The Second World War (148 page)

Churchill was certainly in a fighting mood, prompted by bitter frustration over Britain’s impotence to change anything and yet at the same time encouraged by the implications of the new invention. As the conference progressed, Stalin’s desire to extend Soviet power in many directions became abundantly apparent. He showed an interest in Italian colonies in Africa, and proposed that the Allies should have Franco removed. Churchill’s worst fears would have been aroused if he had overheard an exchange between Averell Harriman and Stalin during one break. ‘
It must be very pleasant for you
’, Harriman said, making conversation, ‘to be in Berlin now after all your country has suffered.’ The Soviet leader eyed him. ‘Tsar Aleksandr went all the way to Paris,’ he replied.

This was not entirely a joke. Well before Churchill’s fantasy of Unthinkable, a meeting of the Politburo in 1944 had decided to order the Stavka to plan for the invasion of France and Italy, as General Shtemenko later told Beria’s son. The Red Army offensive was to be combined with a seizure of power by the local Communist Parties. In addition, Shtemenko explained, ‘
a landing in Norway
was provided for, as well as the seizure of the Straits [with Denmark]. A substantial budget was allocated for the realisation of these plans. It was expected that the Americans would abandon a Europe fallen into chaos, while Britain and France would be paralysed by their colonial problems. The Soviet Union possessed 400 experienced divisions, ready to bound forward like tigers. It was calculated that the whole operation would take no more than a month… All these plans were aborted when Stalin learned from [Beria] that the Americans had the atom bomb and were putting it into mass production.’ Stalin apparently told Beria ‘that if Roosevelt had still been alive, we would have succeeded’. This, it seems, was the main reason why Stalin suspected that Roosevelt had been secretly assassinated.

Churchill received little support from Truman. The new President had been charmed and awed by the manipulative Soviet dictator, who despised him in return. The prime minister’s greatest moment of intimacy with
Truman came when they discussed how the President was to tell Stalin of the atomic bomb. But Stalin had already discussed twice with Beria how he should react when given the news. On 17 July Beria had provided him with details of the successful test, obtained by his spies in the Manhattan Project. So, when Truman told Stalin about the bomb in a confidential tone, Stalin barely reacted. He summoned Molotov and Beria immediately afterwards and, ‘sniggering’, related the scene. ‘
Churchill was standing by the door
, his eyes fixed on me like a searchlight, while Truman, with his hypocritical air, told me what had happened in an indifferent tone.’ Their amusement was increased when the recordings from NKVD microphones revealed that, when Churchill had asked Truman how the Soviet leader had taken the news, Truman replied that ‘Stalin had apparently failed to understand.’

On 26 July, the plenary session at Potsdam was suspended. The day before, Churchill had returned to London with Anthony Eden and Clement Attlee for the announcement of the general election results. Just as he departed, Churchill found himself in the strange position of being reassured by Stalin that he was bound to have beaten the socialists.

The prime minister had received warnings that things might not go his way, largely because of votes in the armed forces whose men wanted to do away with the past, both the harsh years of the 1930s and the war itself. At a dinner in London a few weeks before, when Churchill had talked about the election campaign, General Slim, back from Burma, had said to him: ‘
Well, prime minister, I know
one thing. My army won’t be voting for you.’

For most soldiers and NCOs, the military hierarchy bore too close a resemblance to the class system. An army captain, who had asked one of his sergeants how he was going to vote, received the reply: ‘
Socialist, sir
, because I’m fed up with taking orders from ruddy officers.’ When the votes were counted, it became clear that the armed forces had voted overwhelmingly for the Labour Party and for change. Churchill’s greatest fault was to have shown no taste for social reform, during either the war or the campaign.

In spite of his dislike for Churchill, Stalin was genuinely shaken by the result when the news of his crushing defeat reached Potsdam. He simply could not imagine how somebody of his stature could be voted out of power. Parliamentary democracy, in his view, was clearly a dangerously unstable way of running a country. He was very conscious of the fact that, under any other regime but his own, he would have been removed from office after his catastrophic handling of the German invasion.

Clement Attlee, the new prime minister, and Ernest Bevin, who had taken over as foreign secretary from Eden, now occupied the British seats
at the conference. But through no fault of their own they could exert little influence on the discussions. James F. Byrnes, the new US secretary of state, agreed to recognize the western border of Poland along the Oder–Neisse Line, and they followed suit. Stalin had achieved everything he wanted at Potsdam, even though he had been forced to cancel the invasion of western Europe out of fear of the atom bomb.

