A World at Arms (144 page)

When the compromise proposal was discussed at Yalta, Stalin pretended not to have heard of it although it had been submitted to Moscow two months before. In the context of the discussions at Yalta, however, he came to agree to it and also dropped the membership demand for fourteen of the sixteen republics as well. He too clearly thought post-war cooperation within a United Nations Organization was sufficiently in Soviet interests to make at least some concessions to his allies.
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On another subject relating to the United Nations the major objections had come from the British. This was the concept of trusteeship, pushed by the Americans and agreeable to the Soviet Union. This proposal was seen at first by the British–and entirely correctly–as yet another American scheme for subverting colonial structures, including their own. The agreement of the Americans to apply this new version of the League’s mandate system only to territories taken from the Axis powers removed British objections, if not London’s worries. If on this subject it was easier for the Americans and Russians to reach agreement, there was a further one on which, in spite of difficulties, it was the British and Americans who eventually accepted a new set of institutions while the Soviet Union decided to remain outside.

In the first three weeks of July 1944 representatives of most of the United Nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to try to develop an international banking and monetary system for the post-war world. It was devoutly hoped that this would preclude the kind of international economic and monetary warfare which had characterized the years before World War II and had in the eyes of many contributed to world economic malaise and the pressure toward war which some had seen in that situation. There is certainly some truth in the view of one scholar that a major objective was “locking the door, or trying to lock it, upon the international trade and fiscal practices of Dr. Schacht.”
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The reference is to the German economic leader of the 1930S who
had devised innumerable schemes to defraud foreign investors to assist German trade and rearmament.
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For the immediate post-war problems of relief of suffering and devastation, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) had been established at American initiative in 1943 and was already beginning to operate.
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For the long-term redevelopment of the world economy, however, something far more permanent than such an obviously temporary institution, however important and even vital in the short run, was believed needed. At the Bretton Woods Conference it was decided to establish two permanent institutions, an International Monetary Fund and an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the latter usually called the World Bank. While the Monetary Fund was designed to assist international currency transfers and stability, in the process obviating the sorts of competitive devaluations and special currency manipulations which had hampered world trade before the war, the World Bank was expected to provide capital for development and the continued growth of economies UNRRA had helped recover.

If these new institutions, the instruments for which were ratified by numerous nations over the following years, did not always function as effectively as the founders had hoped, this was in large part the result of the war’s disruption of the world economy being even greater than anyone had anticipated. They nevertheless contributed enormously to the period of great economic growth which followed the war. Drastically modified in the 1970S because of the greatly altered position of the United States and the dollar in world trade, both the Monetary Fund and even more the World Bank remain major factors in the world economy half a century after their conception. A striking feature of their role is the fact that the very countries of Eastern Europe which were prevented from joining by the Soviet Union after World War II are all or almost all expected to become members by the end of the twentieth century.

Whatever concessions the Western Powers were willing to make to Soviet preferences, and whatever adjustments Stalin was prepared to make to accommodate them in turn, on this question there would be no agreement. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who had chaired the Bretton Woods Conference, hoped for a while that the Russians could be persuaded to join the new financial institutions; after all, they expected to benefit and did benefit from UNRRA. But there was simply no way in which the Soviet leadership could see its economy linked to that of the rest of the world, and neither the Soviet Union nor
the governments it established in Eastern Europe joined the Fund or the Bank. In this field, the gap between the Allies could not be bridged.
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That divergence was not, however, seen as so serious as to be disruptive of the alliance in a major way as long as agreement could be reached on the establishment of the United Nations Organization (UNO).

The formal meeting to found the UNO was to be held, as agreed at Yalta, in San Francisco in April of 1945. By the time that conference was held, Franklin Roosevelt, its most important sponsor, had died. But he had played a key role in attuning the American public to participating in world affairs, including the UNO. The very fact that this organizing conference was being conducted even as the war in Europe was obviously in its closing stages showed that the alliance of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union, however strained, had held fast to the end.

