World War II Behind Closed Doors (59 page)

‘But’, said Stalin, ‘you are citing these things as fact when they cannot be verified’.

‘But we know this to be true’, replied Churchill, ‘from our
representatives in these countries. Marshal Stalin would be very much astonished to read a long catalogue of difficulties encountered by their mission there. An iron fence has come down around them’.

‘All fairy tales’, said Stalin.

‘Of course’, said Churchill, ‘we can call each others' statements fairy tales, but I have complete confidence in our representatives in these countries’.
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It was an exchange that symbolized the impotence of the Western powers – impotence with two seemingly untreatable causes. The first was the reality of the military situation – these eastern European countries were now occupied by Soviet forces, and it would take another war to get them out. The second cause had less of a practical nature, but was in a way more far-reaching. It was to do with language. The problems that the Americans and British created for themselves when they agreed that any future Polish government should be ‘friendly’ to the Soviets have already been seen. Now they were to experience similar problems over the word ‘democratic’. Nearly six years earlier, for example, the Soviet authorities had decided to make occupied eastern Poland ‘democratic’. This democracy had consisted of elections, true, but only specially selected ‘friendly’ candidates could stand for office. It was sham democracy – but still something that Soviet propaganda could trumpet as evidence of a commitment to ‘freedom’. In just the same way, the 1936 Soviet constitution was promoted as one of the most liberal political documents in the world, promising as it did ‘free’ elections, the right to work and the right to leisure. Stalin, inaccurately portrayed as the author of the constitution (it was primarily conceived by Nikolai Bukharin) was praised at the time by
Pravda
as ‘the wisest man of the epoch’.
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All this enabled Stalin to maintain the propaganda position, as he did in the 24 July meeting with Truman and Churchill, that he was just as ‘democratic’ as they were – it was just that he practised a different kind of ‘democracy’.

On 25 July, Churchill left Potsdam to return to Britain to learn the results of the general election that had been held earlier in the month – the result had not been available sooner because so many
votes had been cast overseas. For Churchill the news was devastating. Labour had won by a landslide and now commanded a majority of 145 seats in the House of Commons. And although it is true that the Conservatives had run a lacklustre campaign, with Churchill committing the serious gaffe of saying that a socialist government would inevitably mean the imposition of some kind of secret police force, Labour's victory was the result not so much of a poor Conservative performance as a massive desire for change.

So the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, took over leadership of the British delegation at Potsdam. Bevin, in particular, was a very different personality from his Conservative predecessor, Anthony Eden. Unlike Eden, who had been educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Bevin had worked as a labourer since the age of eleven. Pat Everett,
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who had been one of Anthony Eden's secretaries for nearly five years, found the change of boss particularly refreshing. Not least because in the entire time she had worked for Eden he had not bothered to learn her name: ‘Well, he was a bit remote, you know, a bit remote. He always used to call me: “Miss …er … er…”. I was really rather hurt. Once he was reading a memorandum, and there was a list of people who were going on the next flight, and my name was there. I was called Miss Gorn [her maiden name] then and his finger went down and he said: “Miss Gorn – who's that?” So I said: “That's me”. And he says: “Oh, oh, is it?”’

With Bevin, the atmosphere was entirely different: ‘He was very nice, you see. The first time I went to him, he says: “Come in, little missy, and sit down”. So I went in and he said: “Now, what's your name?” So I said I was Miss Gorn, and he said: “And where are you from?” And I said: “Bristol”. He said: “Well, now, so am I”. I said: “Yes, I know”. And he said: “What part of Bristol?” I said: “Well, my father had a house on the big main road out of Bristol,” because being a doctor he had a big corner house. And he said: “Well, I'll be blowed! I used to drive my brewer's dray past your father's house to take my deliveries to the Blue Lion”’.

It was Bevin, together with the new American Secretary of State James Byrnes (appointed by Truman on 3 July), who
thrashed out with Stalin an agreement on reparations, and in the process prepared the way for the eventual division of Germany. Stalin had listened to their proposal and then suggested that ‘with regards to shares and foreign investments, perhaps the demarcation line between the Soviet and western zones of occupation should be taken as the dividing line [between the Soviets and the Western Allies] and everything west of that line should go to the [Western] allies and everything east of that line to the Russians’.
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This agreement that, essentially, the Soviets could take whatever financial recompense they liked from Germany within their own agreed area of occupation, was one of the first moments when the division of the country between East and West became a real possibility. It symbolized the breakdown in trust and communication between the two sides – an acknowledgement that the mutual governance of Germany might never be achieved among the signatories of the Yalta agreement.

The Potsdam Conference finally ended on 2 August. Truman – who Stalin had privately remarked he found ‘neither educated nor clever’
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– left with the resolution that he would never return to Europe. He never did. And although he had found Stalin straightforward to deal with, he was under no illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime, which, he wrote to his mother, was ‘a police government pure and simple: a few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on lower levels’.
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The day before the ship carrying President Truman back across the Atlantic landed at Norfolk, Virginia, a crucial message arrived from the Secretary of War. ‘I decoded it’, says George Elsey, ‘and took it to Truman. And the substance of it was very simply “Hiroshima bombed – greater effect than earlier tests,” and that was all that needed to be said. Truman was elated when he announced to the crew that we had a powerful new weapon and that the war would almost certainly end – invasion [of Japan] would not be necessary…. The crew just erupted in an explosion of hilarity and joy and shouts and the pounding of the desks and tables and so on. That was the mood in which we returned to Washington’.

