The Peace of Amiens

by Nicholas Sumner

  ​He pauses, Leighton says, “Why did you desert?”

  The man smiles.

  ​“To make it harder for Beria to kill me. They don’t want the world to know that they bumped off the boss. I’ve been on the run for seven months – seven months – but they will kill me, sooner or later…” He looks straight into Leighton’s face, “And what of England? Will you fight? Will you fight the Germans? All we hear is rumours. They say you have a new Government now, but there are always new Governments and they always lie. Will you fight? Will you fight alongside Russia or not?”

  ​Leighton pauses. “I don’t know.”

  ​There is silence for a moment. They hear the hubbub of voices from outside and the twittering of birds. “I think you will… yes, I think you will.” He is looking straight at Leighton as he lifts the glass of tea to his lips but before it reaches them the side of his head explodes and a wet red splash of blood spatters across the wall next to it. The report of the shot reaches them a moment after and Carstairs cries out. The glass slips from the dead man’s fingers to shatter on the floor as his knees buckle and his body collapses sideways onto the table, a dark pool of blood spreading across its surface.

  ​The room is suddenly filled with shouts and cries as the men in the teahouse rush the exits, overturning the cots and tables, their glasses smash on the floor. Leighton throws himself to the ground and draws his revolver. He rolls to the window and looks out into the street, but whoever fired the shot has melted into the crowd.

  Carstairs is on his knees, words escape his mouth in panting jerky breaths.

  ​“Oh my God… oh my God… they found him… he’s dead.”

  ​Leighton replaces the gun; his hands are shaking. A woman is screaming somewhere nearby. The owner of the teahouse is trying to speak with them, shouting, gesticulating – terrified. Leighton does not understand what he is saying. Carstairs responds with monosyllabic answers as the sound of the call to prayer dies away in the distance.

  CHAPTER 21: DISCORD AND DISARRAY – THE UNITED STATES AND THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH IN THE INTERBELLUM

  From ‘The Presidency of Wendell Willkie’ by Siobhan McCormick, Pelham House, 2004

  The question of the rising power of Germany caused consensus in one aspect of US politics, that of foreign policy. President Wendell Willkie was finally able to convince his fellow Republicans that though the party might be determined to remain isolationist, it must be a well-armed isolation. Unfortunately, his term as President of the United States was characterised by a decline in foreign trade and economic opportunity. With Nazi domination of Europe and Japanese expansion in the Far East, the United States trading position deteriorated. The brief boom caused by the cessation of hostilities in 1942 was soon over and the world’s economy slowed once again. As the downturn began to bite, world trade decreased and US exporters began to find increasing difficulty in penetrating the two Eurocentric trading blocs led by the British Commonwealth and Germany. The development of trading blocks and other impediments to free trade was a matter beyond Willkie’s control, but attempts to negotiate an agreement on commercial policy with the British Empire were partially successful.

  ​The British difficulty was the American desire for the elimination of preferences (which were characteristically British) but only for a reduction in tariffs (which were characteristically American). At the Anglo-American summit on economic affairs held in Quebec City in 1941, the American negotiators adopted a ‘holier than thou’ attitude from the start. The only justification for this appeared to be that whereas the British had put on duties in the 1930s, the Cordell Hull tariff reduction programme had at that time been making very small (bilateral) reductions in the intimidating American tariff. This tariff had exacerbated the difficulties of repaying war debts in the nineteen twenties and had made more intractable the dollar earning problems of the Sterling area after 1940. In consequence, no general agreement in favour of a multilateral international convention to limit protective measures and to outlaw discriminatory practices was reached. [89] However, a complicated bi-lateral agreement that eased trade between the Sterling and dollar areas was brokered by the Canadians who were caught between the two powers and were desperate for a trade accord.

  ​From 1943 onward, economic help for both the US and the UK came from a surprising quarter – China – though the British saw the lion’s share of the profits. The incursions of former Soviet and Japanese armies on to Chinese soil caused very little shift in attitudes among the competing war lords and the Nationalist-Communist feud continued unchecked. The Nationalists, however, began to purchase munitions from both the United States and Britain. One of Chiang Kai Shek’s most immediate concerns was the inability of China to produce advanced manufactured goods. Initially the Chinese placed orders for Russian planes, but with the collapse of the USSR and the consequent interruption to deliveries, they sought other sources of supply instead. The reduction in exports from Europe after 1940 served to further assist the American export trade, though the full benefits of this were not immediately apparent because of competition from inexpensive war surplus British military supplies from 1941 onwards. There was increasing competition from Japanese goods also. On balance, increased trade with China was no substitute for the loss of European markets, while competition with the British for South American markets was fierce.

  ​A weak pound sterling and a surplus of many types of weaponry after the War of 1940 meant that British made goods were substantially cheaper than US ones and, in many cases, better quality. Consequently US weaponry failed to make inroads into the Chinese market until 1943, and then it was chiefly armoured fighting vehicles that were purchased.

