AT 5 P. M. ON 17JULY1945, using separate doors, Churchill, Stalin and Truman entered the conference room at the mock-Tudor Cecilienhof Palace in the Soviet zone near Babelsberg outside Berlin for the last summit of the alliance. They sat round a circular table covered with a burgundy-coloured cloth on wooden armchairs upholstered in red plush. In front of them, the lawn of the 176-room building sloped down to a lake from which swarms of mosquitoes buzzed in through the unscreened windows. The Red Army had planted a huge star of red geraniums in the garden. The security consisted mainly of green-hatted Soviet frontier guards from Central Asia, though there were also women traffic police whose smart uniforms, Andrei Gromyko said, caused Churchill to drop cigar ash all over his suit.
The delegations were lodged in solid villas round the lake and in woods. While the German capital had been devastated by the last stage of the war, Babelsberg had escaped relatively unscathed. Many houses still had grand pianos.
* * * *
In the ten weeks since Hitler’s suicide and the surrender of the Reich, relations between the Big Three remained bumpy. At the San Francisco conference, the Soviets were insisting that, on top of their veto on UN
Action, the big powers must be able to prevent even verbal complaints being raised against them. Churchill wanted the West to take a stronger line with Stalin. As the British general election drew near, he knew the danger of being seen to have reneged on the principles for which the war was fought. He wrote to the Kremlin of meeting ‘a stone wall upon matters which we sincerely believed were settled in a spirit of friendly comradeship in the Crimea.’
In a twelve-point ‘outpouring of my heart’ to Stalin in the spring, he went through the differences between London and Moscow over Poland and in Yugoslavia where ‘Tito has become a complete dictator [and] proclaimed that his prime loyalties are to the Soviet Union’. A division between Communist states and the English-speaking nations would ‘tear the world to pieces,’ he warned. ‘Do not, I beg you, my friend, Stalin, under-rate the divergencies which are opening up about matters which you may think are small to us but which are symbolic to the way the English-speaking democracies look at life.’ At the same time, he asked the British Joint Planning Staff to prepare a paper on a possible ‘total war’ with the Soviet Union. The object of ‘Operation Unthinkable’ would be ‘to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire’ and to achieve ‘a square deal for Poland.’ Hostilities would start on 1 July. The British Chiefs of Staff rejected the idea as militarily unfeasible.1
Writing to Truman, Churchill changed his metaphor to warn of ‘an iron curtain’ being drawn down along the Soviet front line. He expressed his fears that the Soviet leader might ‘play for time in order to remain allpowerful in Europe when our forces have melted’. To Eisenhower, he showed concern at the destruction of German aircraft since ‘we may have great need of these some day’. In a note to Eden, he highlighted the danger that withdrawal of US troops would lead to domestic pressure in Britain for demobilisation while the Red Army maintained hundreds of divisions from the Baltic to the Adriatic.2
The tone in Washington was changing, as presaged by Truman’s remarks to Molotov. Lend-Lease to the USSR was cut off four days after the surrender of Germany on 8 May, a decision that Stalin branded ‘unfortunate and even brutal’ and which was swiftly reversed and blamed on a bureaucratic misunderstanding. Washington did not want to give Stalin a reason to renege on his undertaking to enter the war against Japan so the programme continued until September 1945.
Though Stalin raised the matter later in the year, nothing came of the scheme for a reconstruction loan for the USSR. When Moscow proposed that the Big Three recognise the regimes in other countries under its influence, the President replied that in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria he had been ‘disturbed to find governments that do not accord to all the democratic elements of the people the rights of free expression’.3
But Truman also had a shock in store for Churchill. On 26 May, a presidential envoy went to Chequers for a conversation that lasted from 11 p. m. until 4.30 a. m. Truman could hardly have picked a worse envoy —the pro-Soviet, anti-British former ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies. The choice had been urged on him by the outgoing White House spokesman, Steve Early, who was going to a job with a company of which Davies was a director. Churchill’s warnings of the spread of Soviet power put him in the same camp as Hitler, Davies said. Eden summed him up as ‘the born appeaser [who] would gladly give Russia all Europe, except perhaps us, so that America might not be embroiled’.4
Davies said the President wanted a bilateral meeting with Stalin before they were joined by Churchill for a trilateral summit. The Prime Minister feared a bilateral deal—and could only resent the way Truman made his priorities so clear. Unless the three men met simultaneously and on equal terms, he warned Truman, he would not attend a summit. In a long despatch to the White House on 27 May, he pointed out that the Soviets were using ‘to the full the methods of police government, which they are applying in every State which has fallen victims to their liberating arms.’ ‘The Prime Minister cannot readily bring himself to accept the idea that the position of the United States is that Britain and Soviet Russia are just two foreign powers, six of one and half a dozen of the other, with whom the troubles of the late war have to be adjusted,’ he went on. ‘The great causes and principles for which Britain and the United States have suffered and triumphed are not mere matters of the balance of power. They in fact involve the salvation of the world. ’
Like Churchill, Truman was facing growing concern in America about events since Yalta, though some opinion-formers and military chiefs still believed cooperation with Moscow was essential—the leading commentator Walter Lippmann stalked out of a briefing by Harriman when the ambassador criticised Moscow. To try to clear the air, Truman sent Hopkins to Moscow to meet Stalin. The aide was lying emaciated in bed at his Georgetown home when Harriman and Bohlen called to tell him of the mission. The new President said he wanted ‘a fair understanding’ with the Kremlin but ‘intended to have a way of carrying out the agreements purported to have been made at Yalta. The aid should make clear to Stalin ‘that we never made commitments which we did not expect to carry out to the letter and we intended to see that he did.’ To make his point, Hopkins could use diplomacy, a baseball bat or anything else he considered appropriate. Louise accompanied her husband to look after him, and was a hit with Soviet generals, being forced, however, by US regulations to turn down nearly all the many gifts she was offered.5
Accompanied by Harriman and Bohlen, Hopkins had six sessions with Stalin over ten days. He began by explaining that Truman would find it hard to continue cooperation without the support of public opinion. Going to the root of the matter, he ascribed popular concern to ‘a sense of bewilderment at our inability to solve the Polish question’.