And though there was an attempt more than ten years
⁶⁰
ago to
portray Truman's decision to use the nuclear bomb against the Japanese as influenced to a large extent by a desire to demonstrate to Stalin the ‘powerful new weapon’ at the disposal of the Americans, other scholarship
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has demonstrated this was not the case. The reason the bomb was dropped was – as common sense suggested all along – primarily because the Americans wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and, crucially, prevent the need to invade the Japanese home islands.

But the existence of the nuclear bomb did offer the possibility of a different way of dealing with Stalin – at least, Churchill thought so at Potsdam. According to Sir Alan Brooke, he was ‘completely carried away!’ Churchill said that ‘we now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians!’ Furthermore, ‘now we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Kharkov, Stalingrad, Sebastopol etc., etc.’.
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No doubt, after the sense of impotence Churchill had felt over the preceding months, this idea of blackmailing Stalin with the nuclear bomb was immensely attractive. But it was scarcely a practical way forward. Although it was one thing to threaten the leaders of a potentially belligerent country that, if they started a war, nuclear weapons would be used against them, it was quite another to say to the leader of a former ally that if he didn't regulate in an acceptable way the countries his forces currently occupied then his homeland would face annihilation. It was also clear that it would not be long before the Soviet Union possessed nuclear weapons of its own – and so it proved. The first Soviet nuclear test was carried out in 1949.

And the evidence is that even during the few post-war years before the Soviets acquired their own bomb, Stalin was not overly concerned by the apparent American advantage. He was well aware that the Americans didn't yet possess enough bombs to destroy the Soviet Union;
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and he did not consider they would use the weapons they did have except under the severest provocation. Significantly, the existence of the nuclear bomb did not prevent Stalin challenging the West, a year before the Soviets
tested their own nuclear weapon, at the time of the blockade of Berlin in 1948, when the Soviet leader tried, but failed, to remove the Western Allies from the city. ‘I believe that Stalin’, said Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, ‘[though] of course nobody actually asked him directly – embarked on that affair [i.e. the Berlin blockade] in the certain knowledge that the conflict would not lead to nuclear war. He reckoned that the American administration was not run by frivolous people who would start a nuclear war over such a situation’.
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THE SOVIET INVASION OF MANCHURIA

The dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima did not mark the end of the war. And three days after Hiroshima, the same day as the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and almost three months to the day since the formal end of the war in Europe, the Soviets kept the promise they had made to Roosevelt and declared war on the Japanese. The Red Army moved into Manchukuo (as the Japanese had dubbed Manchuria) on 9 August. The timing of this action was not coordinated with the nuclear attacks – the Soviets had no knowledge of when or where the bombs would be dropped.

Operation August Storm, under the command of Marshal Vasilevsky, was a huge undertaking, involving more than one and a half million soldiers of the Red Army. The advance – on two fronts – made swift progress against an under-equipped and ill-prepared Japanese defence force. ‘I was telling myself that I was going to fight for a noble cause’, says Ivan Kazantsev,
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a battalion commander during August Storm. ‘The Japanese had done a lot of harm to the Chinese and to ourselves as well…. Of course, the nuclear bomb [at Hiroshima] cooled off the samurais, cooled off their arrogance, but I don't think it put an end [to the war]’.

Within his battalion fighting in Manchuria, one platoon was made up of soldiers from ‘western Ukraine’ who had been drafted into service. These ‘western Ukrainians’ maintained, says Ivan Kazantsev, that ‘they were former Poles’. They came from part of eastern Poland, the territory that the Polish Prime Minister in
exile had refused to relinquish in acrimonious discussions with Churchill and Stalin the previous year, but which was now occupied by the Soviets and recognized by the Allies as part of the Ukraine, a republic within the Soviet Union. These Poles – or ‘Ukrainians’ as Kazantsev saw them, using the politically correct Soviet terminology – were not happy to be fighting for the Red Army in Manchuria, thousands of miles from home: ‘I came out the tent and saw that half of my soldiers, those western Ukrainians, were in tears. It was their “kulak” psychology, non-patriotic psychology. I was twenty-three years old but they were grown-up men in their later forties and older…. They were concerned about their families who they had left behind, about their plots of land…. We realized that ideologically they were different from us…. We knew that these people needed their morale boosting and they had to be enlightened politically, so we gave them classes of political education’.

It is a telling image of personal misery. Instead of basking in a liberated Poland – ‘free and democratic’ – as they had no doubt dreamt of since the start of the war, these previous citizens of Poland had now, against their will, been made citizens of the Soviet Union and drafted into the Red Army to fight the Japanese. No wonder they ‘needed their morale boosting’.

On 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced that the Japanese would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration which had called for the Japanese to surrender or face ‘prompt and utter destruction’. In his speech to the Japanese people, the first time they had heard the voice of their monarch, he said: ‘Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable’.

The Second World War was over. And Hirohito's instruction to ‘endure the unendurable and suffer what is unsufferable’ also encapsulated the task ahead for many of the unwilling subjects of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.

LIFE BEHIND THE NEW ‘IRON CURTAIN’

After the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, the Allies had said that they wanted to bring ‘democracy’ to Germany. But in the German capital in the immediate aftermath of the war, it was clear that democracy would mean different things to different people. Berlin, as had been agreed by the Big Three, was divided into four sectors of occupation – British, American, French and Soviet – with the German capital as a whole sitting well within the Soviet zone of the country. In those early days it was relatively easy to travel between the different zones of the city – the Berlin Wall was not built until 1961. And Heinz Jörgen Schmidtchen
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gives an idea of what the circumstances of occupation were like for someone whose home was in East Berlin, within the newly established Soviet Zone.