On 8 May, when news of Germany’s surrender reached the rifle companies of the 1st Marine Division, the most usual reaction was ‘So what?’ It was another war on another planet, as far as they were concerned. They were exhausted and filthy, and everything around them stank. The concentration of troops on Okinawa was abnormally dense. A battalion front extended less than 550 metres. ‘The sewage of course was appalling,’ wrote William Manchester, a marine sergeant on Okinawa. ‘You could smell the front line long before you saw it; it was one vast cesspool.’
On 10 May Buckner ordered a general offensive against the Shuri Line with five divisions. It was a terrible battle. Only a combination of conventional Sherman tanks and those converted to flamethrowers could deal with some of the cave defences. One small hill called Sugar Loaf took the marines ten days of fighting, and cost them 2,662 casualties. Even some of the toughest marines faced nervous collapse, mainly due to the accuracy of the Japanese mortar and artillery fire. Everyone suffered from thudding headaches caused by the noise of the guns and explosions. At night the Japanese would try to infiltrate their lines, so starshells or flares were fired continuously into the sky lighting up the nightmare terrain with a dead, greenish glow. Sentries needed to note the position of every corpse to their front because any Japanese soldier creeping forward during the night would freeze and lie still, feigning death.
On 21 May, just as the Americans broke through to an area where they could use their tanks, the rains came, bogging down vehicles and grounding aircraft. Everyone and everything was covered in liquid clay. For the infantry and the marines carrying ammunition, slipping and sliding in the mud, was an utterly exhausting task. Living in foxholes filled with water and with decomposing bodies all around in shellholes was even worse. Corpses in the open and partially buried were crawling with maggots.
Under the cover of the heavy rain, Ushijima’s forces began to pull back to final defence positions across the southern tip of Okinawa. Ushijima knew that the Shuri Line could not hold, and with an American tank breakthrough his forces risked encirclement. He left behind a strong rear-guard, but eventually a battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment occupied the citadel of Shuri. It found that it had only a Confederate flag with it, so to the embarrassment of some officers the Stars and Bars were raised until they could be replaced with the Stars and Stripes.
On 26 May the clouds parted, and aircraft from the carriers spotted vehicles moving south from Shuri. Local Okinawans, terrified by Japanese propaganda about the Americans, insisted on fleeing with the troops even though Ushijima had directed them to seek shelter in another direction. American commanders felt compelled to open fire on the column, and the cruiser USS New Orleans began a bombardment of the road with its eight-inch guns. Some 15,000 civilians died along with the retreating soldiers.
After the withdrawal, Ushijima’s force was reduced to less than 30,000 men, but hard battles still lay ahead, even if the end was in sight. On 18 June, General Buckner himself was killed by shell splinters when watching an attack by the 2nd Marine Division. Four days later, General Ushijima and Lieutenant General Cho, by then beleaguered in their command bunker, made their preparations for ritual suicide by self-disembowelment and simultaneous beheading by their respectful aides. The body count of their soldiers came to 107,539, but many others had been buried beforehand or sealed in destroyed caves.
Marine and army formations had suffered 7,613 killed, 31,807 wounded and 26,211 ‘other injuries’, most of which consisted of psychological breakdown. Some 42,000 Okinawan civilians are said to have died, but the true figure may have been much higher. Apart from those killed by naval gunfire, many were buried alive in caves hit by artillery fire from both sides. In any case it prompted the question of how many Japanese civilians would die in the invasion of the home islands which was already being planned. The capture of Okinawa may not have hastened the end of the war. Its prime aim was to serve as a base for the invasion of Japan, but the suicidal nature of its defence certainly concentrated minds in Washington on the next steps to consider.
46
Yalta, Dresden, Königsberg
FEBRUARY–APRIL 1945
At the end of January 1945, while the fighting in Budapest reached its peak and Soviet armies arrived at the River Oder, the three Allied leaders were preparing to meet in Yalta to decide the fate of the post-war world. Stalin, who was afraid of flying, insisted on holding the conference at Yalta in the Crimea, where he could travel by train in his green Tsarist coach.
