A World at Arms (155 page)

There had been lengthy exchanges about a possible new meeting of the leaders of the Allies, and Stalin had once again refused to travel any great distance, a point of particular difficulty for Roosevelt who had an election to face in November 1944 and whose health showed signs of exhaustion from overwork.
⁴⁹
The decision to meet at Yalta meant a long trip for him as well as Churchill; the Chiefs of Staff of the Western Allies arranged to meet beforehand at Malta. At this meeting, the final offensives of the Western armies into Germany were worked out. The British still had visions of a single thrust in the north commanded by Montgomery, but there was no prospect of American agreement. The possibility of replacing Tedder as Eisenhower’s deputy with Field Marshal Alexander was also canvassed before and after this meeting; but once it became clear that he would not assume a full ground forces command position, the British themselves dropped the idea.
⁵⁰
The basic strategy agreed to with considerable British misgivings provided for a series of offensives, beginning in the north, to destroy German forces on the left bank of the Rhine, then a major crossing of that river and an offensive to surround the Ruhr industrial area, to be followed by advances to the Baltic in the north, toward the Russians in the center, and into Bavaria in the south.

There was also considerable discussion of the shipping problem, once again difficult because of the need for both relief shipments to liberated portions of Europe and the plan to redeploy troops from the European theater of war to the Pacific for the final assault on Japan. There was still some concern about the possible appearance of the new types of German submarines, but these were likely to create problems only if the war against Germany were prolonged. To speed up the process of defeating Germany, both the Americans and Canadians insisted on, and the English Chiefs of Staff reluctantly agreed to, the transfer of five divisions, three of them Canadian, from the Mediterranean to the main front in the West.

As for the Pacific War, agreement was reached on the landings on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the eventual invasion of the home islands of Japan. With the expectation that the war in Europe would end between July and the end of that year, it was calculated that another
year and a half would be needed to crush Japan. Victory, the Combined Chiefs of Staff informed Churchill and Roosevelt, would hopefully come in 1947.

At Yalta, the Allied leaders met from February 4 to 11, 1945, in a series of sessions which have gained more fame–or notoriety–than perhaps they deserve. Most of the major diplomatic choices were prefigured at the Teheran Conference, and the most contentious political issue between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies the fate of Poland and Southeast Europe–had been effectively settled between Teheran and Yalta by the occupation–or liberation–of practically the whole of that area by the Red Army in the interim. By the time of the meeting at Yalta, the “Lublin Committee” was installed in Warsaw, and already the Czechoslovak government-in-exile had followed Soviet wishes by recognizing it, not the London government-in-exile, as the legal regime of its northern neighbor.

If one major factor overshadowing the Yalta deliberations was the control which the Soviet Union in fact already exercised over almost all of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the converse was the British control of Greece, and American and British predominance in Italy, France, and most of the Low Countries. The Americans and British found that they would get very little in the way of concessions on the government of Poland, and the concessions which they did obtain were quickly repudiated soon after the meeting: the expansion of the Lublin regime by representatives of the London government-in-exile and others from within Poland was quickly and effectively sabotaged, while the free elections, which Stalin promised could be held as early as a month off, were not held until 1989, forty–four years later. Since the Soviet Union had not interfered in the fighting between the British and the Greek Communists when the latter had attempted to seize power, Stalin may have felt entitled to repress all opposition in the area controlled by his army, though agreeing to the American proposal of a declaration assuring all liberated and occupied territories the freedom to choose their own government. The Soviet Union wanted “friendly” regimes in East and Southeast Europe, and there was no way that governments which Stalin considered friendly were likely to emerge from free elections.
⁵¹

On the other hand, the Western Powers had become increasingly committed to a major role for France in post-war Europe. With very great reluctance Stalin agreed to an occupation zone for the French in Germany but insisted absolutely and successfully that this zone (and a corresponding sector of Berlin) be carved out of the zones (and sectors)
allocated to the United States and Great Britain. The Soviet Union was not about to give up any portions of the territory assigned to it; Stalin may well have thought of France as simply a satellite of the Western Powers. Furthermore, it was only after Roosevelt changed his mind on the subject of assigning France a place on the Allied Control Council for Germany that Stalin also agreed to this.

