Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (85 page)

THIRTEEN
Peace by Terror

On 10 January 1946 the Tory
MP
and diarist ‘Chips’ Channon attended a society wedding in London and remarked to another guest, Lady (’Emerald’) Cunard, ‘how quickly normal life had been resumed. “After all”, I said, pointing to the crowded room, “this is what we have been fighting for.” “What,” said Emerald, “are they all Poles?’”
¹

It was, indeed, all too easy to forget Poland. Yet Poland was the cause of the war in the sense that, if Poland had not existed, the war would have taken a radically different course. And Poland terminated the war too in the sense that it provoked the collapse of the wartime Alliance and the beginning of democratic—Communist confrontation. The tale was resumed where it had left off when Stalin and Hitler signed the pact of August 1939, and Soviet Russia now represented the acquisitive totalitarian principle on the world stage. Poland was the awkward piece on the global chessboard, a reminder that the war had not been so much a conflict between right and wrong as a struggle for survival.

Of course the notion that the ‘Grand Alliance’ was in any way altruistic had been an illusion from the start. It was largely the creation of Roosevelt, partly for his own political purposes, partly because he believed it. Those of his countrymen who had long professional experience of dealing with Stalin and his government were hotly, despairingly, opposed to Roosevelt’s line. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt, who succeeded Davies in Moscow, shared the hard-line State Department view, known as the ‘Riga school’:

Approaches by Britain or the United States must be interpreted here as signs of weakness … the moment these people here get it into their heads that we are appeasing them, making up to them or need them, they immediately stop being co-operative …. My experience has been that they respond only to force and if force cannot be applied, to straight oriental bartering.
²

Roosevelt would have none of this. The moment Hitler’s declaration of war made Russia America’s ally, he devised procedures for bypassing the State Department and the Embassy and dealing with Stalin directly.
³
His intermediary was Harry Hopkins, a political fixer who reported back that Stalin, naturally, was delighted with the idea: ‘[he] has no confidence in our ambassador or in any of our officials’.
⁴
Roosevelt also wanted to bypass Churchill, whom he thought an incorrigible old imperialist, incapable of understanding ideological idealism. He wrote to him, 18 March 1942: ‘I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think that I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.’
⁵
This vanity, so reminiscent of Chamberlain’s belief that he alone could ‘handle’ Hitler, was compounded by an astonishing naivety. He did not believe Stalin wanted territory. He rebuked Churchill: ‘You have four-hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood and you just don’t understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it.’
⁶
‘I think’, he said of Stalin, ‘that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return,
noblesse oblige
, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.’
⁷

The menace Roosevelt’s blindness constituted to the post-war stability of Europe first became apparent at the Teheran Conference which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin attended in November 1943. The chairman of the British chiefs of staff, Sir Alan Brooke, summed it up: ‘Stalin has got the President in his pocket.’
⁸
Churchill complained to one of his Ministers of State, Harold Macmillan: ‘Germany is finished, though it may take some time to clean up the mess. The real problem now is Russia. I can’t get the Americans to see it.’
⁹
Throughout 1944, though the invasion of Europe was successfully launched, Churchill’s anxieties increased. After the Allied breakout of July-August 1944, the pace of the advance slowed down. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, refused to accept the salient point that the degree to which his troops penetrated into Central Europe would in fact determine the post-war map: ‘I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes,’ he insisted.
¹⁰
As the Soviets advanced, they made their hostile intentions plain enough. Seizing the German experimental submarine station in Gdynia, they refused Allied naval experts access to its secrets, though the battle of the Atlantic was still raging and the convoys carrying arms to Russia were still under fierce U-boat attacks.
¹¹
The American generals wanted to preserve the maximum co-operation with the Soviet armed forces so that, at the earliest
possible moment, they could transfer troops to the East to finish Japan (with, they hoped, massive Soviet support), and then all go home. As Churchill saw it, that would leave the British, with twelve divisions (about 820,000 men), facing 13,000 Soviet tanks, 16,000 front-line aircraft and 525 divisions totalling over 5 million.
¹²
His task, as a Foreign Office memo put it, was to discover how ‘to make use of American power’, to steer ‘this great unwieldy barge’ into ‘the right harbour’; otherwise it would ‘wallow in the ocean, an isolated menace to navigation’.
¹³

Churchill decided to pursue a two-fold policy: to bargain realistically with Stalin when he could, and to seek to screw Roosevelt up to the sticking-point at the same time. In October 1944 he went to Moscow and thrust at Stalin what he called a ‘naughty document’, which set out, since ‘Marshal Stalin was a realist’, the ‘proportion of interests’ of the Great Powers in five Balkan countries: Yugoslavia and Hungary were to be split 50–50 between Russia and the rest; Russia was to have 90 per cent in Romania and 75 per cent in Bulgaria; while Britain, in accord with the USA, was to have 90 per cent in Greece. According to the minutes taken by the British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, Stalin haggled over Bulgaria, where he evidently wanted 90 per cent; then he signed the paper with a tick of a blue pencil. He also agreed to hold back the Italian Communists.
¹⁴

The ‘naughty document’ was in effect an attempt to exclude Russia from the Mediterranean at the price of giving her Romania and Bulgaria as satellites. Churchill calculated that Greece was the only brand to be saved from the burning, for British troops were already in place there: what he secured in Moscow was Stalin’s agreement to give Britain a free hand – and it was promptly used. On 4 December, when civil war broke out in Athens, Churchill determining to use force to crush the Communists: he worked late into the night sending out cables, ‘sitting gyrating in his armchair and dictating on the machine to Miss Layton, who did not bat an eyelid at the many blasphemies with which the old man interspersed his official phrases’. His key cable to General Scobie, the British commander, insisted: ‘We have to hold and dominate Athens. It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.’
¹⁵
Bloodshed was necessary; but Greece was saved for democracy. Indeed, though stability in the Mediterranean theatre was not assured until the Communists lost the Italian elections in April 1948, Churchill effectively, and almost singlehandedly, kept totalitarianism out of the Mediterranean for a generation by his vigorous policy in late 1944 – his last great contribution to human freedom.