Stalin was courteous—he told Bohlen once that Hopkins was the first American to whom he had spoken ‘from the soul’. But, below the relaxed, informal nature of the discussions, he stood firm, deploying the debating skills he had shown at Teheran and Yalta. At one point, he said that the Soviet Union always honoured its word, and then, lowering his voice, added ‘except in case of extreme necessity’.
The interpreter Pavlov did not immediately translate these last words.
‘I believe there is a little more,’ Bohlen said. Pavlov mumbled the qualification.
Stalin reeled off a list of complaints—at the admission of Argentina to the United Nations although it had never declared war on Germany; at the temporary halt to Lend-Lease; at the suggestion that France should join the Reparations Commission; and at the prospect the USSR might not get a third of the German fleet. Hopkins produced answers, but the key discussions on Poland were long and tortuous, continuing till the last session on 6 June.
Hopkins said the issue was ‘a symbol of our ability to work out problems with the Soviet Union’. He set out the freedoms which Americans thought necessary—if Stalin accepted these, agreement could be reached. ‘These principles are well known and would find no objection on the part of the Soviet government,’ Stalin replied. But they could only be applied in peacetime, and then with certain limitations. Hopkins hoped an accord was in sight, but, Stalin’s provisos meant he had not committed himself. In any case, as always, the West had no means of holding him to any word he gave.
When it came to the composition of the Warsaw administration, Stalin said four or five of the eighteen to twenty ministries might go to figures nominated by the United States and Britain. Mikolajczyk could take part in talks on a new government together with two other London Poles and five non-Communists. When Hopkins raised the issue of the sixteen non-Communist figures who had been arrested after being invited to Moscow, Stalin stonewalled, saying they had shot Red Army men in the back while their country was being liberated. So they would have to stand trial—had not the Allies arrested saboteurs? Hopkins sent a message to Churchill saying he was ‘doing everything under heaven to get these people out of jug’, but adding that the more important objective was to have Mikolajczyk and other non-Communist Poles in Moscow for talks.
The aide scored a significant success when he raised the matter of Soviet insistence that the great powers should be able to veto even discussion of their conduct at the United Nations. ‘What is this all about, Molotov?’ Stalin asked. The Foreign Minister said big countries should have this right from the start of any discussion. ‘That’s nonsense,’ Stalin replied. Gromyko in San Francisco was told to give way, thus enabling the Charter of the United Nations to be adopted. The global body Roosevelt had dreamed of had finally come into being, but despite Stalin’s concession, the big nations as permanent members of the Security Council would be in charge. If that had been Moscow’s essential condition, it had also been a consistent theme of Roosevelt’s thinking; he had never seen the organisation as truly democratic, or thought that smaller nations should be able to overrule the great powers.
Hopkins also got a firm date for Soviet entry into the war in the Far East—8 August—so long as the conditions agreed at Yalta were confirmed. Stalin said he saw the United States playing the major role in China after the war since the USSR would be so occupied with its own reconstruction. His main, unstated, aim was to keep the vast country as a weak neighbour, which was more likely to be achieved by perpetuating the highly flawed Nationalist regime than by putting the Communists in power.
On the night of 1 June, Stalin gave the last Kremlin banquet for visiting allies. By the standards of previous occasions, it was restrained. There were forty guests, and the vodka bottles were removed early on. After the meal, Hopkins again raised the question of the sixteen Poles. Stalin would not give ground. The American let the matter drop. Fourteen of them were imprisoned; some of them died in detention while others were later re-arrested alter being released—or fled to the West.
Harriman reported that ‘Harry did a first-rate job.’ But he felt that Stalin was probably left bewildered by the way the Americans insisted on focusing on what he must have seen as a lost cause for them. ‘I am afraid that Stalin does not and never will understand our interest in a free Poland as a matter of principle,’ Harriman wrote to Washington. ‘He is a realist in all his actions, and it is hard for him to appreciate our faith in abstract principles.’