The British insistence on American and thereafter Soviet acquiescence in a full role for France was presumably related to the repetition by Roosevelt of his Teheran pronouncement that large numbers of American troops would not remain in Europe for more than two years after the defeat of Germany. Not only would many be needed for the war against Japan, but it was thought unlikely that the American public would agree to any long-term stationing of American units in Germany. Always conscious of the disruption of President Wilson’s hopes and plans at the end of World War I, Roosevelt had been cautious both about commitments for the future and building up domestic support for those he did make. At least in the anticipations of the British and possibly also his own, the French could eventually take over the American zone in southern Germany which Roosevelt had just agreed to accept, and which would certainly be adjacent to any French zone.
⁵²

Getting the American public to accept the compromises the Western Powers had made on Poland was going to be difficult. Both the British and Americans agreed to an eastern border for Poland based on the Curzon Line–as they had previously indicated they would at Teheran–but Roosevelt did try very hard, though unsuccessfully, to salvage the primarily Polish city of Lwow as well as the nearby oil fields for Poland.
⁵³

The resolution of the difficult chore of selling this in the United States, or at least blunting opposition to it, was tied closely to the issue of the planned new international organization. On this topic, Roosevelt was understandably eager to avoid the failure of the Wilson administration, a failure in which he had been deeply and personally involved and which he like many others saw as having contributed so greatly to the outbreak of a second world war. He was determined at the Yalta Conference to have the critical remaining issue left open at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, that of the voting procedure in the Security Council, resolved. He had taken to Yalta the new Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, as he had not taken Hull, recently retired because of illness, to Teheran; and Stettinius carefully explained the United States compromise proposal at the meeting when Stalin claimed not to have studied it beforehand. Although on this point the Soviet leader, to the enormous relief of the American delegation, agreed to accept the proposal to the effect that the great power veto would not apply to procedural matters,
he insisted on another concession which Roosevelt was most reluctant to approve.

Earlier the Soviets had asked for sixteen seats (and votes) in the Assembly of the United Nations, one for each of the constituent Soviet Socialist Republics in the U.S.S.R.. The Americans had objected, but the British, who wanted a place for India as well as for each of the self–governing Dominions, were not so sure. Now Stalin insisted on two extra votes, one each for the Ukrainian and the Belorussian SSRs;
ⁱ
the British agreed to the demand;
⁵⁴
and the Americans reluctantly went along. Roosevelt, who remembered the domestic American opposition to what the public had seen as multiple British votes in the League of Nations with one for each of the Dominions, both insisted on keeping this concession secret and British and Soviet support for two extra votes for the United States in the Assembly if that should prove desirable. When the whole deal leaked out soon after, there was a temporary uproar, but this tempest in a teapot was quickly calmed by two other measures, one taken at Yalta, one soon after.

At the Yalta Conference, it was agreed that those countries which declared war on Germany by March 1 should be invited to the April 25 founding conference for which France would be one of the inviting powers, and also that this conference was to be held in the United States, a point on which the Americans were particularly insistent. If the American public was to be permanently weaned from its isolationist proclivities, the best way to engage their attention for a new world security organization was to organize it in the United States, San Francisco being chosen as the location. And Roosevelt, unlike Wilson, would include key leaders of the Republican Party in the United States delegation. With Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the key spokesman on international affairs of the opposition in the Senate, appointed to the delegation, Roosevelt effectively co–opted the most likely opponent of the Yalta agreements.
⁵⁵

The future of Germany was certainly a major topic of discussion. The agreement on occupation zones, previously worked out in the European Advisory Commission, was approved with the addition of a French zone. An Allied Control Council, meeting in Berlin, would set policy, but other than the negative aims of de-nazification and de-militarization, there was little agreement on what to do. The Soviet Union and the Western Powers interpreted “democratization” very differently as already described. Since the line between the eastern and western zones had been agreed upon, the extent of territorial cession to Poland would, in effect, be left to the Soviets, and the line of the Oder and western
Neisse would come to be the new border, in spite of doubts by both the British and the Americans and the formal reference to final determination at a peace conference. Once the German inhabitants had fled or been expelled, there was not likely to be any more change.

