The Online Library of Liberty

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• Introduction
• 1: The First Crusade
• 2: Communism and Fascism: Offspring of the War
• 3: The Collapse of Versailles
• 4: Debacle In the West
• 5: “again and Again and Again”
• 6: Road to War: the Atlantic
• 7: Road to War: the Pacific
• 8: The Coalition of the Big Three
• 9: The Munich Called Yalta: War’s End
• 10: Wartime Illusions and Delusions
• 11: Poland: the Great Betrayal
• 12: Germany Must Be Destroyed
• 13: No War, But No Peace
• 14: Crusade In Retrospect

8

The Coalition of the Big Three

Pearl Harbor was quickly followed by declarations of war on America by Germany, Italy, and the Axis satellites. The Japanese Government invoked the Tripartite Pact on December 31 and called on Germany and Italy to fulfill their obligations as cosignatories.

Why Hitler kept this promise, when he broke so many others, is a question to which no positive answer can be given, in the light of available information. Perhaps he regarded it as a matter of prestige, and of revenge for the undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. The Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, shrewdly appraised the significance of what was to happen at Pearl Harbor when he wrote in his diary on December 3, after the Japanese Ambassador had told Mussolini of his government’s intention:

“Now that Roosevelt has succeeded in his maneuver, not being able to enter the war directly, he has succeeded by an indirect route—forcing the Japanese to attack him.”2

It would have been a clever move for Hitler to have abstained from this declaration of war. There would have then been strong pressure of American public opinion in favor of a concentration of military effort in the Pacific. The German and Italian declarations of war completely freed the hands of the Roosevelt Administration to direct the main effort against Germany, according to the plans drawn up by American and British staff officers early in 1941.

The diplomatic as well as the military conduct of this global crusade against the Axis powers was in the hands of three men, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin. It was fashionable to refer to the conflict as “a people’s war.” But in practice the three leaders of the strongest United Nations powers took their decisions in the utmost secrecy and with a minimum of popular influence and control. It may well be said of the two meetings of the Big Three at Teheran and Yalta that seldom was so much concealed from so many by so few.

Of the three partners in the coalition, Stalin was the most clear-sighted and consistent in his political aims. And he had the most reason for satisfaction with the political landscape of the world when hostilities ended.

Stalin pursued two main objectives. The first was to realize certain old-fashioned imperialist objectives of Tsarist Russia in eastern Europe and eastern Asia. The second was to create world-wide conditions for Communist revolution. For it is not true, as is sometimes suggested, that Stalin is interested only in protecting Russian national interests, that the dream of world conquest through world Communist revolution died with Trotsky.

The disagreement between Stalin and Trotsky on this point was one of timing and tactics, not of grand strategy. Trotsky, a doctrinaire Marxist revolutionary, wished to support Communist revolutions everywhere, using Soviet Russia as a base. He was convinced that the Russian Revolution would degenerate and fail unless it were supported and stimulated by Communist upheavals in industrially more advanced countries.

Stalin, more practical, cynical, and opportunist, believed that it was necessary to build up a powerful militarized state in Russia before getting involved in foreign adventures. Hence his insistence on a frantic pace of development for war industries during the five-year plans, regardless of the cost in human suffering and deprivation for the Russian people.

Such a state could impose Soviet-sponsored political and economic changes on Russia’s weaker neighbors at the first convenient opportunity. At the same time, Stalin kept a tight rein on Communist parties outside of Russia. He regarded these as useful volunteer agencies of propaganda and espionage in peacetime, as useful centers of sabotage and treason when the day of Soviet conquest should arrive.

Belief in the necessity of world revolution is repeatedly stressed in Stalin’s writings. The following passage in his authoritative book, Leninism, is characteristic:

One also finds in Stalin’s writings repeated references to war as the generator of revolution. On occasion the Soviet dictator could speak pacifically to “bourgeois” visitors. But it is significant that his statements about the possible peaceful co-existence of communism and capitalism have never been given the wide circulation accorded to his more orthodox militant utterances.

This son of an alcoholic cobbler in a remote little Asiatic town was as shrewd, cunning, and calculating as the cleverest disciple of Talleyrand and Metternich. Stalin’s diplomatic masterpiece was his promotion, through his pact with Hitler, of a war from which he hoped to remain aloof.

This attractive dream of watching the capitalist world tear itself to pieces and then stepping in to collect the fragments was shattered by Hitler’s attack in June 1941. The first months of the war were marked by severe defeats for the Red Army, defeats which were as much political as military in character.3 There were moments when Stalin most probably felt that the very existence of his regime was hanging in the balance.

But even when Moscow was threatened and a third of European Russia was occupied by the Germans, the Soviet dictator was intent on keeping the spoils of his pact with Hitler. When the tide of the war definitely turned in the winter of 1942-43, with the Russian victory at Stalingrad and the expulsion of the Axis forces from North Africa, Stalin was in a position to resume his march toward his goal: expansion of Soviet and Communist power in Europe and in Asia.

In this march he received great and probably unexpected aid in the policy which was consistently followed by President Roosevelt and his most influential lieutenant and adviser, Harry Hopkins. A firm Anglo-American front, such as Churchill desired, would have set some bounds to Soviet expansion. But no such front was established until after the end of the war.

Churchill was a champion of British national and imperial interests. He made no secret of his desire to preserve the British Empire intact. As he said on one occasion: “I have not become His Majesty’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

Churchill’s energy, his mental resilience, his physical endurance were prodigious. But he was in the difficult position of being boxed in between two more powerful allies. The Soviet Union put in the field enormously larger land forces. The United States possessed far greater reserves of manpower, much larger natural resources, and higher industrial productivity. Churchill had to reckon not only with the historic antagonism between Russian and British interests in the Balkans and the Near East but with coolness and suspicion in regard to certain issues on Roosevelt’s part.