Reckoning they had got all they could expect, Truman and Churchill recognised the Provisional Government in Warsaw at the beginning of July after the addition of non-Communist members. The fate of the sixteen Poles had made Mikolajczyk wary of going to Moscow for talks on a coalition government, but Churchill persuaded him, saying: ‘You have put your foot in an open door, and should not miss this opportunity.’ Closely watched by Clark Kerr and Harriman, the initial contacts with the Lublin leaders went well, and Mikolajczyk became Vice Premier and Agriculture Minister in the new administration in Warsaw. But the Soviet-backed group, and, through it, Moscow, kept hold of the levers of power in the police and the army. The State Department later identified the Lublin Committee chief as a Communist agent of two decades standing.6
In his memoirs, Churchill wrote that it was difficult to see what more could have been done, but also acknowledged: ‘We were still as far as ever from any real and fair attempts to obtain the will of the Polish nation by free elections.’ Leaving Moscow for Warsaw, Mikolajczyk told Harriman of his grave doubts about the chances of success. ‘I may never see you again,’ he said. He ended up in exile in the United States.7
Hopkins flew home via Berlin, where his wife was photographed arm-in-arm with Red Army officers, surrounded by other grinning Russians and her husband, who looks equally happy. The aide lunched with Marshal Zhukov and Vyshinsky, who was running political affairs in the Soviet zone. When the former prosecutor spoke hopefully of Allied cooperation, Hopkins sipped his coffee and then replied, sighing: ‘It’s a pity President Roosevelt didn’t live to see these days. It was easier with him.’8
Talking to Bohlen on the flight home, Hopkins voiced doubts about the possibility of real cooperation with Moscow, saying differences over the issue of freedom boded ill. But he still saw preventing a revival of German militarism as the first priority. On his return to America, he resigned from government service, turning down an offer from Truman to join the forthcoming summit. ‘I am sure my decision is the right one because I have every chance of getting well now,’ he wrote to Harriman. ‘I have taken a job in New York as Impartial Chairman of the Ladies Cloak and Suit Industry... they are paying me a reasonably good salary and the work is not going to be too hard. Then I am going to get busy writing a book so, all in all, I will have plenty to do.’ He was given an honorary degree by Oxford, and awarded a Distinguished Service Medal by Truman for the ‘outstanding value’ of his ‘piercing understanding of the tremendous problems incident to the vast military operations throughout the world’ as well as his ‘selfless, courageous, and objective contribution to the war effort’. He spent the summer in Maine, telling Bohlen that everything should be done to foster relations between Washington, Moscow and London. Then he went back into hospital.
* * * *
On the voyage across the Atlantic on the Augusta, the heavy cruiser used by Roosevelt at Placentia Bay, Truman was given extensive briefings, played poker and one day queued for food with an aluminium tray in the mess hall. Aides found him very businesslike, free from Rooseveltian ramblings, though he wrote to his wife: ‘How I hate this trip! But I have to make it.’9
Docking in Antwerp, he was driven to Brussels from where he flew to Berlin in the ‘Sacred Cow’. He was lodged in a three-storey stucco house by Lake Griebnitz which was immediately nicknamed ‘The Little White House’ — the road on which it stood had been known as the Street of the Brownshirts, and was subsequently renamed Karl Marx Strasse. Though it had been done up, Truman found the building gloomy and the Presidential Log recorded that the bathroom facilities were wholly inadequate.
As Truman slept that night, the technicians at the test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, made the final check on an atomic device set on top of a tower. Three days earlier, the Emperor of Japan had instructed that peace feelers should be put out in Moscow, but also warned that, if the United States and Britain insisted on unconditional surrender, it would be necessary to fight to the bitter end.
Truman’s main companion for the summit was James Byrnes, the new Secretary of State and veteran of Yalta, who might well have thought he should have been in Truman’s place. Described by Time magazine as ‘the politicians’ politician’, the small, wiry South Carolinian had fancied himself as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944—Truman had been due to nominate him at the convention. But he aroused strong opposition on the left of the Democratic Party and was not likely to attract black voters.
Once in the White House, Truman sought to build bridges by naming Byrnes to replace Stettinius. Since there was no vice president, this made the Secretary of State next in line for the succession. Byrnes was highly self-confident. He had no experience of foreign affairs, but he and the President were on the same wavelength.
Truman was also accompanied by Harriman and Bohlen. But he was free of the influence of Morgenthau whose resignation from the Cabinet he had contrived shortly before he left Washington. According to an account cited by the historian Michael Beschloss, Truman told Stimson, ‘Don’t worry, neither Morgenthau nor Baruch, nor any of the Jew boys will be going to Potsdam.’
Churchill had flown to Berlin from a holiday in France, where he had taken up painting again. He invited Attlee to accompany him. He was put up two blocks away from Truman in a stone house with chandeliers and dirty French windows. Arriving in the evening of 15 July, the Prime Minister flopped into a garden chair between two big tubs of hydrangeas. He seemed, Moran recorded, too weary to move. Drinking a whisky and soda, he stared silently at the lake, where the Russians were said to have drowned wounded German prisoners. A soldier came out of the wood opposite, looked around and disappeared. As night fell, a rifle shot sounded from the wood.10
* * * *
The 16th and 17th of July saw a series of bilateral meetings. Cadogan recorded that Churchill was delighted by Truman, noting his ‘precise, sparkling manner’, ‘immense determination’ and firmness. The American formed an instant liking for the older man. Still, when Churchill said Britain would like to contribute forces against Japan, he was reserved. He wanted the Far East to be an American show, and to keep his freedom of action in deciding whether to use the atom bomb.11
Meeting Churchill the next day, Stalin told him of the Japanese peace feeler which, he said, showed that Tokyo was very frightened.
