World War II Behind Closed Doors (49 page)

Thus the potential chain of causation is clear. White was one of the leading creators and proponents of the Morgenthau Plan, and through his Soviet handlers would have had knowledge of the views of the Soviet government – and Stalin – on the future of Germany. And although no one document in the Venona collection specifically links a message from White (variously codenamed Jurist,
Richard and Lawyer) to the Soviets on this exact subject, it is hardly credible that the subject was not discussed between him and his Soviet minder.

What is certain is that through his spies Stalin was informed about the nature and detail of Morgenthau's proposals. On 18 October the Venona code-breakers detected a message from Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, an economist at the War Production Board, to his Soviet spymasters that outlined the plan (‘The Ruhr should be wrested from Germany and handed over to the control of some international council. Chemical, metallurgical, and electrical industries must be transported out of Germany’.)
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Silvermaster was one of the most productive of all the Soviet spies in the USA and helped to coordinate a large group of agents within the United States government. He had been suspected of being a Soviet agent as far back as 1942, but when confronted, he appealed to his bosses, including Harry Dexter White, who vouched for him. As a result, far from being removed from a position of influence, Silvermaster was promoted.

Within days of the Quebec Conference there was a storm of protest about the Morgenthau Plan. The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was appalled not only that Morgenthau had been allowed to trespass so blatantly on an area of policy that did not belong to him, but that a plan had been proposed that would, in his judgement, so clearly result in the Germans resisting more fiercely. His health failing, Hull resigned in November 1944.

The press was just as antagonistic. The
New York Times
and
Washington Post
both attacked the plan as playing into the hands of the Nazis. And in Germany, the Morgenthau proposals were a gift for the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. ‘In the last few days we have learned enough about the enemy's plans’, said Goebbels in a radio broadcast that autumn. ‘The plan proposed by that Jew Morgenthau which would rob 80 million Germans of their industry and turn Germany into a simple potato field’.
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Roosevelt was taken aback at the scale of the attack on the Morgenthau Plan. He had – a rarity for him – misjudged the mood of his own nation and allowed a Nazi propaganda triumph. By the
end of September he was back-tracking. On 29 September he told Cordell Hull that ‘no one wants to make Germany a wholly agricultural nation again…. No one wants “complete eradication of German industrial production capacity in the Ruhr and the Saar”’.
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That same day, Roosevelt sent a letter to the press in which he said that nothing about Germany's post-war future had finally been agreed. Then, in early October, the President remarked to Henry Stimson, Secretary for War, that he ‘had no idea how he [Morgenthau] had initiated this’.
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The Morgenthau Plan was quietly dropped in the radical form that had originally been proposed at Quebec, although the punitive philosophy behind it later found expression in the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1067, which stated that occupation forces should ‘take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany [or] designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy’.
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CHURCHILL AND STALIN – MOSCOW IN OCTOBER

As we have seen, the summer and early autumn of 1944 were a time of conflict between the Allies – not just over what seemed the eternal question of Poland, but also over the question of the postwar shape of Europe, and, most particularly, Soviet intentions towards the eastern European countries they were shortly to occupy. And in the face of these difficulties Churchill resorted to the tactic he had first used in August 1942 during the row over the second front – he got on a plane and went to Moscow.

Perhaps surprisingly, Churchill was now to be at his most emollient towards Stalin. He had good cause to be angry – the Soviets were continuing to shun the Polish government in exile, and as he had said to Anders just a few weeks before, the ‘Russians’ were ‘destroying’ all of the ‘best elements’ in Poland, ‘especially intellectual spheres’. But during these talks it was as if the row over the Warsaw Uprising had never happened.

In the Kremlin, at ten o'clock in the evening of 9 October,
back in the now familiar shabby surroundings of the Soviet leader's office, Churchill met Stalin once again. The Prime Minister suggested beginning with ‘the most tiresome question – Poland’.
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He remarked that ‘at present each [of us] has a game cock in his hand’ (meaning that the British were linked to the Polish government in exile in London and the Soviets to the Lublin Poles). Stalin laughed, and replied that ‘it was difficult to do without the cock – they gave the morning signal’.