There was a prolonged Anglo-American difference of opinion, partly military and partly political, about the time and scope and method of invading the European continent. Churchill remembered vividly the heavy price in human lives which Britain had paid in World War I. He wished to postpone the cross-Channel operation which American military leaders favored in 1942 and 1943. The British Premier was also a persistent advocate of a Balkan invasion which American military opinion was inclined to dismiss as an undesirable sideshow.

In this last dispute there was a political angle. A successful Anglo-American occupation of the Balkan countries would have tipped the political balance in this part of the world in favor of the West and against Russia. It was a relief to Stalin to find Marshall, Eisenhower, and other American generals who thought in purely military terms opposing Churchill’s scheme which would have limited the extent of Soviet conquest.

Churchill was handicapped in his wartime diplomacy because Roosevelt seems to have suspected British postwar designs more than Russian. Elliott Roosevelt is certainly not the most profound and probably not the most reliable of political reporters. Yet his accounts of his talks with his father in moments of relaxation during the war are not without value and indicate persistent suspicion of Churchill’s designs without any corresponding distrust of Stalin.

According to Elliott Roosevelt, the President said to him, at the time of the meeting at which the Atlantic Charter was signed:

“America won’t help England in this war simply so that she will be able to ride roughshod over colonial peoples.”4

On another occasion Roosevelt is represented as saying: “Great Britain signed the Atlantic Charter. I hope they realize the United States means to make them live up to it.”5

There is no record that Roosevelt ever expressed an intention to “make” Stalin live up to the Atlantic Charter in his treatment of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states. After Teheran Roosevelt is quoted as offering the following explanation of United States policy:

Stalin, who loved to practice the old maxim Divide and Rule, could have wished nothing better.

Churchill tried to reach a satisfactory separate agreement with Stalin. As is shown in another chapter, Churchill took the initiative in the dismemberment of Poland at Teheran. In an attempt to “compensate” Poland for the territory which he wished to hand over to Stalin, the British Prime Minister threw the weight of his influence behind the idea of expelling millions of Germans from the eastern part of that country. This is made clear in Churchill’s statement to the House of Commons on December 15, 1944:

So one of the most inhuman and politically unwise decisions of the provisional peace settlement, the expulsion of millions of Germans from lands that had been German for centuries, was approved in advance by Churchill. The betrayal of Poland, the acquiescence in creating a terrific refugee problem in Germany, the support of Tito in Yugoslavia, were all part of an attempt to strike an acceptable deal with Stalin.

For a time Churchill thought he had succeeded. He confidently told the House of Commons on October 27, 1944, that “our relations with Soviet Russia were never more close, intimate and cordial than they are at the present time.” In an earlier broadcast, on November 29, 1942, he ventured the hopeful prediction that “there will be a far higher sense of comradeship around the council table than existed among the victors at Versailles.”

But after the damage had been done, the wrong decisions taken, the dishonorable departure from Atlantic Charter principles accepted, the British Prime Minister experienced a very substantial change of opinion. In the introduction to the first volume of his war memoirs, written in March 1948, one finds this striking admission:

“The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.”7 (Italics supplied.)

Churchill was one of the leading promoters of Britain’s and of America’s participation in the Second Crusade. Yet the sharpest critic could scarcely pronounce a more devastating judgment upon its result. The British statesman was in a still gloomier mood in October 1948. He then told a Conservative party organization that “nothing stands between Europe today and complete subjugation to Communist tyranny but the atomic bomb in American possession.”8

Roosevelt’s role in the war, because of the vast preponderance of American military power, was even more significant than Churchill’s. But there was no political purpose to give America’s voice at the council table a weight of authority corresponding to American military power. Roosevelt bears complete and undivided responsibility for the development of American foreign policy during the war. The Secretary of State was the elderly and ailing Cordell Hull, who was obliged by illness to resign in November 1944. Hull did not even attend the Big Three conferences at Teheran and Yalta and exerted little if any influence on what went on there.

Hull’s successor, Edward R. Stettinius, was surely one of the most naive and inexperienced men in the field of foreign affairs who ever occupied that office. A witty former colleague remarked that Stettinius could not distinguish the Ukraine from a musical instrument. It required a battery of promoters at the San Francisco conference which inaugurated the United Nations to keep Stettinius from continually muffing his lines and making his country appear ridiculous.

Hull himself was of extremely mediocre caliber as a diplomat. He was equally deficient in first-hand knowledge of foreign lands and foreign languages. An able career diplomat who served under him complained that it was impossible to induce him to make decisions of the greatest urgency within a reasonable length of time or to keep his ambassadors reasonably familiar with the development of Administration policy.

Hull was a popular figure because of his reputation for rugged integrity and because of a Lincolnesque boyhood. The future Secretary of State educated himself while working at farming and logging in the rough hill country of western Tennessee. He had a fund of homely mountaineer stories which he was fond of telling on all occasions.

But, however attractive Hull might have been as a personality, he was not well qualified to conduct America’s foreign relations. He was too much inclined to regard the enunciation of a series of pompous platitudes as a major achievement in statesmanship. From one irrepressible Washington hostess he earned a revealing nickname: “The hillbilly Polonius.”

Even if Hull and Stettinius had been more effective diplomats, it was not in Roosevelt’s power-loving and secretive nature to let the threads of foreign policy slip out of his hands. The aims of his highly personal policy may be briefly summarized as follows:

Appeasement of Stalin at any cost.