There was some chat about the disciplined nature of the Germans—‘like sheep’, the Georgian observed. Stalin remarked that he had taken to smoking cigars. Churchill replied that if a photograph of the Georgian smoking one could be flashed round the world ‘it would cause an immense sensation’ by appearing to show his influence on the Soviet leader. More seriously, Churchill ended by saying he particularly welcomed the USSR as a great naval power, a statement he would come to regret as the Kremlin pressed for a big chunk of the German fleet.
At noon on 17 July, Stalin drove from his house to meet Truman. He had been the last of the leaders to arrive, travelling in an ornate Tsarist train taken out of a museum for his use. While waiting for him, the other leaders had visited the ruins of Hitler’s Berlin.
Stalin was lodged in a mansion which had once belonged to Ludendorff, the First World War commander, with fifteen rooms, a veranda and specially installed electricity, heating and telephone systems. As usual, he was surrounded by extremely heavy security, including seven NKVD regiments and 900 bodyguards. Though this was kept secret, he had suffered a slight heart attack before leaving Moscow.12
Truman was working at his desk when he looked up to see Stalin in the doorway. In keeping with his recent promotion to the rank of Generalissimo, he wore a white uniform tunic with red epaulettes.
Truman was struck by his directness and politeness. He noted that they were the same height, but that Stalin tried to position himself one step higher when photographs were taken of them standing together on the steps of the Cecilienhof Palace.
Not knowing of the Truman-Churchill exchange the previous day, Stalin lost little time in trying a touch of splittist tactics, observing that Britain was not ready to play its role against Japan but that the USSR was ready to come into the war in the Pacific in the middle of August. In reply, Truman said the Yalta agreement on concessions in China would be kept.
Would Stalin stay for lunch? Truman asked.
No, he could not, the dictator replied.
‘You could if you wanted to,’ the President said.
So he did. Table talk was inconsequential. Stalin complemented
Truman on the Californian wine. Afterwards, the leaders and their Foreign Ministers went out on to the balcony where they were photographed. Then they parted. ‘I can deal with Stalin,’ Truman decided. ‘He is honest, but smart as hell.’ He likened him to his mentor in Kansas City, Tom Pendergast. While they had been meeting, a message had arrived from New Mexico: ‘Babies satisfactorily born.’ America had become a nuclear power.
* * * *
Truman followed the Roosevelt precedent by taking the chair at the Cecilienhof. It was his chance to show he was his own man at the very highest level. He and Byrnes might not be cosmopolitans with years of summitry behind them, but the way they sidelined Harriman and Bohlen demonstrated that they were intent on setting a new path.13
Truman wrote to his mother that he found the job nerve-wracking —‘Churchill talks all the time and Stalin just grunts but you know what he means.’ At the longest of the Allied summits, he would become increasingly impatient with both British verbosity and Soviet intransigence and, as his confidence grew, would feel able to suggest that, if they were getting nowhere, the participants should go home.
Churchill was in poor form, tired, suffering from indigestion and dogged by his country’s parlous economic position, telling Truman that Britain was coming out of the war as the greatest debtor nation on earth.
A paper from Keynes pointed out that foreign aid had enabled Britain to overspend its income during the war years by some ?2 billion a year; if the aid ended, it would be bankrupt. The Prime Minister also had to confront the looming election which he likened to a ‘vulture of uncertainty’. His campaign focused on him as the great war leader, and he had been greeted by cheering crowds. But, as Eden noted, ‘in truth they were only saying “Thank you. You have led us superbly. We shall always be grateful to you.’” As Roosevelt had predicted, once the war was won, Churchill became a figure from the past.
The Prime Minister looked disgruntled as he sat with the other two leaders in wicker chairs for the first group photograph. Eden, who had suffered a huge blow with news of the death of his son in action, found Churchill under Stalin’s spell as he repeated: ‘I like that man.’ Over dinner on 17 July, the Foreign Secretary urged his leader ‘not to give up our few cards without return’, and wrote a memorandum describing Soviet policy as ‘aggrandisement’. Moscow’s intentions, he concluded, were becoming ‘clearer as they become more brazen every day’.