The return of prisoners of war, which had been agreed at Yalta, soon proved a terrible problem for the Allies. Both the American Counter Intelligence Corps and British Field Security had trouble identifying war criminals or even the nationalities of those they interrogated, because many from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union pretended to be German in order to stay in the west.

The greatest mixture of nationalities and ethnic groups had congregated in the province of Carinthia in south-east Austria. When units from the British V Corps reached the beautiful Drau Valley, they found tens of thousands of people camped there. There were Croats, Slovenes, Serb
tniks and most of the Cossack Corps. Those from Yugoslavia were fleeing Tito’s victorious revenge in the savage civil war. The Cossacks, commanded by German officers, had played a major part in the murderous anti-partisan campaign.

Tito appeared to match Stalin in his appetite for more territory. He was hoping to seize Istria, Trieste and even part of Carinthia. Some of his partisans reached its capital, Klagenfurt, just before the British. They were terrorizing the countryside and threatening the mass of military refugees. British officers, lacking clear direction from above, found that they faced a chaotic situation, with the threat of more of Tito’s forces crossing into Austria. They were then given the unpleasant task of returning Soviet citizens to the Red Army, just across the frontier to the east.

The Cossacks were notorious for the atrocities they had committed. Even Goebbels had been shaken by the reports he had received of their activities in Yugoslavia and northern Italy. But they also had women and children with them, as well as some White Russians who had been living in the west since the Bolshevik victory in 1921. The two most prominent were the Cossack ataman General Pyotr Krasnov, an officer who was perhaps as honourable as was possible in a civil war, and General Andrei Shkouro, a cruel psychopath. Since it appeared impossible to weed out the good from the bad, staff officers at V Corps headquarters ordered that they should all be handed over to the Red Army. The Cossacks knew very well what Stalin’s vengeance was likely to be, and they had to be forced on to the transport by British soldiers armed with pick helms–the wooden handles of pickaxes. Although they admired the Red Army, most of the
troops involved in these forced repatriations were appalled by what they had to do, and there was nearly a mutiny.

At the same time, British troops were clearly reluctant to confront Tito’s increasingly aggressive forces. Nobody wanted to be killed after the war had finished. V Corps headquarters, under pressure to resolve the dangerous situation as rapidly as possible, ordered that the Yugoslavs should be forced back over their border. Again they included a mixture of those guilty of war crimes, especially the Croat Ustaše, and the less guilty. British officers and soldiers alike were horrified to have to force
tniks, the allies abandoned in favour of Tito, back over the Yugoslav border. Most appear to have been killed almost immediately. The German collapse had triggered the worst round of massacres by Tito’s partisans in the civil war. In 2009, the Slovene Hidden Graves Commission identified over 600 mass graves and has estimated that they contain the bodies of over more than 100,000 victims.

Vengeance and ethnic cleansing were just as brutal in northern and central Europe. For many Germans, rumours that all the country’s territory to the east of the Oder–East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania–would be handed to Poland represented the greatest fear of all. Once the fighting ended, nearly a million of the refugees made their way back to their abandoned homes, only to find that they were about to be chased out again.

As Stalin had intended, ethnic cleansing was pursued with a vengeance. Troops from the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies forced Germans from their houses to push them across the Oder. The first to go were those on pre-1944 Polish territory. Some had lived there for generations, others were the Volksdeutsch beneficiaries of the Nazis’ own ethnic cleansing in 1940. Packed into cattle wagons, they were taken westwards and robbed of their few belongings on the way. A similar fate awaited those who had stayed behind or returned to Pomerania and Silesia, which now fell within the new Polish borders. In East Prussia, only 193,000 Germans were left out of a population of 2.2 million.

During the
expulsions
from Polish territory, around 200,000 Germans were held in labour camps and some 30,000 are estimated to have died. Others were among the 600,000 Germans sent for forced labour in the Soviet Union. The Czechs also expelled up to three million Germans, most from the Sudetenland. Thirty thousand were killed in the process and 5,558 committed suicide. Women with their children had to walk, some of them for hundreds of kilometres, to find shelter in Germany.

It is hard to see how such an unbelievably brutal war could have ended without brutal revenge. Mass violence, as the Polish poet Czes
aw Mi
osz pointed out, destroyed both the idea of a common humanity and any
sense of natural justice. ‘
Murder became ordinary
during wartime,’ wrote Mi
osz, ‘and was even regarded as legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the neighbors away.’ For all of these reasons, Mi
osz explained, ‘the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other westerners] seriously.’ Because they had not undergone such experiences, they could not seem to fathom what they meant, and could not seem to imagine how they had happened either.