Complete military, political, and economic smashing of Germany and Japan.

Evolution of the military coalition known as the United Nations into a world association, capable of preserving the peace.

A rather vaguely conceived new deal in colonial relations, with trusteeship arrangements replacing old-fashioned imperialist rule.

A postwar effort to promote the relief and reconstruction of the “peace-loving nations,”9 that is, the members of the United Nations coalition, with a liberal use of United States funds.

Roosevelt’s admirers may dispute the word “appeasement” as descriptive of his Russian policy. Yet this word appears in one of the most authoritative discussions of this policy, published by Forrest Davis in two articles which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of May 13 and May 20, 1944. These articles were read and approved by Roosevelt in advance of publication. After stating that Roosevelt’s objectives call for “finesse, a skillful statecraft that cannot always be exposed to view” and emphasizing that the President voided the slightest cause of offense to the Kremlin, Davis continues:

A similar picture is conveyed by William C. Bullitt, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union and to France, and for a time one of Roosevelt’s favored advisers. Writing in the magazine Life in the autumn of 1948, Bullitt asserts that Roosevelt, acting on the advice of Hopkins, hoped to convert Stalin from imperialism to democratic collaboration by following these methods:

• 1. To give Stalin without stint or limit everything he asked for the prosecution of the war and to refrain from asking Stalin for anything in return.
• 2. To persuade Stalin to adhere to statements of general aims, like the Atlantic Charter.
• 3. To let Stalin know that the influence of the White House was being used to encourage American public opinion to take a favorable view of the Soviet Union.
• 4. To meet Stalin face to face and persuade him into an acceptance of Christian ways and democratic principles.

This is certainly an accurate nutshell summary of Roosevelt’s Russian policy during the war. At the President’s request, Bullitt prepared a memorandum, setting forth the reasons for believing that such a policy would fail. After a discussion of this memorandum lasting three hours, the President said to Bullitt, according to the latter’s testimony:

So, on the “hunch” of a man even less acquainted than he was with Russian history and Communist philosophy, Roosevelt set out on a course which was predestined to end in diplomatic bankruptcy. In view of the President’s shrewdness in domestic politics, his naïveté and downright ignorance of Soviet politics and economics are surprising. The Soviet political system had moved toward increasingly unrestrained dictatorship. The Soviet economic system had become one of isolationist autarchy. Yet Roosevelt cheerfully remarked to Frances Perkins, after his return from Teheran:

“I really think the Russians will go along with me about having no spheres of influence and about agreements for free ports all over the world. That is, ports which can be used freely at all times by all the allies. I think that is going to be the answer.”10

Perhaps Roosevelt’s most realistic remark, also to Frances Perkins, was, “I don’t understand the Russians. I don’t know what makes them tick.”

Roosevelt framed his policy of “charming” Stalin into good will and good behavior with the close co-operation of Harry Hopkins. The latter was, after the President, the most powerful man in America during the war.

An ex-social worker with a passion for night life and gambling on horse races, Hopkins was never so happy as when he was living off or spending other people’s money. He enjoyed abundant opportunity to satisfy this urge as administrator of WPA and later as dispenser of lend-lease aid. Another worker in the New Deal vineyard, Harold Ickes, paid the following tributes to Hopkins as a spender in articles published in the Saturday Evening Post of June 12 and June 19, 1948:

Hopkins had been a prominent figure throughout the New Deal. During the war years he rose to a status of unique power as the President’s chief confidential adviser. His influence with Roosevelt probably exceeded that of Colonel E. M. House with Wilson, if only because the President’s infirmity made him more dependent on a companion who would sit with him in periods of relaxation.

A person familiar with the Roosevelt household believes that the beginning of Hopkins’s role as supreme court favorite may be traced to the physical collapse of the President’s secretary, Marguerite Le Hand, who had previously filled the role of companion. Hopkins came to dinner at the White House, became ill (he was afflicted with chronic stomach trouble), and stayed on indefinitely. Mrs. Roosevelt once observed in her column that it had been a great sacrifice for Hopkins to live in the White House.

Anyone who stands on the dizzy pinnacle of power and responsibility occupied by a wartime president is apt to feel the need of relaxed confidential companionship. Hopkins supplied this requirement. His personal devotion to Roosevelt was absolute. He became the President’s other self, able to anticipate how Roosevelt’s mind would react to a given situation. Working without a definite post, he was able to take a mass of responsibility off the President’s shoulders.

Despite his lack of higher education, Hopkins possessed a naturally keen and vigorous mind. Churchill, who could always clothe flattering appreciation in an attractive phrase, humorously proposed to give him a title: Lord Root of the Matter. His services in cutting through red tape and concentrating on essentials at important conferences are attested by such American and British military leaders as General Marshall and Sir John Dill. Hopkins did not spare himself and often took trips and exposed himself to exertions which imposed a severe strain on a feeble constitution.

But his defects in the very high and responsible position which he held far outweighed his merits. He was profoundly ignorant in the field of foreign affairs. The very eulogistic biography of Robert E. Sherwood does not reveal in Hopkins any serious knowledge of such subjects as history, politics, and diplomacy.

Hopkins was not a Communist or a fellow traveler. In fact, he seems to have held no political or economic philosophy of any kind except a belief, at once naive and cynical, that Franklin D. Roosevelt should be kept in office indefinitely by a liberal expenditure of public funds. It has been disputed whether Hopkins made the statement:

“We will tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.”