But Churchill was not convinced. Though he could see the Iron Curtain coming down and the need for western Europe to be strengthened, he still chased the notion of establishing man-to-man contact with the dictator to settle their differences. Moran recorded him as saying: ‘Stalin gave me his word that there would be free elections in countries set free by his armies. You are sceptical, Charles? I don’t see why. We must listen to these Russians, they mobilised twelve million men, and nearly half of them were killed or are missing.’ The next day, he was saying that the Soviets ‘talk about the same things as we do, freedom and justice and that sort of thing, but prominent people are removed and not seen again.’ Later, he told Moran: ‘I shall ask Stalin, does he want the whole world?’14
Cadogan noted in his diary that Churchill did not read his paperwork, and ‘butts in on every occasion and talks the most irrelevant rubbish’. His humour was not improved when a storm destroyed the water main by the British villas, depriving him of his bath—other problems with the water supply caused outbreaks of diarrhoea during the summit. In contrast, the Foreign Office mandarin found Truman ‘most quick and businesslike’—‘I don’t want to discuss, I want to decide,’ the President remarked at one point, in words very similar to Stalin’s at Yalta. The Soviet leader, meanwhile, watched the way the discussions were going, giving no ground but seeming relaxed, and, at times, amused as he doodled on the pad in front of him.15
Reading from his script at the opening session, Truman listed subjects for the agenda, starting with the proposed establishment of a five-nation Council of Foreign Ministers. This provoked objections from Stalin. France’s war record did not justify a place, he said. Why should China have any say in European matters?
Unabashed, Truman seized on one of the most sensitive issues between the Allies—the holding of free and fair elections in Europe. In particular, he mentioned Romania and Bulgaria. Then he suggested that policy towards Italy should be revised to enable the new government in Rome to join the United Nations. This time it was Churchill who objected, before Stalin chipped in to say that Italy should not get any preferential treatment not offered to Germany’s former allies in eastern Europe.
Sensing he was out of tune, Truman noted that he had taken the place of ‘a man who was really irreplaceable’. He only hoped to be able to inherit some of the friendship and goodwill Roosevelt had enjoyed. That brought an outpouring of warmth from Churchill, with which Stalin associated himself.
The Prime Minister said they should add Poland to the agenda. Overriding interruptions from Churchill, Stalin laid out his list of subjects--the German merchant fleet and navy, reparations, trusteeships for the Soviet Union, relations with former Axis allies, the removal of the Franco regime in Spain, the futures of Tangiers, Syria and Lebanon, Poland’s western frontier and ‘the liquidation of the [Polish] London government’.
There was then a discussion about the Council of Foreign Ministers. Would it prepare questions for a peace conference? Stalin asked. Yes, Truman replied. In fact, the administration was leery of anything that might come to resemble Versailles in 1919. But it might be useful to discuss the idea to try to hold Stalin to his engagements.
The session ended in good humour as the delegations went into an adjoining room for champagne and caviar. Stimson had been handed a cable saying that ‘the little boy’—the atom bomb to be used against Japan —would be ‘as husky as his brother’—the one already tested. The decoder thought the seventy-seven-year-old Secretary of War had become a father. Stimson wanted to give Japan a last warning before using the weapon. Truman and Byrnes did not agree. As the President stuck to the doctrine of unconditional surrender, the use of the bomb became more probable, day by day.
* * * *
The tradition of summit dinners was maintained with each of the Big Three playing host in turn. Truman brought in a pianist and violinist for his occasion. Stalin doubled the number of musicians for his banquet. Truman wrote to his mother that the evening was ‘a wow. Started with caviar and vodka and wound up with watermelon and champagne, with smoked fish, fresh fish, venison, chicken, duck, and all sorts of vegetables in between. There was a toast every five minutes... I ate very little and drank less, but it was a colourful and enjoyable occasion.’ Truman remarked that the Soviet musicians had dirty faces and that the two women violinists were ‘rather fat’. Himself an accomplished pianist, he rebuffed suggestions from the unmusical Churchill they should leave, reducing the Prime Minister to sulking as he drank brandy and puffed on his cigar. As the party ended, he muttered to Leahy that he would ‘get even’ with the other two for all the music they had inflicted on him.16
He did this on 23 July by bringing in the whole of an RAF band for his dinner. It played so loudly that Stalin got up to ask for some quiet tunes. Churchill raised his glass to ‘Stalin the Great’ and the Soviet leader drank to a joint war against Japan. Truman said he was a timid man who had been overwhelmed to have been made chairman of the summit. ‘Modesty such as the President’s is a great source of strength and a real indication of character,’ Stalin responded.
The Soviet leader went round the table asking others to sign his menu card. Truman and Churchill followed suit. So did the diplomats, and officials and military men. After midnight, the band played the three national anthems and the last convivial occasion of the alliance ended at 1.30 a. m.—late for Truman who liked to be in bed by 10.30.
* * * *
At a tete-a-tete conversation with Churchill, Stalin predicted that the Conservatives would win a majority of eighty in the election. When the Prime Minister said he was not sure of the votes of servicemen, the dictator replied that an army preferred a strong government, and so would vote for the Tories. He stated blandly that he wanted to see countries liberated by the Red Army becoming strong, independent, sovereign states. ‘Sovietization’ should not take place. Free elections should be held open to all parties except Fascists. When Churchill repeated his complaints about Yugoslavia, Stalin said the USSR had no interests there, and often did not know what Tito was doing. He was ‘hurt’ by American criticism over Romania—harking back to the percentages agreement, he pointed out that he was not meddling in Greek affairs.