With Poland firmly under Soviet control, and both Poland itself and the Soviet occupation zone pushed far westwards, Russia could feel safe from any future German invasion. As for that country itself, the issue of dismemberment came up once more. There was again theoretical agreement that this would be a good idea, with the Soviets especially insistent, but the German Communists in Moscow were already working on the assumption of a single German state, while the Soviet government reversed itself and came out for keeping a unified Germany soon after Yalta.
⁵⁶

This shift might have been related to the Soviet view on the reparations issue on which it did not receive the results Stalin wanted at Yalta; later he may have believed that keeping the French from annexing large portions of the industrialized parts of western Germany would more likely make facilities there available for transfer to the Soviet Union. In any case, the Russians argued at Yalta that a reparations sum of twenty billion dollars should be set with half going to them and the balance to the other countries at war with Germany. The Americans and British both read their experience with reparations in the years after World War I as showing that a fixed sum was a poor idea, the British because their zone of occupation would be in need of endless subsidies after its industry had been removed, the Americans because of their belief that American loans had paid for German reparations and might end up doing so again. No agreement was reached, and the issue was left for the Allied Foreign Ministers to resolve, but there was a general sense that massive amounts of industrial equipment would be removed from Germany to help those who had suffered from the Third Reich’s policy of aggression.
⁵⁷

Before any plans for the future could be implemented, Germany and Japan would have to be defeated. The way to crush Germany appeared to be rather obvious: concentric attacks on the Reich. There was some exchange of military information, but there was in practice no more direct and detailed coordination of operations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies now than earlier, and the minimal attempts such as arrangements for American planes to use airfields in Hungary quickly evaporated in the face of Soviet refusal to implement the promises made. More important were the discussions of the participation of the Soviet Union in the war against Japan.

Since Stalin had originally promised to join the war in East Asia for
a suitable price after the defeat of Germany, several major changes had taken place in that war. The Americans and Australians had made major advances in the Southwest and the Central Pacific theaters and the British had defeated the Japanese in Burma, but the fighting had been exceedingly bloody and bitter; at the Malta Conference, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had posited another year and a half of fighting after victory over Germany. Nationalist China, the main land base for the assault on Japanese forces on the mainland of Asia as well as air attacks on the Japanese home islands on which the Americans had counted at the time of Stalin’s promise at Teheran, had in the interim collapsed militarily in the face of Japan’s great “Ichigo” offensive. Although the air supply of China over the Hump continued, and the first convoy of trucks over the Ledo Road had reached the Chinese border on January 28, just before the Yalta Conference, it was obvious that no major offensive against Japan could be based on the crumbling remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s China.

These alterations in the Pacific War appeared to make. the final attack on Japan on the one hand more feasible and on the other hand more dependent on Soviet entrance into the war. With this background, American and British willingness to agree to the Soviet Union regaining its losses from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 looked reasonable enough. There were, however, additional Soviet demands, such as the Kurile Islands, and a recognition of the Soviet satellite status of Mongolia, without the participation of Chinese representatives. Roosevelt had hinted at some of the demands to Chiang at the Cairo Conference; he now undertook to obtain Chiang’s agreement to them. In exchange, he obtained not only Stalin’s promise to join the war against Japan two to three months after the end of hostilities in Europe, but two concessions highly important for the Chinese government. Stalin agreed to help the Chinese Nationalists and he recognized that, once cleared of Japanese troops by the Red Army, Manchuria would be returned to Chinese sovereignty. In view of the situation in China at the time, these were major concessions indeed; and had the Nationalists won the Chinese civil war, would no doubt have brought Stalin reproaches from Chinese Communists as vehement as those which Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s agreement to the Yalta terms were later to bring on the American President.
⁵⁸
No one yet knew whether the atomic bomb would work, nor, if it did work, what its impact on Japanese resistance might be. In the meantime, the Americans and British had secured a major ally for the war against Japan; the Americans to support the invasion of the Japanese home islands, the British to divert Japanese land forces from the planned campaign in Malaya scheduled to follow on that in Burma.