That this represented his working philosophy can scarcely be doubted. Hopkins’s constant advocacy of appeasing the Soviet Union, of giving everything to Stalin and asking nothing in return, was not a result of fanatical devotion to Marxist and Leninist dogmas. It was rather a case of following the line of least resistance. After all, the entire theory on which the Second Crusade was based, especially the insistence on the complete crushing of Germany and Japan, made logical sense only on the assumption that Stalin would turn out to be a peace-loving democrat at heart.

Neither Roosevelt nor Hopkins possessed a profoundly reflective type of mind. Yet both must have given at least occasional passing thought to the situation America would face in the postwar world. What that situation would be if Stalin should live up to his own past record of aggression and bad faith, to his own profession of faith in world revolution, was too painful a prospect to face squarely and realistically. So the President and his confidential aide piled appeasement on appeasement and proved their capacity to “get along” with Stalin by the simple and easy method of giving the Soviet dictator everything he wanted and asking nothing in return.

Because Hopkins was a man ignorant in foreign affairs, he was amazingly gullible. Stalin could tell him the most obvious untruths without exciting contradiction or even surprise, because Hopkins was too unfamiliar with the historical facts concerned.

For example, Stalin informed Hopkins, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to Moscow in the summer of 1945, that in the course of twenty-five years the Germans had twice invaded Russia by way of Poland and that Germany had been able to do this because “Poland had been regarded as a part of the cordon sanitaire around the Soviet Union.”11

Now at the time of the First World War, Poland did not exist as an independent state. Most of Poland’s ethnic territory was a part of the Russian Empire. And at the time of the second German invasion, in 1941, Poland’s independence had again been destroyed—as a result of the Stalin-Hitler pact. So Stalin’s assertion that Russia had twice been invaded by Germany because of the existence of a hostile Poland was sheer fantasy. Yet Hopkins seems to have accepted it without question.

Stalin followed this up with a declaration that “there was no intention on the part of the Soviet Union to interfere in Poland’s internal affairs.” This, it may be noted, was after the imposition on Poland of a made-in-Moscow government, after the treacherous arrest by Russian soldiers of the Polish underground leaders, after the infiltration of the Polish Army and the Polish police with Russian “advisers,” after the stamping out with ruthless terror of independent Polish nationalist movements. Again Hopkins swallowed this obvious falsehood without gagging. Very probably he believed it.

There is small reason for surprise that, as Ambassador Harriman noted: “Stalin in greeting Hopkins at Teheran showed more open and warm cordiality than he had been known to show to any foreigner.” Such a naive and trusting benefactor in such an influential position was well worth a demonstration of cordiality to the Soviet dictator.

It is interesting to note how consistently American policy, in small things as in large, was keyed to the objective of pleasing and “getting along” with Stalin. Roosevelt in 1943 remarked to the Polish Ambassador, Ciechanowski, “Harry gets along like a house afire with Stalin—in fact they seem to have become buddies.”12 Who was gaining from this fraternization, the Soviet Union or the United States, was a consideration that seems never to have disturbed Roosevelt’s mind.

But this question did give considerable concern to General John R. Deane, head of the American military mission in Moscow. The Russians were in the habit of requesting large shipments of military items, such as Diesel engines, which were in short supply in the United States and were needed on American fronts. Deane felt that in such cases there should be some explanation of the reality and nature of the Russian need.

But, as Deane found to his disappointment, Soviet military cooperation stopped with unloading the ships which brought some eleven billion dollars’ worth of lend-lease supplies. Supplementary information was withheld.

Deane discussed this matter with Anastasius Mikoyan, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Trade. He received no satisfaction.

Mikoyan was indeed soon to be proved right. General Deane sent a telegram to the Chiefs of Staff in Washington on January 16, 1944, suggesting that allocations of material in short supply in the United States should be made only on the recommendation of the American Military Mission in Moscow. General Marshall approved this suggestion. But, as Deane reports:

A letter from Deane to Marshall, dated December 2, 1944, reflects the atmosphere of one-sided appeasement which dominated American-Soviet relations until the end of the war:

The first meeting of the Big Three took place in Teheran, capital of Iran, then under joint Soviet-British occupation, and lasted from November 26 until December 1, 1943. There had already been several Anglo-American, Anglo-Russian, and American-Russian contacts.

Churchill came to America after Pearl Harbor, late in December 1941, and the secret informal British-American understanding which had existed for many months before the Japanese attack assumed more concrete form. A co-ordinating organ, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with three American and three British representatives, was set up.

The Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, visited Washington in June 1942 and pressed for the creation of a second front on the European continent. An ambiguous communiqué was issued on June 11 stating that “full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942.” This the Soviet leaders chose to interpret as a pledge of action, although the state of American and British preparations would have made a large-scale landing in France in 1942 an extremely risky enterprise.

It was left to Churchill, on a visit to Moscow in August, to break the news to Stalin that there would be no second front in Europe in 1942. Stalin showed anger to the point of becoming insulting. If the British infantry would only fight the Germans as the Russians had done, said the Soviet dictator, it would not be frightened of them. Churchill adroitly retorted: “I pardon that remark only on account of the bravery of the Russian troops.”

Both Stimson and Marshall were in favor of launching the cross-Channel invasion, first known under the code name BOLERO, in 1943. But Churchill, never enthusiastic over the project, won Roosevelt’s approval for the North African expedition in November 1942 and for the idea of limiting operations in 1943 to the Mediterranean area.

Roosevelt, Churchill, the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and other American, British, and Canadian civilian and military notables met in conference at Quebec in August 1943. Stalin had been invited to the conference but refused to come. This was the fourth time he had rejected Roosevelt’s persistent overtures for a personal meeting. The Soviet dictator gave the impression of being in a sour mood in the summer of 1943. He recalled his relatively western-minded ambassadors, Litvinov and Maisky, from Washington and London and replaced them with less prominent, grimmer, and less communicative successors, Gromyko and Gusev.

