Before the fighting had stopped, the Allies had begun to look
ahead to the 'post-war.' Each pursued his own interests. Roosevelt's
ideas had been summed up in the Atlantic Charter. Although
America harboured no secret plans for conquest, the
financial and economic boom brought by the war magnified her
domination of the American continent at the expense of France
and especially Great Britain. Ironically the American President's
chief concern as the war was ending was that a third world
war should not follow. This was the only event which he imagined
could poison a lasting friendship among the Three Great
Allies. He devoted all his efforts to preserving this friendship.
Stalin had hesitated to accept the Atlantic Charter, but now he
did not hesitate to show his hand. Populations which had once
been part of Russia were not to be given a chance to oppose
annexation. The master of the Kremlin intended to keep all territories
acquired under the Russo- German pact. In September
1944 he demanded back the territories which Finland had absorbed
with the help of Wehrmacht.
Churchill hammered out two principles ol his own. He wanted
to prevent anv recurrence of a German hegemony over Europe;
and he wanted to preserve British power. He did not {eel that
the provisions of the Atlantic Charter applied to subjects of the
British Empire. As for Europe, he may have reckoned that the
Red Army would be too exhausted to continue fighting after
Soviet Russia had been liberated, but the Red Army's westward
advance placed Stalin in a strong negotiating position which
Stalin would use to advantage. Churchill flew to Moscow in
( )< tober 1944 and haggled out a bargain with Stalin, in which a
complicated system of percentages was devised to determine who
would have how much influence over which territories in
central Europe.
In February 1945 at Yalta, and again in July 1945 at Potsdam,
the Americans and the British occupied a weak position. At the
meeting in the Crimea, they were just recovering from the German
attack on the Ardennes. At both meetings their chief aim
was to enlist the Russians' help against Japan. At Potsdam Truman,
who succeeded Roosevelt, knew that he could rely on the
atom bomb, but no one knew what effect it would have on the
war. Signs of conflict between Soviet Russia and Great Britain
worried Roosevelt, though he hoped to keep America out of
it. Regardless of later accusations that Roosevelt conceded too
much to Stalin, he actually did make an effort to avoid nettling
him. For all Truman's suspicions and obstinacy, he struck much
the same conciliatory tone at Potsdam. The Anglo-Americans
agreed to withdraw their forces from the zone occupied by the
Russians in Germany, even though Churchill would have preferred
to leave them there as a bargaining point in later negotiations
with Stalin, but Churchill was forced to yield. Britain was
no longer a front-rank power. The Labour Party swept Churchill
out of power in the parliamentary elections which followed
victory in Europe. His successor, Clement Attlee was not as great
a man as Churchill. He took a keener interest in internal British
affairs, than in negotiations with Russia and America, in which
he played the role of the outsider. The Yalta conference did not
carve up the world, as everyone has said and written since, but it
did create a form ofjoint governance, later affirmed at Potsdam,
by which the two super-powers thrown up by the war would
regulate world affairs. Together they settled a number of questions
which had been left in abeyance - the occupation and
administration of Germany, the Polish question, the status oi the
central European countries which had been satellites ol t he*
Reich, the future of the colonial empires, the occupation and
administration ofJapan, the creation and organization ol «1 new
League of Nations. Other minor issues were also settled, such
as rights of access through the Turkish straits, the status ol Tangiers,
the evacuation of Iran, the occupation ol Austria, and
freedom of navigation in international waterways.
World History