Churchill then said that the question of the post-war frontier of Poland was ‘settled’. This was a strange remark given that the Polish government in exile, which the British recognized as the ‘legitimate’ government of Poland, still vehemently disagreed with the Soviet claim over eastern Poland. Stalin merely replied that ‘if the frontier was agreed on the Curzon Line, it would help their discussion’.

Churchill added that if at some future peace conference ‘some General Sosnkowski’ objected, it ‘would not matter’ because the Americans and British thought the new border ‘right and fair’. (Sosnkowski, as commander in chief of the Polish armed forces, had been outspoken in his attacks on Soviet policy towards Poland. Indeed, at a meeting held in Downing Street in May 1944, Churchill had even advised the Polish Prime Minister to drop Sosnkowski from his Cabinet – referring to him as ‘Sozzle-something’.)
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Churchill asked Stalin if he thought it was ‘worth while’ to get the London Poles to fly to Moscow, saying that he had them ‘tied up in an aircraft’. If they came to Moscow, he said, then ‘with British and Russian agreement’ they would be ‘forced to settle’.

Stalin responded that he had no objection to the London Poles coming to Moscow, but stuck to the line he had used with the Poles a few weeks before, adding that Mikołajczyk ‘would have to make contact with the committee [the Lublin Poles]’. After all, Stalin said, the Lublin Poles ‘now had an army at its disposal and represented a force’.

What Stalin did not mention was the nature of the new Polish army at the ‘disposal’ of the Lublin Poles. Because at the same moment as Churchill was meeting with the Soviet leader in the
Kremlin, members of the Red Army like Georgy Dragunov were receiving rather bizarre instructions – direct from Stalin.
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Dragunov was a pilot with a forward unit of the Soviet 6th air force in eastern Poland. Everyone in his unit was a Russian. But then one day in October 1944 ‘we were told that from tomorrow we had to fight under the flag of Poland. Some of them [his unit] said: “No. I would rather kill myself than fight as part of the Polish army”’. But there was no choice. Dragunov's unit was to become ‘Polish’ overnight. Their planes were immediately painted in Polish colours and the squadron became part of a new Polish air force. However, there was a problem. None of the members of this new unit spoke a word of Polish. So they immediately enrolled for a crash course in the language. The Soviets were aware of the danger of dressing up their pilots as Poles – if they were shot down by the Germans, their enemy would have ‘guessed everything’. So a rule was imposed. The planes became Polish immediately, but the pilots would only be allowed to dress up as Polish flyers once their language skills were good enough for them to pose as Poles. And within months ‘the majority or our pilots were wearing Polish uniforms, and all our documents were in Polish’. Dragunov did not consider his actions in any way disreputable, believing merely that he was helping to start up a new Polish air force. This, then, along with Berling's units within the Red Army (which were to a large extent already staffed by Russian officers in Polish uniforms), was the new and suitably compliant ‘force’ that would be at the disposal of the Soviet-backed government of ‘liberated’ Poland.

But back in Moscow, when Stalin referred to the Soviet-controlled ‘Polish’ army, which in his eyes lent legitimacy and power to the Lublin Poles, Churchill was swift to point out that the ‘other side’ had an army as well. Part of it had ‘held out in Warsaw’, but ‘they also had a brave army corps in Italy where they lost seven or eight thousand men. Then there was the armoured division, one brigade of which was in France…. They were good and brave men. The difficulty about the Poles was that they had unwise political leaders. Where there were two Poles there was
one quarrel’. Stalin quipped ‘that where there was one Pole he would begin to quarrel with himself through sheer boredom’.

The two leaders then moved on to discuss the future shape of much of the rest of Europe. It was during this discussion that Churchill produced what he called a ‘naughty’ document. This has become an infamous moment in the history of the war. As he took the paper out, Churchill said to Stalin that ‘the Americans would be shocked if they saw how crudely he had put it. [But] Marshal Stalin was a realist’.
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Churchill jokingly added that he himself was not sentimental ‘while Mr Eden [who was also present] was a bad man’.