The year 1943 buzzed with rumors of secret Soviet-German peace discussions. American Army Intelligence reported negotiations between German and Soviet representatives in the neighborhood of Stockholm late in June. Apparently the stumbling block in these talks was German unwillingness to evacuate the Ukraine unconditionally.16 There were some meetings between a German representative in Stockholm named Kleist and Alexandrov, a member of the European division of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The talks led to no positive results, partly because Hitler conceived the suspicion that Alexandrov was a Jew, partly because Hitler and the German Foreign Office suspected that Stalin was putting on the negotiations mainly for the purpose of frightening Roosevelt and Churchill.17

The Japanese Government was anxious to promote a Soviet-German peace, so that the full military power of the Axis could be employed against America and Great Britain. Josef Goebbels, in his diary for April 22, 1943, notes that “the Japanese have always tried hard to end the conflict between the Reich and the Soviet Union in one way or another. If this were possible in some way the war would assume a totally different aspect. Of course I don’t believe that such a possibility will arise in the foreseeable future.”18

The skepticism of Goebbels was vindicated. But the fear of a separate peace between Germany and the Soviet Union seems to have exerted a paralyzing influence upon Anglo-American diplomacy vis-à-vis Stalin. This fear was apparently stimulated by hints which the Soviet Government deliberately dropped from time to time. The Soviet chargé d’affaires, Andrei Gromyko, informed Hull on September 16, 1943, that Russia had rejected a Japanese overture designed to promote a separate peace between Russia and Japan.19

This could be construed as a veiled intimation of what might happen if the United States and Great Britain should fail to acquiesce in Stalin’s desires for expansion in Eastern Europe. There is every reason to believe that pressure of this kind represented nothing but bluff. Stalin had far more to lose than the United States from a breakup of the wartime coalition. But the bluff was apparently not without effect.

Hopkins brought with him to the Quebec conference a curious and significant document, entitled “Russia’s Position.” It was attributed to “a very high level United States military strategic estimate.” In all probability it was endorsed by General Marshall. Its salient passages were as follows:

The political naïveté of this judgment, emanating from a high military source, is breathtaking. The Soviet Union was to be permitted and even encouraged to establish over Europe the totalitarian domination which America was fighting Hitler to prevent. And every effort was to be made to enlist the Soviet Union as an ally against Japan without even passing consideration of the probability that Soviet domination of East Asia would be no less harmful to American interests than Japanese.

Whoever prepared this document rendered a very bad service to his country. For, as Sherwood says, “this estimate was obviously of great importance as indicating the policy which guided the making of decisions at Teheran and, much later, at Yalta.”

The foreign ministers of America, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union met for the first time in Moscow in October 1943. Up to that time Secretary Hull had been a bulwark against appeasement in Washington. He had squelched a British maneuver to accept Soviet demands for the annexation of Eastern Poland and the Baltic states in the spring of 1942.

But Stalin and Molotov made unusual attempts to conciliate and placate Hull in Moscow. By the time the conference was over, the venerable Tennessean had reached the conclusion that the Soviet leaders were pretty good fellows, after all. Any intention he may have cherished before going to Moscow of pressing for a showdown on the Polish question on the basis of the Atlantic Charter had evaporated.

Several considerations probably contributed to the marked weakening of Hull’s stand, in practice, for the moral principles which he was so fond of proclaiming in diplomatic communications. He possessed one characteristic of a man unsure of himself. He was abnormally sensitive to criticism. A number of American left-wing organs had been conducting a violent campaign against Hull as an anti-Soviet reactionary.21

Hull was desperately anxious to refute this criticism by proving that he could get along with the Soviet leaders. Stalin and Molotov seem to have taken his measure very quickly. They cheered the old man to the echo when he called for “a drumhead court-martial of Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and their arch-accomplices” and for the hanging of all “instigators of the war.”

Stalin astonished and delighted Hull by assuring him that after the Allies succeeded in defeating Germany the Soviet Union would join in defeating Japan. After saying good-bye to Hull and walking away a few steps, Stalin walked back and shook hands again. This gesture seems to have made a considerable impression upon the Secretary. “I thought to myself,” he writes in retrospect, “that any American having Stalin’s personality and approach might well reach high public office in my own country.”22

Hull at Moscow on a smaller scale repeated the experience of Wilson at Paris. He had become obsessed with the idea that the setting up of a postwar United Nations organization, garnished with suitable moral principles, was the key to world peace. As Wilson offered up his fourteen points, one by one, as sacrifices on the altar of the Covenant of the League of Nations, Hull and Roosevelt scrapped the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms in order to woo Stalin’s adhesion to the United Nations.

The one sacrifice was as futile as the other. America never joined the League. And the United Nations has given America no security whatever beyond what it enjoys through its military and industrial power.

Hull, as he tells us, was “truly thrilled” by the signature of the Four Nation Declaration which emerged from the Moscow conference. This Declaration was phrased in broad general terms. It contained no reference to the treatment of Poland, acid test of Soviet willingness to abide by the principles of the Atlantic Charter. Its most positive statement of intention was Article 4, worded as follows:

“They23 recognize the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving States, and open to membership by all such States, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

This Moscow conference was a curtain-raiser for the first meeting of the Big Three in Teheran later in the year. Roosevelt had not wished to go so far as Teheran, which was difficult to reach by plane because of surrounding high mountains. A constitutional question was involved, whether the President could receive and return legislation passed by Congress within the prescribed limit of ten days. But Stalin was adamant. It was Teheran or no meeting, so far as he was concerned. After pleading in vain for Basra, in southern Iran, Roosevelt, as usual in his dealings with the Soviet dictator, gave way.

