A World at Arms (143 page)

The reality was that the Western Powers could do little to interfere in any case. The real question was whether Stalin would pay attention to their protests in order to retain their good will; the events surrounding the Polish uprising of August 1944 showed that he would not. Roosevelt believed that there was little point to constant protests if there were no chance of these being heeded; perhaps in the future the situation would improve, but in the meantime there was in fact little that the Western Powers could do.
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This was at the time as true for plans about Germany as its satellites. The British plan for the partition of Germany into occupation zones and the projects for German territory to be turned over to Poland and the Soviet Union are reviewed elsewhere. The major concern of the Western
Powers, that the Soviet Union might sign a separate peace with Germany, was finally fading in 1944. There remained doubts about Soviet plans attached to the National Committee for a Free Germany and the League of German Officers, both organized under Moscow’s auspices in 1943; but there came to be no attempt at a counter–organization in the West.
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If there were to be agreements on the issues concerning the future of Germany, these would have to be worked out in conferences between the three Allied leaders in person, and with Stalin refusing to meet Churchill and Roosevelt, that meant the questions would have to wait until their second (and last) meeting in February 1945.

The relations between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union were further troubled by the friction caused by Soviet espionage in the West, although the extent of this, (referred to in
Chapter 10
), especially in Britain, was not suspected at the time. There were also arguments about the repatriation demanded by the Russians of any Soviet citizens or agents who attempted to defect to the West.
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The Soviet government added repeated complaints about Rudolf Hess who was imprisoned in England and should, according to their arguments, have been put on trial immediately. There are signs that Stalin worried alternately about the Western Powers using Hess the way he had tried to use German prisoners in the U.S.S.R. for an alternative government to replace Hitler’s and then make peace with it, or their allowing Hess to escape to a neutral country the way Emperor William II had fled to Holland at the end of World War I.
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The signs of friction between the Allies were at times very much in the public eye, and the Germans did everything in their power to call attention to them, provide disinformation about them to the Soviets and the Western Powers, and in other ways emphasize the inter-Allied difficulties in the hope of rupturing the alliance they had forged against themselves.
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They had an obvious interest in splitting the alliance, since, unlike Japan, they were at war with all three. These, of course, realized very clearly that this was precisely what the Germans wanted and for that very reason recognized that, if the Allies expected to win the war, remaining together and overcoming their differences would be essential. By 1944 it was obvious to both sides that the only hope of victory the Axis still had was a split among the Allies, and the very efforts of the Germans to create such a split made the Allied governments more sensitive to the need to work things out. The fact that victory was finally in sight in 1944 thus had a double and contradictory effect on the alliance. On the one hand, the removal of mortal danger made them less inclined to subordinate individual aims to the need for hanging together and hence a greater willingness to disregard the susceptibilities of allies. On
the other hand, the imminence of victory and the obvious desperation of the Germans suggested that this was a poor time to allow divergent views of policy and strategy to break up a winning coalition and thereby risk all that had already been attained at huge cost in lives and treasure.

The need to work out differences if at all possible was, it should be noted, perceived even if somewhat differently by the leadership in all three Allied capitals. This is to be seen very clearly in the difficult negotiations which led to the creation of the United Nations Organization, in spite of major differences of opinion which surfaced at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference held in the Washington area from August 21, to October 9, 1944.
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Already at the Moscow Conference of October 1943 the Allies had agreed that a new international organization should replace the moribund League of Nations, but it was much easier to call for the establishment than to work out the practical details of such a structure. Furthermore, the three major powers approached this question from very different sets of experiences and perspectives.

Only the British had belonged to the League from the beginning and were still formally members in 1944. They looked upon any new structure as an important method for continued American involvement in world affairs, a useful mechanism for resolving at least some disputes, and, hopefully, as a way of smoothing continued cooperation with the Soviet Union, a subject expected to be difficult indeed. There were, however, serious concerns about any new international organizations. On the one hand, the British not only wanted France restored eventually, if not immediately, to a major role and all the Dominions and also India to be represented in such an organization. On the other hand, they were determined, and Churchill was especially insistent on this point, that there be no interference into the affairs of the British colonial structure from the outside. This concern extended both to possible claims on portions of the empire by others, such as China’s claim to Hong Kong, and to any prescriptions for the internal development of territories included within the empire.

The Soviet Union had joined the League in 1934 but had been ousted as a result of its attack on Finland in the winter of 1939–40. The denunciations of the League which had preceded its entrance into that organization seemed justified in Moscow’s eyes by the subsequent expulsion. While it was clear to Stalin that participation in any new international organization was in theory preferable to staying out, with the obvious risk that such abstention would only facilitate that “ganging-up” on the Soviet Union by others which he always feared, there had to be some protection for the U.S.S.R. in any new structure.

He evidently believed that it was important for the Soviet Union to
play a part in the new organization, and he appears to have been especially interested in the role it could play in preventing any renewed aggression by a revived Germany. Furthermore, he appears to have had two major concerns about the whole question. In the first place, he no more wanted interference of any sort into the internal affairs of his empire than Churchill wanted in the British one. The result of this was a general tendency to restrict competence to political matters and to downplay all others to the extent of having the Soviet Union stay out of the whole set of new international banking and monetary structures created at the Bretton Woods Conference reviewed later in this chapter.