The handwritten document contained a series of percentages, outlining how much influence ‘Russia’ and other countries should have over specific European territory. The list was as follows:

‘Romania: Russia 90%, the others 10%.

Greece: Britain (in accord with USA) 90%, Russia 10%.

Yugoslavia: 50/50%.

Hungary: 50/50%.

Bulgaria: Russia 75%, the others 25%'.

Stalin made one change to the document. He crossed out the percentages for Bulgaria and changed them to Russia 90 per cent and ‘the others’ 10 per cent.

It was at first sight an extraordinary moment. Here was one of the leading statesmen of the democratic world secretly bandying percentages of ‘influence’ over the countries of eastern Europe with a man who was recognized as a tyrant. It seemed almost reminiscent of the first meeting with Ribbentrop back in August 1939, when the Soviets had bargained with the Nazis over the fate of weaker countries who could not resist.

And this apparently callous way of trading other people's destinies continued in discussions held between Molotov and Eden the next day
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Here, in a series of meetings that are not as well known as the initial ‘percentages’ conversation, but are in their own way at least as revealing, the two foreign ministers swapped percentage figures as if they were used car dealers discussing prices. Molotov asked if they could not now agree to ‘Bulgaria, Hungary
and Yugoslavia, 75/25 per cent each’. Eden replied that such figures ‘would be worse than the previous day’, so Molotov countered with ‘90/10 for Bulgaria, 50/50 for Yugoslavia, and Hungary subject to amendment’. Molotov later bargained that ‘if Hungary was 75/25, then Bulgaria should be 75/25 and Yugoslavia 60/40’. This, he said, was the ‘limit’ to which he would go. Just what, it might reasonably be asked, was going on?

Given that much of eastern Europe was to suffer under Soviet domination for most of the second half of the twentieth century, it is not hard to condemn the British for talking in such apparently heartless terms. But we must remember that Churchill and Eden could not be sure how matters would turn out. Moreover, there was enormous pressure on the British to get on with Stalin.

As Churchill talked with Stalin in the Kremlin, Soviet forces were about to liberate and then occupy Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. So given this hard reality, Churchill must have thought he had to try and salvage something from the Red Army's rush into Europe. Gaining any immediate Western influence over these countries represented an advance on the current situation.

And then there was the question of the Americans. After the war American forces were to have a seemingly permanent presence in western Europe via their membership of NATO, but it is easy to forget that neither Roosevelt nor Churchill anticipated this development. Quite the reverse, in fact. At Tehran Roosevelt had emphasized to Churchill and Stalin that the Americans would only send ‘planes and ships’ to Europe in the event of any ‘future threat to peace’.
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In the context of this lukewarm American commitment to Europe, much of the responsibility for making any post-war European settlement succeed would fall to the British. And no post-war settlement could truly work without the cooperation of the Soviet Union.

Added to that straightforward political necessity, as the British saw it, was Churchill's continued perception of Stalin the individual. Stalin remained essentially quiet and thoughtful in meetings. Any vitriol that suddenly appeared could continue to be dismissed as part of the – utterly mistaken – belief that there were other
people behind Stalin who occasionally intervened and forced him to be less accommodating. Indeed, in a telegram sent to the War Cabinet in the context of this very trip to Moscow, the Prime Minister wrote: ‘There is no doubt that in our narrow circle we have talked with a… freedom and beau gest[e] never before attained between our two countries. Stalin has made several expressions of personal regard which I feel sure were sincere. But I repeat my conviction that he is by no means alone. “Behind the horseman sits dull care”’.
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This convenient method of dealing with any unwelcome news that emanated from the Kremlin had, it will be remembered, first been expressed by Churchill during his initial meeting with Stalin in the summer of 1942. It was a theory that evened out the inconsistencies and also, crucially, allowed Churchill and the British to give Stalin the benefit of the doubt. When he was relatively accommodating, this was the ‘real’ Stalin. When he was difficult and harsh, he was acting on the instructions of the dark forces behind him. But there was no ‘dull care’ sitting behind this ‘horseman’. That such a misguided theory was accepted by Churchill reflects not only how little was known about how the Soviet state functioned but also, it must be said, a predisposed desire in the circumstances to see something that just was not there.