THE TRIPARTITE PACT POWERS

If the Allies had numerous difficulties in working together, these were minimal when compared to those of the Tripartite Pact powers. There were no institutions comparable to the British–American Combined Chiefs of Staff and the other joint boards and committees. The Tripartite military commissions established between Germany, Italy and Japan in the winter of 1941–42 were good for publicity pictures but practically nothing else.
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The argument that this was due to geographic factors cannot be sustained in the face of the absence of any real coordination between Germany and Italy in the early years of the war when those two were contiguous–unlike Britain and the United States–and coordination would have been simple to arrange had there been any desire for it. There is no evidence to suggest that either Axis partner had any interest in such coordination; on the contrary, both Hitler and Mussolini far preferred to direct the respective war efforts of their countries entirely independently of each other.
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The rapid deterioration of Italy’s position in the Axis as her armies were defeated first in Greece, then in East Africa, and finally in North Africa has been recorded. On the one hand, Italy could no longer conduct war independently, as Mussolini had at one time imagined, on the other the Germans were justifiably worried that a total Italian collapse would open up Europe to Allied invasion from the south. Such a situation would require the dispatch of substantial German forces both to whatever new fronts might be created by Allied landings and also as replacement for Italian occupation forces in France and Southeast Europe. Under these circumstances the Germans tried unsuccessfully
to prop up the Italian war effort while watching with great suspicion for any signs of defection from the Axis.
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The relationship between Germans and Italians was almost always strained. They had fought on opposite sides in World War I; the Italians looked on the Germans as barbarians, and overbearing ones at that, while the Germans considered the Italians inefficient and incompetent. Germany’s inability to provide the coal Italy needed in spite of very considerable efforts was matched by the unwillingness of the Germans to treat the vast numbers of Italian workers in Germany decently. This latter problem, a steady irritant in German-Italian relations, would be greatly exacerbated by the deliberately ruthless treatment accorded to the soldiers disarmed by the Germans after the Italian surrender and then deported to slave labor in Germany.
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As if these problems were not sufficient, there were, in addition, personal and ideological ones. The personal problem was that some of the highest German officers who dealt with the Italians, notably Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, simply could not abide them, an attitude which was quickly and widely known. The ideological question on which there was a wide difference concerned the proper handling of the Jewish question. Mussolini had introduced a series of anti-Semitic laws in 1938 as a sign of his ideological affinity with the German dictator. These rules, though often enforced on Italy’s tiny Jewish community, appear to have been no more popular than the German goosestep, introduced into Italy at the same time and for the same reason under the pompous title of “passo Romano,” the Roman step.
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The divergence between the Axis partners became ever more pronounced during the war. German initiation of the systematic killing of Jews was no more discussed with the Italian government than any other of their major political, military, or other initiatives, but the Italians were expected to participate fully. On the whole, in spite of Mussolini’s willingness to go along, they mostly simply would not do so. In the Italian-occupied portions of France, Yugoslavia and Greece the local commanders, who knew perfectly well what the Germans were doing, refused to turn over the Jews to the Germans to be murdered, and endless arguments over this issue led to no agreement. The Italians were confirmed in their prior belief that the Germans were still barbarians, and the Germans were reinforced in their view of the Italians as indifferent and incompetent allies.

The most significant divergence between Germany and Italy, however, was the one over strategy. As the Allied threat to Italy grew in 1942–43, obvious to all with the British breakthrough at El Alamein in early
November 1942 and the American landing in Northwest Africa a few days later, the Italians began to urge Germany to concentrate its forces on the war against Britain and the United States while working out a compromise peace with the Soviet Union. First put forward to Hitler and other German leaders in December 1942, these proposals always fell on deaf ears, as did the similar Japanese proposals which the Germans had by that time been hearing for over a year. The Germans saw the threat in the Mediterranean, but their response was not what Mussolini wanted.

In early 1941, when there appeared to be all sorts of opportunities for Axis advances in the Mediterranean area, the Germans had committed small forces there, primarily because Hitler saw the area as Italy’s living space and hence not worth a major investment of German resources. Now that disaster appeared to threaten Italy, his worry was that the Allies could use Italy as an airbase for attacks on Germany from the south, and might seize the portions of Southeast Europe under Italian control, thereby threatening Germany’s access to the mineral resources of that area. Under these circumstances he was prepared to allot a far larger share of his military resources to the Mediterranean theater, a commitment most obvious in the building up of an Axis army in Tunisia. This effort was, however, designed as a protection for Germany’s southern flank, not as a support for Italy’s ambitions; under no circumstances was he willing to accept the basic reorientation in strategy urged on Germany by both the Italian and the Japanese governments.

Many of the transport aircraft which might have been utilized to fly supplies into the beleaguered German garrison in Stalingrad were instead deployed to Sicily for ferry duties to Tunisia, but Hitler was not about to consider a compromise on the Eastern Front. There was, instead, to be a new German summer offensive on that front. The same difference, if on a smaller scale, affected German-Italian relations in the turmoil that was World War II Yugoslavia. The Italians wanted to arm Mihailovic against the partisans and then crush him later; the Germans preferred to fight both simultaneously.
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The collapse of Italian resistance on Sicily in July 1943 followed by that of the whole Fascist system later that month marked a final parting of the ways between Germany and Italy. The extraordinarily clumsy way in which the Italian government left the war merely facilitated Germany’s use of considerable Italian territory and resources for a continued war which devastated the country. The puppet state Mussolini organized under German auspices in northern Italy after his rescue from imprisonment could have no influence on German strategy or policy. The most
dramatic illustration of this was to be the surrender negotiations which the Germans there carried out behind his back in 1945. They had shot innumerable Italians in various so-called reprisals; they left Mussolini to be shot by his own people.

The relationship between the European Axis powers and Japan was not marked by any closer cooperation than that between Germany and Italy. In the political field, there was very little willingness to work together. Japanese advice to the Germans to allow greater freedom to the subject peoples of Europe, as Japan claimed she was granting in her sphere, fell on deaf ears. Nothing remotely resembling the extensive discussion of post-war plans among the Allies ever took place among the powers of the Tripartite Pact. In November 1942, after a conference of the heads of Japanese diplomatic delegations in Europe, Ambassador Oshima forwarded their recommendations that the Japanese, Germans and Italians must work together as effectively as the Allies were doing.
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It regularly proved most difficult to iron out minor differences;
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certainly on the major issues between Germany and Japan nothing changed.

The basic strategy issue remained unsolved in 1943 and 1944. The Germans wanted the Japanese to become offensive again, by which they meant that Japan should move against the British, Americans, or Russians. Certainly Japan was not about to attack the Soviet Union. The Japanese had been badly beaten by the Russians in the 1939 fighting, had no desire whatever for a repetition, feared that the Soviet Union might allow the Americans use of air bases for attacks on the home islands of Japan and, therefore, went to great lengths to keep peace with the Soviet Union. They were most assuredly not going to interfere with the steady stream of American supplies passing by Japan to help the Soviet Union in its fight against Germany. In these years, as earlier, the Japanese were certain that the Germans should make peace with Russia so that Germany could concentrate on fighting Britain and the United States.
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