A World at Arms (162 page)

Other issues were at least partly worked out at Potsdam. There was to be a Council of Foreign Ministers to start meeting to prepare the peace treaties, with the first session scheduled for London in September. On the most important of these treaties after the one with Germany, that with Italy, preliminary agreements were not reached; but the Soviet Union did agree to put the treaty with Italy at the head of the agenda and to support Italy’s admission to the United Nations, in spite of very clear signs that the British and Americans were not prepared to agree to the Soviet Union’s receiving a share of the Italian colonial empire. Stalin had pushed for this, as well as for a role in Tangier, but it is not clear at this time whether this was a serious plan and hope or a negotiating ploy for exchange on other issues.
¹⁵⁷

On Poland, there was also at least minimal progress. Truman had earlier succeeded in obtaining from Stalin a small concession on the new government by the admission of Mikolajczyk and some others to it. These changes appear to have been the result of Harry Hopkins’s mission to Moscow from May 26 to June 6 at Truman’s request, and to represent a willingness of Stalin to make at least changes in appearances now that the Red Army was in full control of the country and the Lublin Committee had been firmly established in Warsaw.
¹⁵⁸
By the time of the Potsdam meeting both the British and American governments were reluctantly moving toward an acceptance of the new Polish government, and they agreed to let it take over former Polish assets abroad. They were, however, not prepared to agree to the requested forced repatriation of the Polish soldiers who had fought alongside them against the Germans. It was one thing to repatriate against their will those who had fought on the German side; it was quite another to do so with your own comrades in arms. Once again free elections for Poland were promised for the immediate future–but not then held. The division of the remnants of Germany’s merchant and naval shipping was worked out. The first international trial of German war criminals was set. A number of
other issues was postponed by referral to the new Council of Foreign Ministers or simply left unresolved. On one final great question there was agreement: the warning to Japan.

On the way to Potsdam, Truman learned of the successful testing of an atomic bomb in New Mexico. He now obtained Churchill’s agreement to tell Stalin about it.
¹⁵⁹
The contemporary record does not indicate, but we know today, that Stalin not only knew of the American and British work on the A-bomb from his espionage network–and that the Soviet Union itself was hard at work on producing one–but that Truman had been briefed on Soviet atomic espionage when first informed about the A-bomb after his swearing in as President. What he therefore knew would be really news for Stalin was the report on the success of the test.

Truman was hopeful that the bomb would end the war with Japan quickly.
¹⁶⁰
Although he doubted that the Japanese would respond to any appeal for a prompt surrender, Truman was greatly concerned about the casualties and destruction the new weapon would cause and therefore wanted “a warning statement advising the Japanese to surrender and save lives.”
¹⁶¹
This concern led to the Potsdam Declaration which called on Japan to surrender, a call which they dismissed, as discussed in
Chapter 16
. But the Potsdam Conference also provided an opportunity for a coordination of war plans for the final assault on Japan if that should still prove necessary. British forces would participate in the 1946 landing on the main island of Honshu, and the Russians would attack the Japanese army in Manchuria. One way or another, Japan was to follow Germany in defeat. If the call for surrender from the center of an occupied Germany did not get them to see the light, other steps would.

As the Allied leaders left Potsdam for their respective countries, they could look back on a terrible struggle which had finally ended in complete victory over Hitler’s Germany and its European allies. But the very completeness of that victory left them both in full control of a devastated continent and face to face with each other in its center. They could look back with satisfaction on a great task accomplished–a point symbolized by exchanges of decorations and the holding of parades–but they also had to look forward to the difficult problems of reconstruction and the challenge of finding ways to live alongside one another without still another great conflict. Both of these assignments would occupy them for years.

^a
By the end of 1944 the Germans had also lost two other sources of oil which they had seized earlier in the war and had exploited for several years: the small oil fields in the Boryslav-Drogobycz area of Poland and the Estonian oil shale region.

^b
The Soviet government gave up this lease in 1955.

^c
It was always assumed that the area of Memel (Klaipeda), which Germany had been obliged to give up in 1919 but had taken back in 1939, would be included in Lithuania.

^d
The outcome was a major modification in favor of Poland at the northern end of the border, leaving the bulk of the Bialystok region to Poland, and smaller alterations at the southern end, also in favor of Poland, with the Bug river remaining the border in the middle. There is a very useful map in U.S., Department of State,
Postwar Foreign Policy Preparations,
facing p. 512. There is a sketch map comparing the Molotov-Ribbentrop line with the 1945 border in Romain Yakemchouk,
La ligne Curzon et fa IIe Guerre Mondiafe
(Louvain and Paris: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1957), p. 117.

^e
The Curzon Line, named after British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon of Kedleston, had been drawn up at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 on the basis of the Austrian census of 1910, and was supposed to follow approximately the eastern limit of predominantly Polish as opposed to Belorussian and Ukrainian populations.

^f
The fact that in post-war West Germany the political party which represented the refugees and expellees in public selected as its leaders two men, Waldemar Kraft and Theodor Oberlander, who had both played prominent roles in earlier efforts to expel and expropriate non-Germans, effectively undermined whatever resonance German complaints might have had.

^g
The post-war critiques of the Morgenthau Plan invariably omit the plan’s assumption of Germany’s keeping much of the territory later turned over to Poland. Morgenthau assumed that only East Prussia and Upper and Central Silesia would be ceded. See the maps in Henry Morgenthau,
Germany is Our Problem
(New York: Harper, 1945), facing p. 160; and “White’s map published in David Rees,
Harry Dexter White: A Study in Paradox
(New York: Coward, McCann & Georghegan, 1973), p. 444. The area to be left with Germany was inhabited by at least five million people in 1939; they were, of course, among those who lost their homes in the settlement actually applied. Morgenthau estimated (p. 50) that his plan would require the shifting of just over four million workers from heavy industry to agriculture.