Roosevelt had been sworn in as president for the fourth time on 20 January. In his short inaugural address, he looked towards the peace which he would not live to see. Three days later, amid unprecedented security precautions, he embarked in secret aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quincy. Eleven days later the Quincy and her escorting warships reached Malta, where Churchill awaited him eagerly. But Roosevelt, with a smokescreen of charm and hospitality, managed to avoid discussing what they should say at Yalta. He again did not want Stalin to think that they were ‘ganging up’ on him. He clearly wanted a free hand without an agreed strategy. The British delegation became increasingly uneasy. Stalin knew exactly what he wanted, and he would play them off against each other. Roosevelt wanted above all to secure Soviet support for a United Nations Organization, while the top British priority was to obtain guarantees that Poland would be genuinely free and independent.
The two delegations flew overnight from Malta to the Black Sea, and landed at Saki on 3 February. Their long journey over the Crimean Mountains and along the coast took them past many areas laid waste by war. The delegations were installed in Tsarist summer palaces. Roosevelt and the Americans stayed in the Livadia Palace, where the meetings would take place.
For Stalin, the main purpose of the Yalta conference was to force acceptance of Soviet control of central Europe and the Balkans. He was so confident of his position that he felt able to torment Churchill in a preliminary meeting, by suggesting an offensive through the Ljubljana Gap. He knew perfectly well that Churchill’s pet project to pre-empt the Red Army had been consistently opposed by the Americans. And now with Soviet armies north-west of Budapest, the British were far too late. In any case, the Americans had just insisted on the transfer of more divisions from Italy to the western front. Churchill must have been deeply irked as Stalin twisted the knife with mock sincerity.
Roosevelt, still hoping to give the impression that the western Allies were not ganging up, refused to see Churchill before the real business started. This precaution was wasted since the Soviet delegation had assumed that he and Churchill in Malta had already discussed their strategy. Just before the opening session, Stalin visited Roosevelt, who immediately tried to win his trust by undermining Churchill. He spoke of their disagreements over strategy and even referred back approvingly to Stalin’s toast at Teheran suggesting the massacre of 50,000 German officers, a comment which had made Churchill walk out in disgust.
Remarking that the British wanted to ‘have their cake and eat it too’, he brought up his complaint that the British would occupy northern Germany, which he had wanted for the United States but had failed to mention until it was much too late. He was prepared, however, to support Churchill’s plea that the French should have their own area of occupation in the south-west, but even that was delivered in a disparaging way, with digs against the British and de Gaulle.
When the first session began in the ballroom of the Livadia Palace on the late afternoon of 4 February, Stalin invited Roosevelt to open the proceedings. Over the next few days, they discussed the military situation and strategy, the possible dismemberment of Germany, the occupation zones and also reparations, a subject of the greatest interest to Stalin. Churchill was horrified when Roosevelt announced that the American people would not let him keep their troops in Europe much longer. American commanders especially were keen to wash their hands of Europe and finish the war with Japan. But Churchill rightly saw it as a terrible blunder in their negotiations. Stalin was immens
ely encouraged. He remarked afterwards to Beria that ‘the weakness of the democracies lay in the fact that the people did not delegate permanent rights such as the Soviet government possessed’.
On 6 February, Roosevelt’s great dream of a United Nations Organization was the subject of long and tortuous discussions. When it came to the composition of the security council and qualifications for countries to be members of the general assembly, Stalin suspected that the Americans and British had cooked up a trap. He had not forgotten the League of Nations vote condemning the Soviet invasion of Finland in the winter of 1939.