  ​Willkie was certainly a decent man and as charismatic as his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. His stance on racial equality alienated much of his party, though today he is seen as one of the earliest heroes of the civil rights movement. His Administration also oversaw the early independence of the Philippines. His dismantling of many of the measures of the New Deal caused much anguish to many ordinary Americans but put the country on a sound economic footing, placing the American economy in a position to take advantage of the upturn when it finally arrived.

  ​The chief failing of the Willkie administration in its early days was that the White House functioned with too little unity, co-ordination and effectiveness. Willkie was a stubborn man and didn’t work well with Congress. His relationship with his fellow Republicans sometimes verged on the disastrous and some publicly denounced him. He lacked the political skills to build consensus, at a time when America needed consensus. The failure of the bill to pass Congress for renewal of the draft in the fall of 1941 [90] delayed American military expansion. It was eventually passed two years later. He was also quite unable to inspire the American people with the idea of a mission to curtail Japanese aggression in China. He was a defender of civil liberties and an interventionist in international affairs, though in this he was at odds with both Republican Party policy and also his own election promises. What unified his Administration, and in some ways defined it, was the ‘Ware Wolves’ scandal, which came to a head in the late summer of 1941.

  J. Edgar Hoover, the formidable head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a member of the Republican Party, had been investigating links between individuals in the Roosevelt Administration and the Soviet Union since 1934 when Michael Whitney Straight, an American who had become embroiled in the Apostles scandal at Britain’s Cambridge University returned home in disgrace. [91] Whitney Straight became the subject of FBI surveillance and the investigation widened until it revealed an unsettling picture of the extent to which the Roosevelt Administration had been infiltrated by Communist agents, sympathisers and ‘fellow-travellers’.

  ​It showed that a large number of people employed in the Administration were Communists and it showed that these people worked constantly to advance the cause of the Soviet Union and destroy the foundations of American government. It was apparent that almos
t every department and agency of the Government was compromised to varying degrees including State, Treasury, the Foreign Economic Administration and the Office of Strategic Services. The infiltration was concentrated in the departments which made policy, particularly international policy. The FBI discovered that so extensive was this infiltration that it was no exaggeration to say that American government, particularly with regards to its foreign policy, was deeply compromised by the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye), the Soviet’s Main Intelligence Directorate, during the Roosevelt presidency.

  ​Hoover was deeply disturbed by the results of the investigation, but could gain no traction against the conspiracy in the Roosevelt era. However, once the Republican Willkie Administration was in power, he found that it was very willing to listen to the concerns that he raised and also that his agency was able to act with much greater freedom in its investigation. The three factors principally responsible for breaking up the Soviet spy rings in the United States were the testimonies of Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley as well as the Venona decrypts.

  ​Venona was the code name given to the highly successful anti-Soviet code breaking effort of American Intelligence. [92] The transcripts implicated a substantial number of people and revealed that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies had inadvertently aided the infiltration of the American Government by Soviet agents because so many people with left-wing views had been hired by the Democratic Administration to administer it. Many of these were not merely left-leaning but were actual Marxists or Communists and they held a deep affinity with, and sympathy for, the Soviet Union.

  ​Whitaker Chambers was one such left-leaning individual who was in contact with many in the American Government who shared his outlook. In 1925, Chambers had joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), then known as the Workers Party of America. He also wrote for and edited several Communist publications, including The Daily Worker newspaper and The New Masses magazine. He began his career as a spy, working for a GRU cell led by Alexander Ulanovsky. Soon after he joined, his main controller in this group became Josef Peters who introduced him to Harold Ware.

  ​During the early 1930s Chambers became a member of the so-called ‘Ware Group,’ another cabal of spies within the American Government who aided Soviet intelligence agents. Ware was an American Marxist and a senior Soviet agent, Chambers continued his work in Washington as an organizer among Communists in the city and as a courier between Washington and New York transporting stolen US Government documents which he delivered to Boris Bykov, the GRU’s New York station chief.

  ​However, in 1939 Chambers was so shocked and appalled by the Nazi-Soviet pact that he decided to betray the Russian espionage operation to the American authorities. In September, shortly after the joint invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, he went to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and revealed the conspiracy, but Berle did not act on the information Chambers gave him. [93]

  ​By March 1941, the new Administration had taken over and the information gathered by the FBI was made available to the Willkie White House. It gave a startling picture of the Communist penetration that had taken place in the Roosevelt years. The evidence presented by Hoover was sufficiently compelling to cause Willkie to order the FBI to take the investigation public. Once the investigation was announced, Chambers did not hesitate to come forward again, this time presenting his testimony directly to the FBI. This was enough to move the investigation forward and it proceeded under the aegis of an investigative committee of the House of Representatives. This was the House Un-American Activities Committee which had convened on 26th May 1938 and had been established to investigate allegations of subversive and treasonous activities on the part of private citizens, public employees and organizations suspected of having ties to Communist or fascist organisations. It was chaired by Fiorello LaGuardia, the energetic and focussed Republican Mayor of New York City. [94]

