World War II Behind Closed Doors (18 page)

The Americans did not seem to believe that they would be the victims of a Japanese attack. No doubt partly influenced by their dealings with the Nazis – who so far had been careful not to force the USA into the war – many Americans felt that the most logical scenario would be that the Japanese would attack Dutch or British colonies in the East, perhaps aiming directly at the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. But the Japanese were thinking in more epic terms. Their attack on Pearl Harbor, in the middle of the Pacific, was an attempt to push the United States out of the equation altogether. ‘America is a big country and we knew that we wouldn't be able to win against them once the war was pro longed’, explains Masatake Okumiya,
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then serving in the Japanese Imperial Navy. ‘But at the time the fleet was the mainstay of military power, be it American, British or Japanese. The fleet represented a nation's military power. So if you destroyed the fleet, the damage would be huge. It would ruin President Roosevelt's reputation as a commander-in-chief and he might then be put in a difficult situation’.

It was a massive misjudgement. Far from seeking to disengage with the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans were driven on by a sense of righteous indignation to pursue vengeance against Japan. ‘Remember Pearl Harbor!’ became the rallying cry of American forces in the war that followed. And their
determination never to trust a foe whom many US Marines now called the ‘Tricky Nipper’ was born in part of the American government's complacency in allowing themselves to be surprised by Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese attack on the Americans affected the Soviet Union in two important ways. First, it confirmed that Japanese forces would no longer pose any foreseeable threat to the Soviet Union in the Far East. Indeed, it had been reports two months earlier from Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy in Japan, that the Japanese intended to attack in the south that had informed Stalin's decision to move divisions from the Siberian border to help in the defence of Moscow. Second, Pearl Harbor led almost immediately to Germany declaring war on America, and so brought Stalin an ally of colossal potential power. Hitler's decision to declare war on America, made on 11 December 1941, has often puzzled people who are not aware of the details of the history. Why, as German forces faced the immensity of the challenge of the war on the Eastern Front, did Hitler voluntarily add such a powerful additional enemy to his list of adversaries?

The answer is straightforward. Hitler, like Stalin, was a political leader who had an eye for reality, not just rhetoric. And to Hitler it had been obvious that war with the United States was inevitable. The key moment on that road to war had occurred not at Pearl Harbor but several months before, when Roosevelt had ordered American warships to accompany British convoys to the middle of the Atlantic.

As Churchill noted, by the time of the Atlantic Conference in August 1941 Roosevelt was determined ‘to wage war, but not declare it’.
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This was the conclusion the German Admiral Raeder had reached too, and he had told Hitler months prior to Pearl Harbor that unless U-boats were allowed to sink American ships, the battle of the Atlantic could not be won. Inevitably, following Roosevelt's decision to order American warships to patrol the Western Atlantic in support of convoys, a series of incidents followed – notably a U-boat attack on the USS
Greer
in September and the sinking of the USS
Reuben James
, causing the deaths of
more than a hundred American sailors, in November. So by December Hitler must have felt that by declaring war on America he was doing little more than accepting the inevitable – with the added benefit of retaining apparent control of events. Hitler further reasoned that the immediate entry of the USA into the war would do nothing substantively for at least a year to alter the course of the struggle in the Soviet Union – and it was this fight against Stalin that he believed would decide the entire conflict one way or the other. Moreover, he thought the Japanese would now tie down the American fleet in the Pacific and threaten British interests in the Far East.

But December 1941 was also a crucial month for less well-known reasons. On the 3rd, four days before Pearl Harbor, General Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government in exile, together with General Anders, a senior commander in the Polish army, met Stalin and Molotov in the Kremlin. Now that Poland had become an ‘ally’ of the Soviet Union, Stalin was in something of an awkward position. After all, little more than a year and a half before he had ordered the murder of much of the Polish officer corps. Not surprisingly, the attitude of the Soviet authorities to the remaining Poles whom they held in captivity had suddenly changed after the German invasion. One day they had been instruments of a bourgeois state that the Soviet Union had helped wipe off the map, the next they were potential allies against the Nazis.