But Churchill was powerless to save Eastern Europe. As he put it in a cabinet minute:

It is beyond the power of this country to prevent all sorts of things crashing at the present time. The responsibility lies with the United States and my desire is to give them all the support in our power. If they do not feel able to do anything, then we must let matters take their course.
¹⁶

But at the critical meeting at Yalta in January 1945, Roosevelt deliberately blocked Churchill’s attempts to co-ordinate Anglo-American policy in advance: he did not wish, said Averell Harriman, to ‘feed Soviet suspicions that the British and Americans would be operating in concert’.
¹⁷
When Poland came up, Roosevelt settled for a Russian agreement to elections in which ‘all democratic and anti-Nazi parties shall have the right to take part’, but he did not back the British demand for international supervision of the poll. Instead he produced a typical piece of Rooseveltian rhetoric, a ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’, with vague commitments to ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. The Russians were happy to sign it, especially after they heard Roosevelt’s staggering announcement that all American forces would be out of Europe within two years: that was just what Stalin wanted to know.
¹⁸

The Cold War may be said to date from the immediate aftermath of the Yalta Conference, to be precise from March 1945. Of course in a sense Soviet Russia had waged Cold War since October 1917: it was inherent in the historical determinism of Leninism. The pragmatic alliance from June 1941 onwards was a mere interruption. It was inevitable that Stalin would resume his hostile predation sooner or later. His mistake was to do so too quickly. It was not that he was impatient, like Hitler. He did not believe in an imminent eschatology. But he was greedy. He was too cautious to follow Hitler’s example of systematically creating opportunities for plunder, but he could not resist taking such opportunities when they presented themselves. His sensible tactic was to hold his hand until the Americans had vanished to the other side of the Atlantic. Instead, seeing the Polish fruit was ripe, he could not resist taking it. Roosevelt’s aide Admiral Leahy, the most hard-headed member of the American delegation, had complained even at Yalta that the Polish agreement was ‘so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it’.
¹⁹
But once the commission set up by Yalta to fulfil the free election pledge met on 23 February, it became clear Stalin intended to ignore his pledges. The critical moment came on 23 March, when Molotov announced the elections would be held Soviet-style. When Roosevelt got Harriman’s account
of this meeting two days later, he banged his fist on his wheelchair: ‘Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.’
²⁰
Roosevelt’s political education was assisted by a series of thirteen forceful messages Churchill sent him, 8 March-12 April 1945; and disillusioned at last, he went to Warm Springs to die, telling a journalist that either Stalin was not in control or was ‘not a man of his word’.
²¹

Nevertheless, in his last weeks Roosevelt did nothing to encourage Eisenhower to push on rapidly towards Berlin, Vienna and Prague, as the British wanted. ‘The Americans could not understand’, General Montgomery wrote sadly, ‘that it was of little avail to win the war strategically if we lost it politically.’
²²
The new President, Harry Truman, was not a member of the wealthy, guilt-ridden East Coast establishment and had none of Roosevelt’s fashionable progressive fancies. He was ignorant, but he learnt fast; his instincts were democratic and straightforward. At 5.30 on 23 April he summoned Molotov to Blair House (he had not yet moved into the White House) and told him Russia must carry out what it had agreed at Yalta on Poland: ‘I gave it to him straight. I let him have it. It was the straight one-two to the jaw.’ Molotov: ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life.’ Truman: ‘Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.’
²³
But Truman could not transform American military policy in the last days of the war. General Bradley calculated it would cost 100,000 US casualties to take Berlin; General Marshall said that capturing Prague was not possible; General Eisenhower was opposed to anything which ended military co-operation with the Red Army; all wanted Soviet assistance against Japan.
²⁴
So Eastern Europe and most of the Balkans were lost to totalitarianism.

It was unclear for some time whether Western Europe could be saved too. Even at the political and diplomatic level, it took precious weeks and months to reverse the Roosevelt policy. In the first half of 1945 the State Department was still trying to prevent the publication of any material critical of Soviet Russia, even straight factual journalism, such as William White’s
Report on the Russians.
²⁵
At Potsdam, in July, Truman had at his elbow ex-Ambassador Davies, now the proud holdet of the Order of Lenin, who urged, ‘I think Stalin’s feelings are hurt. Please be nice to him.’
²⁶
Churchill, defeated at the elections on 25 July, had a dream in which he saw himself lying under a white sheet, his feet stretched out: dead.
²⁷
His Labour successors, obsessed with home problems and Britain’s appalling financial plight, talked vaguely of rebuilding a European alliance with France, but they were more afraid of a resurgent Germany than a Soviet steamroller.
²⁸
There were many who thought the game was up. Harriman, back from Moscow, told the Navy Secretary, James
Forrestal, that ‘half and maybe all of Europe might be Communist by the end of next winter’.
²⁹