Stalin was deft and assured. He spoke with a quiet authority and played a winning hand just as cleverly as at the conference in Teheran fourteen months before, which had created the strategy to give him dominance over half of Europe. He also had the advantage of knowing from Beria’s British spies the negotiating positions of the western Allies. The other two members of the Big Three could not hope to match him. Roosevelt, looking old and frail, with his mouth hanging open most of the time, sometimes did not appear to follow what was going on. Churchill, always likely to be carried away by his own emotional rhetoric rather than focusing on hard facts, clearly did not grasp the vital aspects of certain key discussions. This was particularly true on the question of Poland, which was so close to his heart. He seems to have missed Stalin’s subtle yet clear signals on the subject.
For Churchill, the key test of the Soviet Union’s good intentions would be how it would treat Poland. But Stalin saw no reason to compromise. The Red Army and the NKVD were now in complete control of the whole country. ‘On Poland Iosef Vissarionovich has not moved one inch,’ Beria told his son Sergo in Yalta. (Sergo Beria was in charge of bugging all the rooms and even of placing directional microphones to pick up Roosevelt’s conversations outside.)
Churchill had sensed he was on his own. ‘The Americans are profoundly ignorant of the Polish problem,’ he had told Eden and Lord Moran, his doctor. ‘At Malta I mentioned to them the independence of Poland and was met with the retort: “But surely that isn’t at stake.”’ In fact, Edward Stettinius, the secretary of state, had agreed with Eden, but Roosevelt wanted to avoid a breach with Stalin on Poland, especially if it would hinder agreement on the United Nations.
On 6 February during the discussions on Poland, Roosevelt tried to act as if he were the honest broker between the British and the Soviets. The eastern border along the Curzon Line had been more or less agreed between the Big Three, but Roosevelt, rather to Churchill’s surprise, appealed to Stalin to allow the Poles to keep the city of Lwów as a generous gesture. Stalin had no intention of doing anything of the sort. It belonged to Ukraine, in his view, and, although Poles within the city were in an absolute majority, ethnic cleansing had already started. He intended to move them all to the eastern parts of Germany with which he proposed to compensate Poland. The citizens of Lwów would eventually be moved en masse to Breslau, which would become Wrocaw.
Stalin was far more concerned about western proposals for a Polish coalition government based on leaders of all the major parties to supervise free elections. As far as he was concerned, there was already a provisional government in place: the Lublin Poles who had now moved to Warsaw. ‘We shall allow in one or two émigrés, for decorative purposes,’ he said to Beria, ‘but no more.’ He had recognized his own puppet government at the beginning of January, to the protests of the British and the United States. The French recognized Stalin’s puppet government, despite de Gaulle’s previous stance in December. The Czechs also recognized it under pressure.
Stalin became agitated during these discussions. After a recess, he suddenly stood up to speak. He admitted that the Russians had ‘committed many sins against the Poles in the past’, but argued that Poland was vital to Soviet security. The Soviet Union had been invaded twice through Poland in the course of the century, and for that reason alone it was necessary that Poland be ‘mighty, free, and independent’. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could fully understand the shock of the German invasion in 1941 and Stalin’s determination to establish a cordon of satellite states so that the Russians would never be surprised again. One could well argue that the origins of the Cold War lay in that traumatic experience.
Stalin’s idea of ‘free’ and ‘independent’ was of course very different to a British or American definition, because he insisted that it should be ‘friendly’. He rejected any involvement in its government by representatives from the government-in-exile, accusing them of stirring up trouble behind Soviet lines. He claimed that members of the Home Army had killed 212 Red Army officers and soldiers, but of course made no mention of the appalling repression carried out by the NKVD against non-Communist Poles. The Home Army, according to his argument, was therefore helping the Germans.
It became clear the following day that any compromises on Poland and the United Nations would be linked. Stalin postponed the subject of the Polish government and thrilled the Americans by agreeing to their voting system for the United Nations. He did not want the Soviet Union to find itself massively outvoted in the general assembly. He therefore got Molotov to argue again that, on the basis that the British had several votes, if one counted the Dominions as likely to side with the mother country, then at least some member states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics should be admitted, especially Ukraine and Belorussia.