Tadeusz Ruman
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experienced this near-miraculous transformation first hand. As a twenty-year-old Polish student, he had been arrested in the spring of 1940 for attempting to cross the border between the German and Soviet zones of Poland. Although he never admitted it to the Soviet guards who arrested him, he had been acting as a courier for the Polish underground and had subsequently been imprisoned under a false name. Initially he had been held in the infamous Brigidki prison in Lwów, where he had been forced into an overcrowded cell and systematically starved. From here he had been sent northeast to a labour camp in the Soviet Union, where he and a group of other Poles were told that they had all been sentenced to fifteen years' hard
labour. ‘There was no trial’, he says. ‘You had your trial when you were interrogated…with a totalitarian system there is no need to prove [anything]’. But the fifteen-year sentence did not hang over this twenty-year-old's mind because he had a more immediate problem in the camp: ‘You only think – will I get enough food? When you're hungry, you don't think of anything else’.

But one day in the summer of 1941 he experienced a change in fortune. He was ordered to see the commandant of the prison, a lieutenant-colonel in the NKVD. Ruman was told to sit down and offered a cigarette. He was wary, as he knew this was the normal NKVD interrogation technique: ‘Sit down, cigarette, and then you're suddenly banged in the back’. But this time the encounter was altogether more cordial. The NKVD officer explained that the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union and that now the Poles had an opportunity to fight with the Red Army against ‘our common enemy’.

‘What about me?’ asked Ruman. ‘I've received fifteen years for fighting for the Poles’.

‘Ah!’ said the commandant. ‘We must forget’. He took Ruman's file and put a cross on it, together with the word ‘freed’.

So Tadeusz Ruman, emaciated and weak, was released from Soviet captivity, his fifteen-year sentence for hard labour dismissed as casually as it had been imposed. He thus became one of the tens of thousands of Poles who were now to be organized and trained into a fighting force to help the Soviet Union, their new ally, recover Poland.

But gathering these men together from labour camps across the Soviet Union was a huge logistical task, as was the problem of feeding and housing them. And it was practical questions like these that the Polish delegation in Moscow, headed by General Sikorski, was trying to resolve. The Polish leaders were also, of course, keen to investigate why so few of their officers had so far been released. During the meeting in the Kremlin, Sikorski explained to Stalin that the recent Soviet ‘direction concerning the amnesty’ for Polish prisoners of war was ‘not being implemented’ and that ‘many of our most valuable people are still in labour camps and prisons’.
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‘That is impossible’, replied Stalin. ‘Because the amnesty applied to all, and all the Poles have been released’. Molotov nodded in agreement.

Sikorski went on to explain that he had a list of several thousand Poles who could not be accounted for. Not one of them had been released, and so, he surmised, they must therefore still be kept in captivity somewhere in the Soviet Union.

‘That is impossible’, said Stalin. ‘They have escaped’.

‘Where could they escape to?’ asked General Anders.

‘Well’, said Stalin, ‘to Manchuria’.

It is one of the defining exchanges of Stalin's entire war. Here was the Soviet leader, who knew better than anyone what the fate of the missing soldiers had been, calmly announcing that they had in fact escaped to a remote part of northeast Asia. It was surely one of the most cynical demonstrations of power seen in recent times. For just as the Soviet state could decree that you were an ‘enemy of the people’ – something was ‘true’ regardless of any objective criteria – so Stalin could, in what was probably a whimsical fancy, resurrect the murdered Polish officers and magic them to the wastes of Manchuria.

General Anders, who had personal experience of the Soviet judicial and penal system (all of it bad) – dared to contradict Stalin explicitly. ‘All of them could not possibly have escaped’, he insisted.

‘They have certainly been released’, said Stalin, ‘but have not yet arrived’.

Stalin's mind was still very much on the Polish question when he held another key discussion that December – this time with the suave British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. After a journey by sea to Murmansk, and from there by train to Moscow, Eden met Stalin for the first time on 16 December 1941. This too was to be a remarkable encounter, offering an important insight into Stalin's thinking. Because, with the German army still fighting near Moscow, with his country facing the possibility of extinction, with his anger still apparent at the lack of British commitment to an immediate second front, with a sense of indignation at the relatively small amount of military aid that had so far arrived, with all
these pressing issues on his mind, Stalin chose to open the discussion by focusing on a question that was not immediate but important – the future post-war boundaries of the Soviet Union.