Before Roosevelt and Churchill went to Teheran, they held a conference on Far Eastern questions in Cairo, with the participation of Chiang Kai-shek. No very binding or important military decisions were taken. The unconditional surrender was affirmed in regard to Japan. War aims in the Orient were stated as follows:

It is not known who deserves the dubious credit of composing this piece of self-righteous moralizing. It may be ranked among the unhappy exhibits of crusading diplomacy, along with the “unconditional surrender” slogan and the Morgenthau Plan. Other powers besides Japan have certainly acquired territory by what might fairly be called violence and greed, and even theft. Japanese aggression, like the aggression which contributed to the building up of the European colonial empires or the aggression that gave the United States a vast area formerly belonging to Mexico, is morally reprehensible. There is an element of rather smug hypocrisy in singling it out for special reprobation and punishment. The cooping up of Japan’s growing population of almost eighty million people within an area smaller than the state of California and their exclusion from the mainland of Asia have not worked out happily from the standpoint of American and British interests, especially in the light of what has happened in China.

From Cairo Roosevelt flew to Teheran, where his long-sought and long-evaded meeting with Stalin took place on November 28. It is noteworthy that the Soviet Government never took the initiative in bringing about wartime conferences with its allies. Stalin was keenly conscious of the psychological advantage of being the wooed, not the wooer, in international relations. So was at least one American observer, the candid and perceptive General Deane.

“No single event of the war,” he wrote, “irritated me more than seeing the President of the United States lifted from wheelchair to automobile, to ship, to shore and to aircraft in order to go halfway around the world as the only possible means of meeting J. V. Stalin.”24

Had Roosevelt matched Stalin in cool-headed aloofness, the monstrous unbalance of power in postwar Europe and Asia could have been averted, or at least mitigated. The President might well have let Stalin ask for lend-lease, instead of sending Harry Hopkins to Moscow to press this aid on the Soviet ruler with both hands. Before America was involved in the war, lend-lease aid could have been made conditional on a specific recognition of the Soviet frontiers of 1939, on a disgorging of the spoils of the Stalin-Hitler pact.

But a gambler is often exposed to the temptation of constantly doubling his stakes. Roosevelt was gambling on the assumption that Stalin was a potential good neighbor who could be appeased. Teheran and its concessions were a natural outgrowth of the policy of constantly making overtures to the Kremlin. Yalta and its still greater concessions followed Teheran as a logical sequel.

After Roosevelt arrived in the Iranian capital, he accepted Stalin’s invitation to move from the American Embassy to a villa in the Soviet compound. The invitation was motivated by a conveniently discovered alleged plot against the President’s security, details of which were never revealed. The attendants in the President’s new quarters were poorly camouflaged Soviet secret service operatives, who were able to keep Roosevelt’s every movement under watchful surveillance.

The President was quick to live up to his role as the constant and cheerful giver. He suggested in his first talk with Stalin that after the war, surplus American and British ships should be handed over to the Soviet Union. Stalin saw nothing to object to in this suggestion. Every big issue at the conference was settled according to Stalin’s wishes. He found allies in the American military representatives in resisting Churchill’s suggestion for Anglo-American operations in the Balkans. OVERLORD, the American-British cross-Channel invasion, was definitely set for the spring or early summer of 1944. Stalin sharply brushed off what he mistakenly regarded as an attempt to raise the question of the independence of the Baltic states. And he learned that Churchill would co-operate in his scheme for annexing almost half of Poland, and that Roosevelt would offer no opposition.25

Roosevelt, still in the role of the cheerful giver, suggested that the Soviet Union should have access to the port of Dairen, main outlet of Manchuria. Stalin himself suggested a doubt. The Chinese, he thought, would object. But Roosevelt was sure the Chinese would agree to a plan for Dairen as a free port under international guarantee. This arrangement was actually confirmed at Yalta and written into the Soviet-Chinese treaty of August 1945. But years have passed, and Dairen remains under complete Soviet control and as far removed from the status of a free port as could well be imagined.

The shrewd and wily Stalin must have derived a certain grim satisfaction from watching Roosevelt try to conciliate him by resorting to horseplay at the expense of Churchill. Finding that his charm was not melting Stalin’s reserve as rapidly as he had hoped, Roosevelt at one of the conferences ostentatiously whispered to Stalin, through an interpreter: “Winston is cranky this morning; he got up on the wrong side of the bed.” The President went on teasing Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, and his habits.26 Churchill glowered and Stalin finally gave satisfaction with a guffaw of laughter. Then Roosevelt, always obsessed with the idea that diplomacy was a matter of hail-fellow-well-met personal relations, felt the day was won.

There was another incident at one of the numerous banquets. Stalin proposed a toast to the execution of 50,000 German officers. Churchill objected to putting anyone to death without trial. Roosevelt tried to pour oil on troubled waters by suggesting a compromise: the execution of 49,000.

In more serious moments Yugoslavia’s fate, as well as Poland’s, was settled at Teheran. It was agreed that “the Partisans in Yugoslavia should be supported by supplies and equipment to the greatest possible extent and also by commando operations.” In Yugoslavia, as in Poland, there were two movements of resistance to the Germans. One, headed by General Drazha Mihailovic, had started as soon as the Germans overran Yugoslavia. It was nationalistic, anti-Communist, and looked to the western powers for support.