Roosevelt was not taken in. Nobody considered them independent of Moscow in any form and it undermined the principle of one country, one vote. To his surprise and irritation, Churchill sided with Stalin. But Roosevelt then conceded the next morning, hoping to get Stalin to commit to declaring war on Japan. Stalin’s own concession on the United Nations, however, had been an attempt to persuade Roosevelt to soften his line on Poland. The three-dimensional game was becoming complicated. It was made even more complicated by disagreements within the American delegation.
When the conference returned to the subject of Poland, Stalin pretended that Roosevelt’s suggestion that delegates from the rival governments should be brought to Yalta was impossible to fulfil. He did not know their addresses and there would not be sufficient time. On the other hand he appeared to offer encouraging concessions by talking of the possible inclusion of non-Communist Poles in the provisional government and the holding of general elections afterwards. He rejected American suggestions of a presidential council to oversee elections. Both Molotov and Stalin were firm that the Warsaw provisional government would not be replaced, but it could be enlarged.
Churchill presented a powerful response, explaining why there would be deep distrust, if not outrage, in the west at the idea of a government which did not enjoy widespread support in Poland. Stalin replied with unmistakable warning signals to Churchill. He had honoured the agreement over Greece. He had not protested when British troops suppressed Communist partisans in Athens. And he compared the question of rear-area security in Poland to the situation in France, where he had in fact reined in the French Communist Party. In any case, he argued, de Gaulle’s government was no more democratic in composition than the Communist provisional government in Warsaw.
Stalin claimed that the Soviet liberation of Poland and his provisional government had been widely welcomed. This outright lie may have been highly unconvincing, but the message was clear. Poland was his France and Greece, only more so. Greece, as he knew, was the prime minister’s Achilles heel, and Stalin’s arrow was well aimed. Churchill was forced to acknowledge his gratitude for Stalin’s neutrality in Greek affairs. Roosevelt, afraid of losing ground on the United Nations, insisted that the Polish question should be put aside for the moment and discussed by the committee of foreign ministers.
The President agreed to Stalin’s price for entering the war against Japan. In the Far East, the Soviet Union wanted the southern part of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands which Russia had lost after the disastrous war against Japan in 1905. Roosevelt also conceded Soviet control over Mongolia, providing it was kept secre
t as he had not discussed it with Chiang Kai-shek. This was hardly in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, nor was the American compromise over Poland, announced by Stettinius on 9 February.
Roosevelt did not want to put at risk agreements achieved on his two main priorities, the United Nations and Soviet entry into the war against Japan. He had given up on any hopes of forcing Stalin to accept a democratic government in Poland. All he wanted now was an agreement on a ‘Provisional Government of National Unity’ and ‘free and unfettered elections’ which could be sold to the American people when he returned home. This approach tacitly accepted the Soviets’ demand that their provisional government should form the basis of the new one and by implication cast the London government-in-exile into outer darkness. Molotov, pretending to put forward insignificant changes, wanted to drop terms such as ‘fully representative’, and instead of permitting ‘democratic parties’ to qualify he wanted that changed to ‘anti-fascist and non-fascist’. Since the Soviet state and the NKVD already defined the Home Army and its supporters as ‘objectively fascist’, this was hardly a pedantic trifle.
Roosevelt dismissed Churchill’s concerns as no more than the interpretation of certain words, but the devil was indeed in the detail, as they would find later. The prime minister would not be put off. Knowing that he could not now win on the composition of the provisional government, he concentrated on the question of free elections and demanded diplomatic observers. Stalin retorted shamelessly that that would be an insult to the Poles. Roosevelt felt obliged to support Churchill, but the next morning the Americans, without warning the British, suddenly withdrew their insistence on the monitoring of the elections. Churchill and Eden were left out on a limb. All they could obtain was an agreement that ambassadors should have freedom of movement to report on events in Poland.
The Second World War Page 98