The
influence of the military and all those who had
guided Japan, into the path of aggression would
be removed. War criminals would be punished
and reparations required. Japan would have to
give up all its imperial conquests. Finally, Japan
would be occupied. But, beyond this, the declaration
went out of its way to promise Japan a
future: ‘We do not intend that the Japanese shall
be enslaved as a race nor destroyed as a nation.’
Japan’s industries would be preserved, its soldiers
allowed to return home, and democracy and
justice would be established under the guidance
of the occupation. Once this was securely rooted
in Japan, and a freely elected Japanese government
could safely be given responsibility, the
occupation forces would withdraw. In short,
imperial Japan with its divine emperor would be
transformed into a Western-type democratic state.
What was not clear, and it was a critical point for
the Japanese, was whether the emperor would be
permitted to remain on the throne.
Japan’s 80-year-old prime minister, Admiral
Suzuki, responded to the ultimatum with a noncommittal
statement. He was temporising in the
face of the powerful military opposition; mistranslation
unfortunately made his reply sound
contemptuous. But was it really necessary to drop
the atomic bomb or would a few more days have
given the upper hand to the peace party in any
case? The evidence suggests that only after
Hiroshima – realising what terrible havoc would
result from more such bombs – did Emperor
Hirohito conclude that he could no longer merely
accept the decision of his leading ministers and
the military, but that he would have to assert
himself and overrule the military who still were
inclined to continue the war. Ironically it was the
last act of the emperor’s divine authority, soon to
be destroyed, that saved countless American and
Japanese lives. President Truman was therefore
right in believing that only the atomic bombs
could shock Japan into immediate surrender.
On 6 August an American plane dropped just
one small bomb on a Japanese city still untouched
by war. ‘Hiroshima’ henceforth has become a
byword for a nuclear holocaust, for a threatened
new world. There was instant recognition that the
nature of war had been transformed. Scientists
had harnessed the innermost forces of nature to
a weapon of destruction that had hitherto been
unimaginable. In one blinding flash the humans
who were instantly vaporised were perhaps the
more fortunate; 66,000 men, women and children
were killed immediately or succumbed soon
after the atom bomb had struck. Another 69,000
were horribly injured – they were found to suffer
from a new illness, radiation sickness, and many
died later in agony. Even future unborn generations
were affected, deformed by the mutation of
genes in the sick. The suffering has continued for
decades. Four square miles of the city were totally
destroyed on that terrible day. Three days later
Nagasaki was the second and mercifully last city
to suffer the effects of an atomic attack. It was
not the end, however, of the development of even
more destructive nuclear weapons of annihilation.
The single Hiroshima bomb possessed the explosive
power of 20,000 tons of TNT. Later hydrogen
bombs were tested in the 1950s with a power
many times greater than the bomb dropped on
Hiroshima. There was and is no effective system
of defence in existence that can stop the missile
delivery of a destructive power that can wipe out
civilised life on whole continents. The Japanese
were the first victims and the last, if the world is
to survive.
Ever since the horror of Hiroshima the debate
has raged whether a weapon so indiscriminate in
its mass destruction of human life should have
been used. It has been argued that the main
reason why it was dropped was to warn the
Soviet Union of the new invincible power of
the US. No doubt the possession of the atomic
bomb made it possible for the US to feel that it
was safe to demobilise even in the face of the
superior weight of the Soviet armed forces. But
the bomb would have been dropped even had the
Soviet Union not existed. The investment in
the construction of the two nuclear bombs available
for use in 1945 had been huge. It was
thought that using them would prove decisive in
ending the war without more fighting and the
expected further losses of Allied lives from storming
the Japanese home islands against fierce resistance.
The killing of enemy civilians in order to
shorten the war was seen as justified after so much
death and destruction. No one thought in terms
of drawing up a balance sheet of losses of enemy
men, women and children as against the lives of
Allied soldiers. That is shown by the devastating
raids on German and Japanese cities with conventional
weapons. Loss of civilian lives was
greater in Tokyo and Dresden than in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
The Soviet Union’s declaration of war on
Japan on 8 August and its invasion of China were
fresh disasters but not decisive factors in forcing
Tokyo’s leader to make a decision. Messages sent
by the Allies and received in Tokyo on 13 August
1945 indicating that the emperor would not be
removed from the throne were more important in
the final deliberations. On 14 August the emperor
broadcast Japan’s surrender. Over the radio he
spoke for the first time to the Japanese people,
saying that the unendurable had to be endured.
The Second World War was over.
World History