Taking a map, Churchill drew a line through Europe, naming capitals in Soviet hands. It looked, he added, as though the USSR was rolling westwards. On the contrary, Stalin replied, he was pulling forces back—two million would be demobilised within four months.
Churchill returned to the subject during the plenary session on 24 July, drawing attention to the way eastern Europe was being closed off under Moscow’s domination. ‘An iron fence’ was being erected, he said. ‘Fairy tales!’ Stalin growled.
At the end of that session, Truman walked round the circular table.
Having been told what he was going to do, Churchill watched closely.
The President casually mentioned to the dictator that ‘we have a new weapon of unusual destructive force’.17
Stalin showed no special interest, Truman recalled. His face remained expressionless. He just said he was glad to hear the news, and hoped America would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese’.
Churchill, who described the test as ‘the Second Coming’, felt that Stalin had no idea of the significance of what he had been told. As he and Truman left, the Prime Minister asked the President: ‘How did it go?’ ‘He never asked a question,’ Truman replied. Byrnes hoped that the information about the bomb might give Washington leverage with Moscow, and help keep the Red Army out of Manchuria.
The calm was deceptive. Stalin had known about the Manhattan Project for some months. Based on information from Soviet agents, Beria had informed him of the explosion in New Mexico. They had decided that, if Truman broke the news, the dictator should pretend not to understand. That night, Stalin told Molotov, who was in charge of the atomic programme, of the conversation with Truman. The Foreign Minister ordered work to be speeded up, but Stalin judged that he was not getting adequate results and switched responsibility for the project was soon entrusted to Beria as the ultimate weapon was dropped on Hiroshima while the President sailed home.
* * * *
On the morning of 25 July, Truman stood, his arms crossed over his chest, to grasp the hands of the Soviet and British leaders for photographs. He smiled at Stalin, who seemed set in stone in his white tunic. Churchill looked all too human, his uniform rumpled, his face pink.18
The plenary session that day wandered over familiar subjects such as Germany and Poland. Truman intervened to remind the others that treaties had to be approved by the Senate. So anything he said did not ‘preclude my coming back and informing you when I find that political sentiment at home on a proposition is such that I cannot continue to press its acceptance without endangering our common interests in the peace’. It was a constitutional point Roosevelt had brought up, but the directness of Truman’s statement made it a warning.
Welcoming his directness, Churchill told Moran: ‘If only this had happened at Yalta. It is too late now.’ He flew to Britain in the afternoon to await the election result.
‘I hope to be back,’ he said as he left.
‘Judging from the expression on Mr Atlee’s face, I do not think he looks forward avidly to taking over your authority,’ Stalin replied.
But the previous night, Churchill had dreamed of lying dead in an empty room under a white sheet, his feet protruding. ‘Perhaps this is the end,’ he told his doctor.
Though voting had taken place three weeks earlier, the declaration was delayed to allow for ballots from servicemen abroad to be counted. Churchill recorded that he went to bed that night ‘in the belief that the British people would wish me to continue with my work’. Just before dawn, he woke with a stab of almost physical pain. After which, ‘a hitherto subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke forth and dominated my mind.’
He went back to sleep, waking at 9 a. m. Going to the Map Room, he saw the unfavourable results coming. By lunchtime on 26 July, it was clear that Labour had won. The voters had determined that the bulldog of 1940 was, as Roosevelt had forecast, not the man to lead them in peacetime, and had given their belated verdict on pre-war Conservative rule. Clementine said defeat might be a blessing in disguise. ‘At the moment,’ her husband replied, ‘it seems quite effectively disguised.’
* * * *
Clement Attlee, the pipe-smoking socialist, could not have been more of a contrast to his predecessor. Methodical and personally modest—he had been driven round the country during the election campaign by his wife in their family car—Attlee’s demeanour made him easy to underestimate. Cadogan noted in his diary that the new Prime Minister ‘recedes into the background by his own insignificance’. He had been part of the British delegation from the start of the summit. Though he had said little, he knew what had gone on, and his self-effacing style hid a lot of steel.
The dominant figure in the British team was Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, a proletarian mastiff in place of a Tory bulldog. The burly, hard-drinking former trade union boss did not hide his suspicions of the Soviet Union, repeatedly confronting Stalin and Molotov. He had learned the way Communists operated during his years in the labour movement. But his blunt manner did not go down well with the Americans at first, and the Potsdam meeting continued to get nowhere as each side trotted out familiar arguments and counter-arguments.19
The Soviets pressed for a definite figure for German reparations, though they scaled down the original $20 billion. The Americans insisted that no figure could be agreed, and the British worried about the effect on the Ruhr, which lay in their occupation zone.
Stalin and Molotov insisted on the western Neisse as Poland’s border. A Polish delegation arrived, much to the annoyance of the French who felt that they should be present, too. The Lublin Committee sat up over sandwiches and whisky till 1.30 a. m. with the British. Mikolajczyk handed Harriman a note saying proper elections were impossible so long as the Red Army and NKVD remained in Poland.
Byrnes evolved a package deal, linking German reparations and Poland’s western frontier. He pointed out that moving the border as Moscow wanted would make payment of reparations difficult since the areas acquired by Warsaw contained raw materials needed in Germany.