  ​When the scandal broke in the newspapers, an editorial writer for the Houston Informer coined the colourful phrase ‘Ware Wolves’ to describe not only the members of the Ware Cell but all those implicated in the scandal. However, the publicity also bought forth a new witness. Elizabeth Bentley came forward when the investigation was at its height in the autumn of 1941.[95] The majority of Bentley’s contacts were in the ‘Silvermaster group’, a network of spies who reported to Nathan Silvermaster. This network had become one of the most important Soviet spying operations in America. Silvermaster worked with the Resettlement Administration, he had little access to sensitive information himself, but he knew a number of Communist Party members and Soviet sympathizers within the government who passed information to him. He then gave it to Elizabeth Bentley who sent it to Moscow. Bentley’s testimony increased the list of names of Soviet agents to over one hundred. The list now included such apparent pillars of the American establishment as Alger Hiss, who had worked closely with Cordell Hull at the State Department; Laughlin Currie, who was President Roosevelt’s economic adviser and Harry Dexter White who had worked closely with Henry Morganthau the Secretary of the Treasury.

  ​At first the investigation struggled to overcome scepticism and disbelief at every level of society, but Bentley’s testimony, taken with that of Chambers and the Venona decrypts provided overwhelming evidence. Thomas Dewey, Willkie’s Secretary of State, backed Hoover when he ordered the arrest of several of those implicated on a range of charges including treason. The trials began in mid-1942 and highlighted the ability of sophisticated Soviet agents to insinuate themselves in to the confidence of credulous government officials.

  ​Many of the suspects were convicted. Some, like Hiss, Currie and White were executed. The Democrats were left reeling in the wake of the Ware Wolves scandal. As the trials ground on they appeared more and more ridiculous and at the Democratic Party Convention held in Chicago in July 1944 the delegates were subdued and spirits were low. In contrast to this the Republican National Convention assembled in Philadelphia was jubilant and they voted to nominate the incumbent President as their candidate.

  ​Fate, however, was to intervene. Wendell Willkie died in office of a heart attack on the October 8th, 1944. The Vice President, Charles McNary, [96] had pre-deceased Willkie in February of that year and at that time there was no 25th Amendment allowing a new vice-president to be installed in office. The Constitution allowed for the Secretary of State to become President and in this case it was Thomas Dewey who also became the Republican candidate in the 1944 Presidential election.

  ​The Democrat candidates for the Presidential nomination were Harry S. Truman, Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace. One of the central issues at the convention was civil rights and to the dismay of many, thirty-six Southern delegates, led by Strom Thurmond, walked out in response to an announcement by Truman (the front runner) that if nominated his platform would not include any attack on the passage of civil rights laws by the incumbent administration. [97] These formed a spin-off party, which they named the States Rights Democratic Party. More commonly known as the “Dixiecrats”, the party’s main goal was continuing racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws that sustained it. Strom Thurmond became the Dixiecrats presidential nominee.

  ​Truman defeated Wallace in a close race but partly because of a need to present a united front to the voters after the split by the Dixiecrats, Wallace became Truman’s running mate. Thurmond’s States Rights Party took away much of the Democrats traditional base in the South, but did not spark the wholesale revolt that had been predicted and he carried only four states.

  ​Truman’s campaign was intense and personal, much of it was conducted in a folksy rural style, he had the gift of being able to get on with almost anyone and in his appeal to the New Deal interest groups, he established a modus operandi that was extremely effective. He presented himself as a fighting underdog, one of the people, a champion of the common man. He was also instrumental in restoring confidence in the Democratic Party after a clean out of Soviet
sympathisers

  ​By contrast, Dewey did his best to distance himself from Willkie’s policies but, unlike Willkie, his campaign ran smoothly and was well organised. A Dewey win was widely predicted but in campaigning he failed to take any risks, spoke in empty platitudes and made the mistake of not shaving his moustache. Many women voters were impressed by Dewey’s intelligence and integrity, but disliked his facial hair. Edith Efron, wrote in the August 1944 edition of the New York Times Sunday Magazine that Dewey “...may be elected to office, but it will be in spite of his ‘manly attributes’ – not because of them.” To many women Dewey’s moustache was repugnant. Efron continued on the subject of Dewey’s moustache that: “It plays many roles today, it is Chaplin-pathetic, Hitler-psychopathic, Gable-debonnair, Lou Lehr-wacky. It perplexes. It fascinates. It amuses. And it repels.” Dewey had reason to be confident of victory but American voters, dismayed by the dismantling of the New Deal, the continuing sluggishness of the American economy and it seems, the Republican candidates facial hair, delivered a victory for Truman.

  *

  What became known as the Willkie Doctrine; which was that the Soviets were as bad as the Nazis, was one of the defining pillars of American foreign policy for the next five decades. In addition to this and his contribution to the cause of Civil Rights, Wendell Willkie’s other great legacy was continuing the build-up of the American forces begun by Roosevelt in the teeth of Congressional opposition and in spite of faltering economic growth. Had he not been hampered by the slowness of the world economy America might have been far better prepared for the war when it came. As it was, he wisely chose to emphasise the naval build-up though both the Army and the Army Air Corps also underwent significant growth.

  ​His insistence that black soldiers be treated exactly the same as white, be paid the same, receive the same respect from the Army and undergo the same dangers in combat was political dynamite in what was then still a surprisingly racist country. His policy was continued by subsequent administrations despite much opposition.