^h
From the isolated coastal areas about two million military and civilians were evacuated. On Breslau, see Karol Jonca, “The Destruction of ‘Breslau’: The Final Struggle of the Germans in Wroclaw in 1945,”
Polish Western Affairs
2, No.2 (1961 ), 304–33.

ⁱ
Why Stalin thought this issue so important remains to be investigated.

^j
Knowledge of the bridge seizure first reached 1st Army headquarters from a decyphered
German
message; Adolph G. Rosengarten, Jr., “With Ultra from Omaha Beach to Weimar, Germany-A Personal View,”
Military Affairs
42, NO.3 (1978), p. 131; see also London report “Sunset 860” of 8 March 1945, SRS 1869, Part VI, p. 121, NA, RG 457. Montgomery learned of the bridge capture on the same day and immediately informed Brooke (Tac Hq 21st Army Group to War Office M. 1020 of7 March 1945, Liddell Hart Centre, Alanbrooke Papers, 14/7/16), but there is no reference to the event, or to Patton’s Rhine crossing, in Brooke’s Diary.

^k
It seems to me that General Gotthard Heinrici, the Commander in Chief of Army Group Vistula, belongs in this category, and that his firing from that post by Field Marshal Keitel reflects quite accurately the distinction between the two types of leaders suggested in the text. See Ziemke,
Stalingrad to Berlin,
pp. 484–87. Note also Gellermann,
Armee Wenck,
Chapter 5
.

^l
Since so many of them survived, German generals took their revenge on Hitler by blaming
him
in their memoirs for all the battles they lost, while claiming for themselves the credit for whatever victories their forces had attained.

^m
William H. Mac Neill in
America, Britain, and Russia,
p. 625 n I, has pointed out that Soviet insistence on deliveries from the western zones contributed to the American abandonment of support for internationalization of the Ruhr. it should be noted that Truman had accepted the resignation of Morgenthau rather than take him along to Potsdam. The Potsdam agreements meant abandoning both Morgenthau’s ideas on the Ruhr and his intention of leaving much more of eastern Germany to the future Germany. The resignation of Morgenthau is linked by Alan P. Dobson,
US. Wartime Aid to Britain
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), p.222, to the decision on the following day to allow no Lend-Lease aid to Britain except for fighting Japan, in violation of the Quebec phase II agreement. There is a helpful review of the workings of the reparations settlement, including the original terms and the experience in the first years after the war, in Inter-Allied Reparation Agency,
Report of the Secretary General for the Year
1949 (Brussels: Inter-Allied Reparation Agency, 1950).

16

THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC: FROM LEYTE TO THE
MISSOURI

Allied plans for the defeat of Japan were developed in the summer and fall of 1944. The success in the Marianas and northern New Guinea opened the possibility for new strikes at the Japanese empire. It was not yet settled among the American planners whether an attack on Luzon, the largest and most important island in the northern Philippines, was preferable to a landing on Formosa (Taiwan) as the basis for the direct attack on Japan itself, but agreement had been reached on an invasion of Leyte in the central Philippines as an essential prerequisite for either of the two alternatives. From Leyte, with its great anchorage facilities and its assumed potential for air bases, subsequent assaults could be mounted over the intervening space to either Luzon or Formosa.

The Formosa project, especially dear to Admiral King, however, fell victim to three developments in the fall of 1944. The collapse of the Chinese Nationalists made the idea of a base off the China coast for the coordination of operations from there in the great assault on Japan an unrealistic project. The continuation of the war in Europe into 1945 precluded the early transfer to East Asia of the troops and shipping needed for the Formosa operation. The logistic needs of a Formosa landing, especially past a Japanese-controlled Luzon, were beyond the anticipated resources of the Central Pacific theater, so that Admiral Nimitz increasingly favored a Luzon over a Formosa operation as a follow-up to Leyte. Even while the Leyte plans were being developed, therefore, the central Philippines landing increasingly took on the character of a prelude to a landing on Luzon as a step to an assault further north–toward Japan itself–and with less and less direct connection to the war on the Chinese mainland.

There were three further repercussions to this change. In the first place, there came to be increasing concern in Allied headquarters about the possibility of a continuing campaign against the large Japanese forces
in China even after a defeat of Japan in its home islands. The huge area held by the Japanese armed forces in China, together with their control of some industry there, seemed to open up the possibility of an extended further war to reduce those units.
¹
The question of trying to make the Japanese surrender
all
of their forces simultaneously, on the mainland of Asia as well as in the cut-off islands of the southwest Pacific, assumed increasing importance in Allied thinking. In view of their experience with the way the Japanese held on to the bitter end, the prospect of further years of fighting in all sorts of places on the continent and the islands raised very serious questions indeed, questions which included concern about the willingness of the American-to say nothing of the British-public to support bloody “cleaning-up operations” for years on end.

Secondly, the steady deterioration of the situation in China might well lend credence to the British disdain for the Chinese Nationalists and China’s role as a great power, but it also made any British operation in Southeast Asia far more a separate endeavor to recapture their colonial empire than a portion of the general campaign against Japan. In the third place, the centrality of the Philippines to the final defeat of Japan in the eyes of Washington as well as the view of General MacArthur, who had always seen this as the supreme test of his own and his country’s war effort–and he never could distinguish between the two-would assure solid support from Washington for practically anything he wanted to do in the Philippines campaign.