In addition, the Soviets had already removed large amounts of German plant. Setting a sum for payment as the USSR wished would mean Washington would have to put money into Germany to enable it to satisfy Moscow. That the United States would not do.
Stalin pleaded a cold and sent Molotov in his place to a bilateral session with Truman. The Foreign Minister agreed to an American proposal that, instead of a set sum, each occupying power would take what it chose in the way of reparations from its sector, thus, in effect, dividing Germany into four zones, each under the command of a military governor who would decide policy on the spot. This was not dismemberment as originally envisaged, but provided a clear West-East split, with potential for each zone to evolve in different ways.
In addition to what it chose to take from the east, the USSR was to receive 10 per cent of assets from the western areas, plus another 25 per cent in return for supplying food—which never happened. When the British were brought in, Bevin objected, noting that Moscow would get more than the 50 per cent of reparations it had requested. But Britain’s opposition carried less weight than it might once have done.
On Poland, Byrnes-Truman scheme proposed to recognise the western Neisse frontier as the de facto line pending a peace conference. On recognition of the Communist-dominated governments in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, the Secretary of State came up with another formula designed to get round British objections. The Big Three powers would examine the question of establishing relations with such regimes ‘to the extent possible’.
Bevin was not happy. He suggested that reparations should be put on one side, and that the meeting should concentrate on Poland. This was not at all what Byrnes had in mind. With long experience of stitching together packages in the Senate, he insisted that the proposals stood or fell as a whole. If America was to give way on Poland, he wanted to be sure of agreement on reparations. In place of the cloudy wording of Teheran and Yalta, the new administration wanted a clear deal. To hammer in his point, Byrnes told Molotov that he and Truman were preparing to go home, and would leave with agreement on all counts or no agreement at all.
Recovered from his diplomatic illness, Stalin turned up at the next plenary on 31 July, and went along with the American scheme for zonal reparations, with special allocations for the Soviet Union. Inconclusive discussions followed on such matters as the German navy and Truman’s scheme to internationalise waterways running between countries. Then, at a night session on 1 August, the other key points in Byrnes’s package were sewn up. Diplomatic recognition of the new regimes in eastern Europe was watered down to a statement that peace treaties should be concluded with those countries, as well as with Finland. The final definition of Poland’s western border should await a peace conference. Pending that, former German territories up to the western Neisse and East Prussia, except for areas taken by the USSR by the sea, ‘shall be under the administration of the Polish state’.
‘The Conference can, I believe, be considered a success,’ Stalin said finally. At which, after thanks to the Foreign Ministers, Truman declared the summit closed. As he bade farewell and left for home, he said he hoped the next meeting would be in Washington. ‘God willing,’ Stalin replied. Though they both would lead their countries into the 1950s, they would not meet again.
* * * *
The personalities at the top of the wartime alliance had always been vital, their relationships crucial. Now, Roosevelt was dead. Churchill was out of office, succeeded by a Labour government ready to take a tough line with Moscow while greatly broadening the welfare state, implementing nationalisations and achieving Roosevelt’s goal of granting independence to India. For Eden, the shock was brought home when Japan surrendered on 14 August. He was dining with Churchill at Claridge’s Hotel. After the meal, they listened to Attlee giving the news on the BBC. Then ‘there was a silence. Mr Churchill had not been asked to say any word to the nation. We went home. Journey’s End.’ The British had got into their ‘glorious struggle... in one muddle and have come out of it in another,’ Churchill wrote.
After the defeat of Japan, America cut off Lend-Lease to Britain. Cadogan laid aside his customary disdain to note in his diary: ‘The problems ahead of us are manifold and awful. But I’ve lived through England’s great hour, and if I can see no falling away from that, I shall die happy.’20
In Washington, the cast changed, too. Morgenthau was gone. Two months after Potsdam, Stimson resigned. Having felt snubbed by Truman and Byrnes, Harriman left the embassy in Moscow. Hopkins’s life was drawing to a close as his liver disintegrated. He had a stand with a bottle of blood plasma rigged up by his bed so that he could insert the needle himself. But his stomach would not take food, and he sometimes woke up soiled by diarrhoea. He could still hit his habitual wry note, writing to Churchill that his cirrhosis was ‘not due, I regret to say, from taking too much alcohol’. That letter, on 22 January 1945, was his last. As his body turned to skin and bone and his gaze became vacant, the carpenter of the alliance slipped away, ‘You can’t beat destiny,’ he told his valet. On 29 January, his wife left his bedside to cable friends with news of his condition. When she returned, Harry Hopkins was dead. He was just fifty-five.
* * * *
Reporting to the American people on his return from Europe, Truman noted that: ‘Nearly every international agreement has in it an element of compromise.’ He had let Poland go. Though a referendum in 1946 gave strong support to Mikolajczyk’s party, a mixture of fraud and harrassment earned the Communists a large majority when a general election was held the following year; Moscow’s control became complete as opposition leaders fled the country. Germany was divided into zones dominated by the Soviets and the West, which would go their separate ways for the next half-century.
