The World at War (78 page)

ANTHONY EDEN

Every morning the Foreign Secretaries had to meet for several hours to try and prepare the agenda for that day, it's much too short notice really, and then in the afternoon the heads of government would also meet with their Foreign Secretaries. So far as we were concerned the hours were appalling, it was almost continuous. And then Roosevelt got himself tied up with an engagement to meet King Ibn Saud on a destroyer in the Suez Canal and had to leave. It's perhaps a good tactic in a negotiation to summon your train to take you away and to let your opponents think that you're not going to wait indefinitely, but to pin yourself down to an end date really puts you in a awkward fix, so we thought. Churchill and I were much troubled by this tight timetable to which we were working and which suited Stalin I think quite well.

CHARLES BOHLEN

I don't know how carefully Mr Churchill had studied the paper we had to sent on to the British; we sent it to the Soviets also. I was going out in the hall to see them off; Mr Churchill and Mr Eden had quite a discussion over the voting formula, Churchill took the line that after all the countries that had born the brunt of the war should really have the deciding vote and they would take care of the little countries, that the little countries shouldn't be allowed too much voice in things. Mr Eden disagreed quite strongly and Churchill suddenly turned to me and said, 'What is this voting formula of yours?' And I said, 'Well, Mr Prime Minister, it reminds me of a story of the South in the old days and the plantation. The owner of the plantation gave a negro a bottle of whiskey and when he asked the negro the next day how he liked the whiskey, the man replied it was absolutely perfect: "If it had been any better you wouldn't have given it to me, if it had been any worse I couldn't have drunk it."'

ANTHONY EDEN

They were certainly a remarkable triumvirate by any standards. FDR, it was his personal charm which was considerable and his flair as a politician was also considerable, but at that time his health was not good. I remember during one session Harry Hopkins coming up and saying quietly to me over my shoulder, 'I don't think the President's well. I think we ought to wind this up as soon as we can.' So he wasn't on top form at Yalta. Winston, with all his great qualities, but perhaps negotiation wasn't really his strong suit because Winston was essentially warm-hearted and responsive to anybody whom he respected and had an admiration for. In that sense he was a contrast to Stalin who was a cold, cool and a calculating negotiator who knew exactly what he wanted to get and went out to get it, never got excited, hardly ever raised his voice, a cold chuckle or laugh particularly when he thought that FDR or Winston were at odds. He'd get up and walk up and down and rub his hands, but he was a formidable man to negotiate against.

AMBASSADOR HARRIMAN

Yalta was really the highpoint of the relationship between the three men. Victory was in the air and, although we hadn't crossed the Rhine yet, the Germans were in retreat and so there was a good deal more talk about matters in the future, and Poland again became the most troublesome point. And it's interesting that both Roosevelt and Churchill felt they had an agreement with Stalin, both went to their respective legislative group, Prime Minister to Parliament, President to Congress, spoke in very effusive terms. Churchill said that Poland will have the right of self-determination; they were bitterly disappointed that Stalin had broken his agreement. And then there was the agreement for liberating Europe, for free and unfettered elections and they had high hopes that there would be solid cooperation in other fields as well in the post-war period.

ALGER HISS

Basically the impression I had, being fairly objective, was that three highly politicised leaders, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, felt it was essential at that stage of the war that agreement be announced as to Poland. Roosevelt did not want anything like secret agreements, which had bedevilled [President Woodrow] Wilson; they wanted something that should be announced to the world. The Yalta communiqué was no treaty, things not spelled out in detail. Justice Burns, who was present as a supernumerary, I think we were the only people trained as lawyers, and if that had been a treaty there'd have been a whole staff. They came close to precision as their different objectives permitted. I was very aware that both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill were highly conscious of domestic political issues, they were frank about it, it's in the minutes – Roosevelt saying that Stalin must appreciate his problem with the large Polish electorate in Detroit. Mr Churchill saying Stalin must understand that he had to deal with public opinion, not only in the Commons but throughout the county regarding the Polish government in exile, as a gallant remnant. The nub of the disagreement was there was never a complete acceptance of the American side in a unitary sense of an abolition of the cordon sanitaire which had been set up after Versailles. Those of us most interested in the UN work had early concluded that if any kind of peaceful coexistence was to occur, that had to be done away with, the Russians had to be assured that there was no hidden landmine. And democratic government is a mixture of many forces, in flux at the same time, they rise and fall. Years ago, [American journalist] Walter Lippmann said that American foreign policy moves by one law only, the law of the pendulum swing, but while the pendulum is swinging, those who are espousing policies momentarily predominant are contending with those who know the pendulum will come their way later on – they never give up their position completely.