The so-called Partisan movement was led by the Moscow-trained Communist Josip Broz Tito. It was Communist in leadership and aims and set as its goal the destruction of Mihailovic and the conservative nationalists. Just as in Poland, although more speedily, the American and British governments decided to throw over their friends and support their enemies.27

For this blunder Churchill bears a large share of responsibility. He allowed himself to be deceived by observers, including his own son, Randolph, and Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, who played down Tito’s communism and Moscow affiliations and presented him as a purely nationalist leader. In the same speech in the House of Commons in which Churchill announced his support for Stalin’s annexationist demands on Poland (February 22, 1944) Churchill declared:

“In Yugoslavia we give our aid to Tito. . . . Every effort in our power will be made to aid and sustain Marshal Tito and his gallant band.”

Later, on May 24, he asserted:

“Marshal Tito has largely sunk his communist aspect in his character as a Yugoslav patriot leader. . . . In one place [Greece] we support a king, in another a Communist—there is no attempt by us to enforce particular ideologies.”

Churchill treated the Yugoslav government-in-exile in the most brusque and cavalier fashion. He put the strongest pressure on young King Peter to discard Mihailovic and endorse Tito. For several months the King and his Prime Minister, Dr. Puric, resisted Churchill’s more and more insistent demands that Mihailovic, War Minister of the government, be dismissed. Finally Churchill threatened that if the King did not yield he would publicly accuse Mihailovic of collaboration with the enemy and treat the King and his government accordingly. In his dealings with Yugoslavia, the conservative British Prime Minister almost accepted Stalin’s standard. Anyone opposed to communism was a “fascist.”28

The young monarch sent a pathetic letter to Roosevelt, who inspired more hopes in the anti-Communist forces of Eastern Europe than he was willing or perhaps able to satisfy.29 The government, King Peter pleaded, could not abandon Mihailovic without betraying the people. “I would become a traitor to my people and to my army in Yugoslavia.” The King’s message continued:

Roosevelt brushed off Peter much as he brushed off the similar pleas of the Polish democratic leader Mikolajczyk.30 He advised the young sovereign to do pretty much what Churchill told him to do. Peter finally yielded and appointed a Croat politician, Ivan Subasic, as Prime Minister in a cabinet designed to pave the way for Tito’s assumption of power. Churchill’s high-handed methods with the government-in-exile found striking illustration in his handling of the cabinet change on May 24, 1944. Puric had refused to resign, and the King had not dismissed him. Churchill made the announcement of the change of cabinet as if Puric’s resignation had already been tendered.31

No one gained much advantage from these unsavory proceedings. Peter lost his throne. Subasic lost his liberty; he soon found that no one could “do business” with Tito. And Churchill soon learned that Britain had lost its last shreds of influence in Yugoslavia.

Teheran set the pattern of appeasing Soviet demands, which is responsible for the disturbed and chaotic condition of postwar Europe and for the Communist conquest of China. But Roosevelt does not seem to have realized, at least until the eve of his death, what a defeat he had sustained. Had he not induced Stalin to unbend to the point of emitting a guffaw of laughter? According to Sherwood,32 Roosevelt then felt sure that Stalin was, to use his own word, “getatable,” “despite his bludgeoning tactics and his attitude of cynicism toward such matters as the rights of small nations.”

Indeed, after the President returned to the United States, he expressed no reservations about the prospect of friendly co-operation with the Soviet dictator. Roosevelt announced in a broadcast on December 24, 1943:

There was the same note of cheery unalloyed optimism in the communiqué issued under the signatures of the Big Three after the Teheran meeting:

“Emerging from these cordial conferences, we look with confidence to the day when all peoples of the world may live free lives, untouched by tyranny, and according to their varying desires and their own consciences.”

Poles, Yugoslavs, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and other peoples of Eastern Europe, apart from the small minorities of Communist sympathizers, probably felt skeptical about these glowing assurances. But their voices were not heard in the carefully guarded meetings where the Big Three enjoyed the intoxicating sense of settling the destinies of the world.

The horrors of Soviet mass deportations from eastern Poland and the Baltic states during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact were well known to responsible American officials. But the details of the packed fetid trains, with human beings treated worse than cattle, of mass deaths, separation of members of families, slave labor in concentration camps were carefully concealed from the American people. It was considered broad-minded to forget the misery which Soviet rule had brought to millions of people and to view with sympathy Stalin’s professed desire to assure Soviet “security” by annexing or dominating all Russia’s neighboring states.

When the venerable Hull returned from Moscow, still feeling the warm pressure of Stalin’s repeated handshakes, he told a joint session of Congress on November 18, 1943, that he found in Marshal Stalin “a remarkable personality, one of the great statesmen and leaders of this age.” He also ventured the following optimistic but almost amusingly inaccurate prediction:

Hull soon learned that Churchill was seeking very energetically to safeguard British interests by coming to an agreement with Stalin about spheres of influence. The British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, inquired of the Secretary of State on May 20 how the American Government would feel about an arrangement which would give Russia a controlling influence in Rumania and Britain a controlling influence in Greece.33 Hull’s reaction was critical. Churchill then telegraphed directly to Roosevelt, urging his sanction for the arrangement. The British Government had proposed such an agreement earlier; the Soviet Government had replied expressing general agreement with the idea, but withholding final assurance until the United States attitude was known.

Churchill followed this up with another message on June 8, arguing that someone must “play the hand” and that events moved very rapidly in the Balkans. Roosevelt, at Hull’s advice, replied with an expression of preference for consultative arrangements in the Balkans. This elicited from Churchill a more urgent communication, of June 11, suggesting that a consultative committee would be slow and obstructive and asking a three-months’ trial for the arrangement he had proposed. Roosevelt accepted this suggestion without notifying Hull.