The Cold War had taken shape during the hot war. Potsdam opened the age of atomic anxiety as the world split in two—a division to become even greater when Chiang Kai-shek lost power to Mao at the end of 1949. The accidental alliance was over; as Churchill remarked in a speech to the Commons in 1944 the marvel was that it had survived. With victory, divergences of ideology, geography and national cultures that had been submerged by common need rose to the surface.
The threat they faced had convinced three strong and very different leaders of the absolute importance of cooperation, however strained it might become. Though there were many side roads, many moments of indecision, many episodes when linguistic gloss overlaid reality, they knew two things - they had to defeat the evil enemy and, to do so, they had to remain in alliance.
Each played his role to the utmost. First into the pit, Churchill used all his powers of rhetoric and emotion to court Roosevelt, but was also ready to cut territorial percentages with Stalin; he warded America off from a potentially disastrous invasion of France in 1942, and identified the danger of Soviet power in Europe.
Forced into war ahead of his planning, Stalin saw his country take huge losses, but knew more clearly than either of the other two leaders what he wanted, using his army to get it and constructing a national security empire stretching to the middle of Europe. ‘In politics,’ he observed at Potsdam, ‘one should be guided by the calculation of forces.’
Always the most sensitive to domestic opinion, Roosevelt moved his country from isolationism to internationalism and created an organisation which was meant to keep the peace. But he left no road map and, having decided from the start not to confront Stalin, could do nothing to turn words into action in the half of Europe taken by the Red Army. Had he lived, he might have produced a joker, on the evidence of his performance, one must doubt it.
With Roosevelt dead and Churchill out of office, only the dictator with his clear priorities remained in power—for another eight years. The alliance had rid the world of Nazism and its Japanese equivalent. But this could only be done in a way that would move the world to nearly fifty years of cold confrontation. The alliance had been for war, not peace. It ended by dividing the globe more sharply and on a broader scale than
Ever before. Europe was more clearly organised, and less prone to war, each of its nations living within clearly defined boundaries overseen by two superpowers under the umbrella of the nuclear stand-off.
Western Europe thrived under the shield of Pax Americana while the eastern half of the continent was confined in the Soviet Empire. The outcome of the alliance was not one that could be openly admitted, particularly not in the West. There would be major conflicts, especially in Asia, which would take millions more lives and cause great destruction. But, in Europe, neither side could risk a fresh war on the scale of the one they had just won. When that stand-off ended, the continent could move into a new era of peaceful cooperation.
Sixty years on, Roosevelt might grin at the triumph of the American capitalism he had rescued; Churchill might growl at the loss of Empire but not be too unhappy at the way his country had followed his lead in continuing to punch above its weight—and glory in the way American presidents evoke him as a heroic role model; Stalin would have deplored the break-up of the Soviet Union, but, no doubt, made a sardonic observation about the new authoritarianism in the Kremlin.
The Big Three now belong to history, as does the 45-year confrontation for which their alliance paved the way. As has so often been the case with such alliances, theirs was forced on them by enemies. Once those foes had been defeated, the tripartite structure fell apart, though, to this day, British prime ministers hail the ‘special relationship’ conjured up by Churchill during the conflict and enshrined in memoirs.
Still, without the success of the Big Three in maintaining their coalition for four years, the world would have become an unrecognisable place. No Cold War, no hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, no United Nations, no European Union, no international monetary and financial organisations, no Communist China, no end to the Holocaust, no state of Israel.
The prospect would have been of an America standing on its own, wielding great political, economic and military force but torn between global empire and a return to atomic-tipped isolationism as it pursued the endless task of trying to make its interests and values rhyme—would Truman have unleashed atomic warfare in Europe, too? Alone against the Axis in Europe, Britain could hardly have survived as much of a mediumsized power—the idea that it might have stood aside from the war and held on to the Empire makes no sense given the strain on its economy, the
Fuhrer’s intentions, Japan’s advance in Asia, German naval power, rising nationalism in India and the threat to the Suez Canal. Even if its space saved it from the Wehrmacht’s advance, the Soviet Union would have found resistance much harder, and might well have reached the second pact with Berlin, which Stalin wanted to pursue in 1941. That would have enabled the Third Reich to survive and maintain its dominion in Europe. The oil of the Middle East would have been up for grabs. Japan could still have been forced to surrender by America’s atomic bombs, but the Far East would have become either a theatre of anarchy or a long-term US protectorate, with Washington endlessly in two minds about which side to back in China.31
In banishing such what-ifs of history, the Big Three played the most important role of any group of leaders in the twentieth century.
Their fractured but necessary partnership showed the strains and challenges involved in constructing and maintaining such a coalition of global partners, the need for subtle judgments and diplomacy, and for recognition of the fundamentals of world politics. As Churchill’s remark at the very start of this book demonstrates, all three knew the primacy of alliance in achieving the common objective they had set—or been forced to set by their adversaries. For Britain, the alliance was the lifeline. For the Soviet Union, it was the avenue to super-power status. For America, it represented the recognition that, however great its power and whatever unacceptable accommodations were involved, the United States could not walk alone in seeking over-arching objectives reaching far beyond its narrow national interests. Those considerations are as valid today as they were between 1941 and 1945.
World History