ANTHONY EDEN

We were not happy about what happened in connection with the Far East, it was never discussed at the conference in the sense of future boundaries or who wished to have what territories and Winston and I were very much take aback when on the last day of the conference, at a luncheon which Roosevelt was giving, we were suddenly told that the Russians and the Americans had come to some agreement about the Far East, disposing of some of the Chinese territories, and we thought that a very bad thing. I was so much against it that I didn't want us to have any part in it and urged the Prime Minister that we should let them make a deal if they wanted to and hold ourselves free. He took the view, we wouldn't have anything to do with the later developments either and though we didn't like it, we'd be better in on it, and see what we could do. But it was a very startling development and perhaps an example of FDR thinking that he could do things direct with Stalin more effectively than with the three of us round the table. I can't help feeling if that had been discussed at the conference end of the agreements, it wouldn't have ended up in the shape which it did.

ALGER HISS

They were seen not only by the participants but by the American public as a whole when they were announced as a vastly successful hopeful wartime agreement, solidifying unity during the remainder of the war and presaging a period of peace. The enthusiasm was tremendous and in view of their later criticism of the Yalta agreement you wouldn't believe what the same people were saying in
Life
magazine. They had some lovely things to say about it then. Once the Cold War was in full blast this became a political dodge to tie dead cats around the neck of the Democrats and all of the participants. Pretty notable Americans like Admiral Leahy, Mr Harriman, Bohlen and high military people including General Dean, who was our Military Attaché in Moscow, uniformly said that this was a successful agreement, we got all we could have hoped and in some cases more. Most people who have studied the text with any objectivity, if they start plotting up who made what concessions, actually the Russians made more concessions than the British. It's almost mysterious as to how the myth of Yalta grew. I wrote a magazine article in September 1955 called
The Myth of Yalta.
Just recently Professor Theo Harris has written a book called
The Myth of Yalta
and his book does show how it developed among Republicans and newspapers who supported the Republicans, and it was amazing, instant mythology. Usually
myths take a few centuries to develop; this was done almost overnight, it was ugly. President Roosevelt's health was attacked; the general line was an ailing President, malevolently advised by me among others, sold Poland and China down the river. It's not the impression of those who were present, and I think it's less and less the attitude of the general public. After all, when the Republicans came in under Eisenhower they could no longer say there's no sense in dealing with the Russians, you can't trust them, because they began dealing with them so there had to be some separation of sheep from goats. And it seems to me the Republicans now take a good deal of pleasure in following the spirit of Yalta belatedly by having another President go to the Soviet Union and go to China, which Roosevelt never did.
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ANTHONY EDEN

I don't know that our hopes in our hearts was very high, I don't think we could claim more for Yalta than that it was the best arrangement in the circumstances, in the war which was still being waged – that we could make with the war still very much going on, and Russia was still bearing a very heavy part of it. I've never known exactly what happened after Yalta. Certainly things began to sour very quickly and there were some in the Kremlin who didn't altogether like some of the things they'd agreed to. Nobody knows how the Kremlin works and one doesn't know whether there was any truth in that or not. I think it went sour because the military development strengthened Russia's hands and that whereas the Russians had felt it necessary to be considerate of Western opinion at Yalta, a few months later they didn't feel any such necessity because the war was going so well for them. Therefore they swept aside some of the engagements they'd got into. That certainly applied particularly about Poland.