Stalin forcibly made it clear to Eden that he would accept nothing less than (with slight alterations) the pre-1941 boundaries that had been agreed with the Nazis. The Soviets thus sought to legitimize their control over a huge chunk of what before the war had been Poland. Stalin also demanded that the territorial gains he had made at the expense of the Finns should be legitimized, as well as Soviet control of the Baltic States and several other smaller territorial concessions made on the western border of the Soviet Union. The diplomat Sir Frank Roberts, who accompanied Eden, later recalled the moment Stalin made this dramatic statement: ‘And when I went to Moscow with Anthony Eden in December 1941, when the Germans were still only 19 kilometres away from us as we talked, the very first thing that Stalin said at that meeting was, “Mr Eden, I want to have your assurance that at the end of the war you will support my just claim to all these areas”…. And Eden said: “Oughtn't we to be thinking about how we win the war?” “No, no,” said Stalin, “I would like to have this clear at the very beginning”. So Eden obviously had to say we had no authority to discuss how the war was to end. And I remember I made a mental resolution – because I was dealing with Poland – I said, “We'll never be able to restore Polish independence unless we do it before Stalin is winning the war”’.
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Significantly, Stalin also suggested at the meeting that Britain and the Soviet Union sign a ‘secret protocol’ that would lay out post-war boundaries. The words ‘secret protocol’, of course, were reminiscent of the infamous deal with the Nazis, concluded in the same building little over two years earlier. Eden, for obvious reasons, considered such a suggestion ‘impossible’.
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Eden's second meeting with Stalin, held at midnight the following day, was even more acrimonious. Eden said he was not in a position to agree to Stalin's claims, as the British had agreed with the Americans that these territorial questions should be settled only after the immediate military challenges posed by the Germans had
been successfully faced. Stalin was outraged, although whether his outrage was real or feigned is hard to say. All this was an indication of Stalin's preferred method of diplomacy: intimidation. The second meeting tended to be the one in which the visitor was lambasted by the Soviet leader, with the third and final encounter reserved for an attempt to mollify the previous angst caused.

And so it was with Eden. At their third and last meeting Stalin was more amiable, but he still said the same thing – he wanted an agreement on post-war frontiers that consolidated the Soviet Union's pre-1941 gains, and he wanted that agreement now.

Eden, the model of the aristocratic English gentleman, was clearly considerably disconcerted by Stalin's behaviour. Indeed, it is possible to see in this one encounter not just a clash of political ideologies but a clash of entire belief systems. Stalin – who was certainly not considered a ‘gentleman’ by the British – was thought to have revealed his boorish, peasant origins. His apparent lack of sophistication in diplomacy made it easy for some British people either to feel superior to him or to find him exotic and intriguing. Both approaches were mistaken. Sir Alexander Cadogan, for example, wrote in his diary after meeting Stalin on 17 December that: ‘Difficult to say whether S [Stalin] is impressive. There he is – a greater Dictator than any Czar (and more successful than most). But if one didn't know that, I don't think one would pick him out of a crowd. With his little twinkly eyes and his stiff hair brushed back he is rather like a porcupine. Very restrained and quiet. Probably a sense of humour. I thought at first he was simply bluffing. But I was wrong’.
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The gulf between British and Soviet sensibilities was epitomized by the banquet on the last night of the talks. It was held in the Empress Catherine's rooms at the Kremlin, and Eden described it as ‘almost embarrassingly sumptuous’.
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After suckling pig, sturgeon and caviar, the serious drinking began. This soon degenerated to a level of rowdiness that surprised the visitors, although one of the junior secretaries at the British embassy did enter into the spirit of the occasion by wrestling with a drunken Marshal Voroshilov
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Another Soviet marshal, Timoshenko, was so
inebriated that Stalin remarked to Eden: ‘Do your generals ever get drunk?’ Eden, ever the urbane diplomat, replied: ‘They don't often get the chance’.
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