His second, and perhaps even more significant interest related to the organization’s internal structure and procedure. He was evidently concerned that in any voting the U.S.S.R. and the sympathetic regimes it hoped to establish in Eastern Europe might be hopelessly outnumbered. For this reason, he at first adopted a restrictive attitude toward membership, only agreeing at Yalta in February 1945 that those who joined the Allies in war by March 1, 1945, could be invited to the founding conference. The same worry about what might be called the optics of voting by all countries appears to have been behind the Soviet proposal, first made to the horror of the British and American delegations at Dumbarton Oaks on August 28, 1944, that all sixteen Soviet republics be initial members.
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This issue, like the preceding one and the dispute over the veto which is discussed below, was also resolved at Yalta as described in
Chapter 14
, but should be seen in the author’s view as a part of Stalin’s worries about the way future voting in the new organization might well look, even if those votes did not mean that much.
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An issue of supreme importance to the Soviet Union, and one on which Stalin was evidently not prepared to compromise until the last moment, involved that of unanimity, an issue generally referred to as that of the veto. While President Roosevelt always favored some form of the veto, from the beginning of serious discussion of the new organization, the Soviet government was insistent on unanimity on all issues among the great powers on the executive organ. Their suggestion that it be called the “Security Council” was accepted by the others at Dumbarton Oaks, and they were willing to accede to proposals that France and China have permanent seats on the Council; they were also agreeable to a system where majority votes rather than complete unanimity would be acceptable–provided always that the majority include
all
the
permanent members. What the Soviet Union said, in effect, was that the other nations, which would be elected on a rotating basis by the body including all members, called the Assembly, could be out–voted by a majority on the Security Council, but no great power, especially the Soviet Union, could be dealt with in this fashion. And that requirement of unanimity was to extend to issues in which it was itself involved.

This insistence, to which the Soviet delegation at Dumbarton Oaks adhered in the face of every objection, was based, it would appear, on two major considerations. One was an element of prestige and one of practical substance. The prestige issue, which at this time may well have been more significant than believed by some, was the definitive recognition of the status of the Soviet Union as a world power. Isolated in pre-war years, clearly making a major contribution and the largest sacrifices in the war to defeat Germany, the U.S.S.R. was to be recognized by all as a state which would properly play a major role on the world stage. This meant that no action should be taken on any subject by the world organization unless the Soviet Union was in accord with it.

The practical issue was, simply put, that the Soviet Union was not going to allow itself to be out–voted on any issue,
especially
including those in which it was itself involved. No urging by either the British or the Americans was going to make Moscow budge on this question, and the Soviet representative in the negotiations, Andrei Gromyko, made it clear that no concessions on it were to be expected. The efforts to show that the public in the United States and Great Britain would not support and might not be willing to join an organization in which a country was to be a judge in a matter in which it was itself involved made no impact on the Soviet delegates, and they were willing to let the conference adjourn without an agreement on the voting question.
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The final report on the Dumbarton Oaks Conference simply stated that the procedure to be followed on voting in the Security Council was “still under consideration.”

The United States had refused to join the League altogether, and those who were in leadership positions in the country in World War II all looked back to that decision as one of the great errors made by America. Their view of that error was redoubled by the fact that it had been a domestic political disaster for them as well; their party, the Democrats, had been crushed in the 1920 election and kept out of power for over a decade. Roosevelt was himself particularly conscious of that turn of the American public. He had been the second man in the Wilson administration’s Department of the Navy and he had been the second
man on the losing Democratic Party’s national ticket in the 1920 election. Furthermore, the one time during the 1930s when Roosevelt had tried as President to obtain the Senate’s agreement to have the United States join the World Court, he had suffered a humiliating defeat. With this as background, the careful work of the administration in Washington to get an agreement on a new international organization both with the Allies and at home should be easy to understand.

Cordell Hull was as convinced as Roosevelt that a new international organization would be needed to maintain the peace by settling disputes and bringing collective pressure to bear on any power inclined to take an aggressive path. He worked hard to build up support at home and, with the President’s full agreement, tried to avoid what was seen as a grave mistake of the Wilson administration by involving key Republicans in the process of developing and defending the American position. It has become fashionable to denigrate the role of the wartime Secretary of State; this was certainly one field in which he was extremely active and successful. He had obtained Soviet agreement in principle at the Moscow Conference, he had developed a working relationship with key Republican congressional leaders, and he closely monitored the State Department’s work on the project.
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The stalemate over voting procedure which hampered the Dumbarton Oaks Conference left Roosevelt and Hull, like the British, searching for a solution. In the British government, the belief in the absolute need for what was now being referred to as the United Nations Organization was so strong that the Cabinet, under Churchill’s prodding, came to realize that a compromise was desirable but that the Soviet position should be accepted if that proved the only way to get agreement. Though not formulated in quite so explicit a fashion, the American attitude developed along identical lines. It is an interesting indication of the extent to which both governments hoped that, in spite of current and prospective frictions, cooperation with the Soviet Union in the future would be possible, that they were both prepared to jettison their preferred procedure if there were no other way to obtain Soviet participation in the United Nations.

These internal discussions took place between the Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta conferences as both the British and American governments tried to develop compromise proposals which were designed to meet the major Soviet concern, but without crippling the procedures of the United Nations. In one way or another, these new formulae kept a major power which was party to a dispute from stopping discussion of an issue and other procedural matters but retained the unanimity requirement for
major actions. It was the hope of President Roosevelt that this would satisfy the Russians and get them to drop the sixteen Soviet republics proposal. The British were agreeable to what they saw as a proposal similar to their own ideas, but Churchill let it be known that, if Stalin insisted, he would be willing to accede to the Soviet position. As the Prime Minister explained to the British Cabinet on November 27, 1944, when a Western bloc was suggested by the Foreign Office: “He was very doubtful himself as to the soundness or practicability of a Western bloc. In his judgement the only real safeguard was agreement between the three Great Powers within the framework of the World Organization. He felt himself that Russia was ready and anxious to work in with us.”
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