President Roosevelt died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 12 April 1945 and was succeeded by Harry S Truman, who had only been Vice President since 20 January. Truman had replaced the pro-Soviet Henry Wallace, who in 1948 was the Presidential candidate of the Progressive Party, a Communist front, and was described as 'a propaganda parrot for the Kremlin'.

CHARLES BOHLEN

Mr Truman was a man with great powers of decision and the interview with Molotov, which I interpreted in 1945, he was fairly stern with Molotov and shut him up when he began to get into the propaganda explanation about Poland. His behaviour was cold and he merely told him he wished he'd tell Marshal Stalin that we'd like to know when they were going to begin to live up to their agreements. Molotov was more interested in the agreements about the Far East, which had not yet been implemented, but it was a rather unusual interview with a Soviet official. It gave me a certain amount of pleasure to translate rather firm stuff to the Soviets and I think Molotov was not quite used to hearing that. It was not quite as spectacular as Mr Truman makes out in his memoirs.

CHAPTER 31
FALL OF BERLIN

It is unfortunate that
Götterdämmerung
has become the standard cliché for the end of the Nazi regime because in Norse mythology it describes a war of the gods that brings about the end of the world. That was certainly the view of Hitler and the hard core of true believers who went down with him, but the term dignifies them by attributing too much importance to their deaths. On land and by sea and air the Germans fought to the bitter end and while one may feel considerable sympathy for the miserable civilians cowering under a rain of bombs, and professional respect for the courage and tenacity of the fighting men, the fact remains that every minute the war was prolonged by the efforts of such as Albert Speer, or by resolute field commanders like Kesselring in Italy or Model in western Germany, meant the death of yet more Jews in the Nazi death factories. All the contradictions in American political and military policy were also brought to the surface in the final months but one cannot fault Eisenhower's logic in not making a dash for 'Berlin when it was already agreed that it would fall well within the Soviet area of occupation. The interviews conducted for the programme
Nemesis: Germany February–May 1945
were some of the best in the series, reflecting the makers' fascination with the last moments of this evil regime. Particularly striking are Speer's vivid recollection of the final days in Berlin and Traudl Junge's chilling moment of realisation that Hitler was a hollow man as she took the dictation of his 'Last Will'. The rather gruesome concern with the identification of Hitler's body reflects the fact that in June 1945 the Soviets declared that his remains had not been found, which gave birth to a wave of speculation that he had survived and was being concealed by Nazi sympathisers in the West. It served its propaganda purpose at the time, but
as such things do it acquired a life of its own and has predictably kept conspiracy theorists busy ever since.

LIEUTENANT DENIS BEATSON-HIRD

51st Highland Division

As soon as the Rhine crossing had taken place we felt the war was coming to an end and obviously nobody wanted to get badly hurt and certainly nobody wanted to get killed at that stage. We were all desperately keen to get home fairly soon. There was a feeling of optimism and success – we just felt that this was the end, the Germans were going to pack up and there was nothing really to worry about.

MAJOR GENERAL KENNETH STRONG

General Eisenhower's Chief of Intelligence

Eisenhower still had his main
objective, which was to penetrate Germany and to destroy the enemy armed forces. He didn't think that Berlin was a very important objective. What he decided to do was to go straight through to the centre of Germany to the Elbe, go eastwards, join up with the Russians and then to clear the northern flank, north sea ports and to clear his southern flank where there was possible talk about resistance in the Alps. He told Stalin his plan and he got into a lot of trouble for this because the British said he'd had no right to do this, this was a matter of politics or policy and not a military matter. But he always said, 'Here I am advancing, I'm going to come into contact with the Russians, I really must tell them what I am trying to do.' So the British pressed very strongly to him to go to Berlin and he said simply, 'If I'm ordered to go to Berlin, I'll do it, but these orders must come from my bosses who are the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington.' His orders were never changed because the Americans were convinced that after the war they could get on well with the Russians. They looked on Russians as being their allies in the future.