When Churchill and Eden went to Moscow in October 1944, they extended the arrangement further. According to reports from the American embassies in Moscow and Ankara, it was agreed that Russia would have a 75:25 or 80:20 predominance in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania. Influence in Yugoslavia was to be split 50:50.34 There was never any serious attempt to implement these mathematical divisions. Soviet influence was absolute in all the mentioned countries until Tito rebelled against Moscow in 1948.

It was in the autumn of 1944 that Churchill’s comments on Anglo-Soviet relations were most optimistic. He would soon learn that no agreement for “sharing influence” in countries run by satellite Communist parties was worth anything.

The Soviet weight in the balance of forces among the three principal allies steadily increased during 1944. The German eastern front was crumbling. The Red Army swept up to the line of the Vistula in Poland and paused deliberately while the Germans crushed the revolt of the Polish nationalists in Warsaw. Rumania and Bulgaria followed the Balkan tradition of deserting the losing for the winning side. Rumania was quickly occupied by the advancing Red Army.

What happened in Bulgaria was characteristic of Soviet speed and initiative, as contrasted with the slow and fumbling methods of the western powers. Agents of the Bulgarian Government were negotiating with American and British representatives in Cairo in August and September 1944. Instead of rushing the armistice discussions to a swift conclusion and sending an Anglo-American army of occupation into Bulgaria, the talks in Cairo were allowed to drag, and Moscow was dutifully informed of all the details.

Since Bulgaria was not at war with Russia, the first negotiations were confined to the United States and Great Britain. But on September 8 the Soviet Government hurled a declaration of war at Bulgaria and carried out a lightning occupation of that country, thereby excluding Anglo-American troops. A sanguinary purge, repeated at intervals up to the present time, disposed not only of Bulgarian conservatives, but of liberals, socialists, and dissident Communists and brought that country firmly into the Soviet orbit. Missions of the western powers, when they were finally allowed to enter Bulgaria, were treated with calculated and ostentatious discourtesy.

Meanwhile, Soviet armies, benefiting from the ever increasing American flow of trucks, telephone equipment, canned food, and other lend-lease supplies, were streaming westward. They left behind them a trail of murder, rape, and pillage worthy of the hordes of Genghis Khan. And they were carving out for Stalin a mightier empire than any Tsar had ever ruled. The Red Star was very much in the ascendant when the second meeting of the Big Three took place, very appropriately, on Soviet soil, in the Crimean resort of Yalta.

[1. ] Ciano, The Ciano Diaries, 414ff.

[2. ] Ibid.

[3. ] The supposed unity of the Soviet peoples in supporting the Soviet regime was a fiction. There were mass surrenders to the Germans on a scale suggesting desertion rather than defeat. And, despite the stupid Nazi brutalities in occupied Soviet territory, the Germans succeeded in recruiting several hundred thousand Soviet citizens for their armies.

[4. ] E. Roosevelt, As He Saw It, 25.

[5. ] Ibid., 122.

[6. ] Ibid., 206.

[7. ] Churchill, Gathering Storm, iv-v.

[8. ]The New York Times, October 10, 1948.

[9. ] By a ludicrously ironical decision taken at Yalta only nations which declared war against Germany by a certain date were adjudged “peace-loving” and hence eligible for membership in the United Nations.

[10. ] Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 86.

[11. ] Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 899.

[12. ] Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory, 231.

[13. ] Deane, The Strange Alliance, 97-98.

[14. ] Ibid., 98.

[15. ] Ibid., 84-85.

[16. ] See article by Donald B. Sanders in the American Mercury for November 1947.

[17. ] This information is based on a well-informed private source.

[18. ] Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, 340.

[19. ] Hull, Memoirs, 2:1263-64.

[20. ] Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 748-49.

[21. ] These same publications attacked the temporary deal with Admiral Darlan which was of great military value in North Africa, called for a blockade of Spain, and were enraged over the policy of dealing with the Badoglio regime in Italy. They turned a blind eye to the far more serious threat of Soviet imperialist expansion.

[22. ] Hull, Memoirs, 2:1311.

[23. ] The four signatories, Hull, Molotov, Eden, and the Chinese Ambassador Foo Ping-sheung. Hull regarded it as a great victory that China was included as a signatory. This point might well seem more debatable in 1950.

[24. ] Deane, The Strange Alliance, 160.

[25. ] This subject is treated in more detail in Chapter 11.

[26. ] Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 84.

[27. ] Tito broke with Moscow in 1948, and this led to a gradual relaxation of tension between his dictatorship and the western powers. This does not affect the fact that during the war and immediate postwar years Tito was blatantly pro-Moscow and anti-Western, and that the abandonment of Mihailovic reflects little credit either on the honor or the judgment of Roosevelt and Churchill.

[28. ] In the savage and confused civil war in Yugoslavia the hatred between the forces of Mihailovic and Tito was greater than the hatred of either for the Germans and Italians. There were cases of technical collaboration, especially with the Italians, on the part of some of Mihailovic’s subordinate commanders. Mihailovic himself, however, had a price set on his head by the Germans and remained a consistent, anti-Communist Yugoslav patriot to the end.

[29. ] Fotitch, The War We Lost, 247-49.

[30. ] In this connection see Chapter 11.

[31. ] Fotitch, The War We Lost, 252.

[32. ] Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 798-99.

[33. ] Hull, Memoirs, 2:1451.

[34. ] Ibid., 1458.