The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  As Truman and Churchill saw, the key to future peace would be dependent on Stalin’s accommodation with the West. However much the president admired Churchill for his courageous leadership in the face of overwhelming odds at the start of the war, Truman saw him as too belligerent or ready for confrontation with the Soviets. He had greater hope than Churchill that they could sustain good relations with Stalin. Moreover, he was confident that Britain’s dependence on the United States for reconstruction of its shattered economy would force Churchill to follow his lead on working out differences with Moscow and setting them on a long-term path toward peace.

  Truman was much less certain about taming Stalin. He was the riddle, the mystery, the enigma, as Churchill had said of Russia, in the yearning for an era of quiet in international affairs. Stalin understood that his country’s defeat of the Nazis had now made it the dominant power on the Continent. When he came a day late to the conference, he justified it as the result of a slight heart attack. But he was in fact making a statement about relative might: his allies—Britain and America—had to wait on him to discuss Europe’s future. While he was eager for U.S. financial help in rebuilding Russia’s shattered infrastructure, his armies were now in a position to shape the life of the eastern part of the Continent and possibly part of Western Europe and East Asia as well. U.S. eagerness for help in ending the Pacific War had allowed Stalin to make several successful demands on FDR for Soviet advantages in Japan and China.

  Soviet power was on full display at Potsdam. Some twenty thousand Soviet troops—seven NKVD or secret police regiments, including sixteen companies of NKVD soldiers to guard Stalin’s phone lines, and nine hundred personal bodyguards—oversaw the generalissimo’s safety.

  Churchill and Truman were sympathetic to Stalin’s determination to secure his country’s future safety. But his refusal to give ground on Anglo-American demands about Poland and Eastern Europe generally frustrated them and made them believe he was interested less in good relations with his allies or democratic outcomes for countries they liberated from the Nazis than establishing Soviet dominance on the Continent as the best way to assure Soviet security. They were, however, reluctant to believe that after all the suffering in the war Stalin would be so reckless as to risk renewed conflict for the sake of Russian Communist ambitions.

  And Stalin, who assumed he could achieve his foreign policy goals without provoking Britain or the United States into retaliatory actions, presented enough of a friendly face at the conference to keep Anglo-American hopes alive for mutually acceptable dealings. In his social exchanges with Churchill, Stalin displayed “an easy friendliness,” which Churchill found “most agreeable.” As Stalin puffed on a cigar at the conference’s opening session in the Cecilienhof Palace, a Tudor-style structure built for Germany’s crown prince in 1917, Churchill told Stalin that a photo of him smoking “a Churchillian cigar” would “create an immense sensation…. Everyone will say it is my influence.” Stalin predicted that the result of a current British Parliamentary election would favor Churchill and his conservative party. “It seemed plain,” Churchill concluded, “that he hoped that his contacts with me and [Foreign Secretary Anthony] Eden would not be broken.”

  Truman also saw Stalin’s beneficent side, or at least the reasonable, accommodating character he pretended to be. When he came to call on July 17, before the first formal session of the conference convened, Truman was struck by how short in stature Stalin was, at five foot six. It must have given Truman some feeling of strength to learn that at five foot eight he was taller than both Churchill and Stalin. The fact of their relative height, which he made note of in a diary and repeated over ten years later in his memoirs, registered strongly on him.

  Truman tried to establish a rapport with the formidable Stalin by declaring at once that he was someone who did not beat around the bush or use diplomatic language. After hearing both sides of an argument, he would simply say yes or no. Stalin seemed to like the president’s forthrightness. Truman remembered being “impressed by him…. He looked me in the eye when he spoke, and I felt hopeful that we could reach an agreement that would be satisfactory to the world and to ourselves.” Truman’s remarks seemed to put Stalin in “a good humor. He was extremely polite, and when he was ready to leave he told me that he had enjoyed the visit.”

  Truman was especially pleased that in this first conversation, Stalin repeated the promise he had made at Yalta, that he would join the war against Japan three months after the German defeat. Truman considered this a primary objective of the meeting, and thus recorded in a diary after Stalin left, “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest—but smart as hell.” Searching for comparisons to other powerful figures he had known in his life, Truman thought of him as a Russian Tom Pendergast, the Democratic Party boss in Kansas City, who Truman saw as tough and even ruthless but likable and loyal to his friends.

  Truman’s inclination to trust Stalin, or at least hope that they could get along, reflected the American affinity for friendly dealings in a peaceful world. Like most of his countrymen, Truman wanted to believe that the horrors of the war had sobered leaders and peoples everywhere into extending themselves as far as possible in reaching agreements that promised a more benign future. As Americans had believed since the founding of the Republic, the path to such an outcome would be through not traditional power politics supported by armies and navies, but respect for an international rule of law against aggression and self-determination for all nationalities.

  Charles Bohlen, an American diplomat in Moscow whose close-up observations of events under Stalin gave him a greater hold on Soviet realities, was not taken in by the Russian leader’s posturing. “There was little in Stalin’s demeanor in the presence of foreigners that gave any clue of the real nature and character of the man…. He was exemplary in his behavior. He was patient, a good listener, always quiet in his manner and expression. There were no signs of the harsh and brutal nature behind this mask.” Like his fellow Soviet expert George F. Kennan, Bohlen believed that Americans had to curb their traditional aversion to power politics and see the world in general and Stalin and the Soviets more specifically for what they were.

  On July 17, the second day of the conference, in another private meeting at Stalin’s residence during a return courtesy call, Truman found the generalissimo even more cordial than the day before. Stalin reciprocated the president’s hospitality with a sumptuous lunch. He declared his eagerness to continue Soviet-American cooperation, but complained that it was made difficult by misperceptions in their respective countries. Truman promised to try to correct this impression in the United States, and Stalin with “a most cordial smile … said he would do as much in Russia.”

  It was not misperceptions, however, that divided the two countries; it was the realities of distrust generated by clashing interests and ideologies. As soon as conference discussions focused on Germany, Italy, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, and a Truman proposal for freedom of movement on all of the world’s inland waterways, Allied differences became evident. Soviet ideas about the occupation of Germany, reparations for war damages, revised eastern borders, and what constituted democratic governments in Poland and other liberated countries sparked renewed antagonism.

  The Allies quarreled over the admission of Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary to the United Nations. Churchill and Truman supported Italy’s inclusion, and the exclusion of the Balkan countries until the Soviets allowed democratic elections. But Stalin objected that Italy had an unelected government imposed by its occupiers, and since the Balkan states did not have Fascist governments, they should be considered democratic. Churchill angrily replied that Italy had a free press and freedom of movement for both its citizens and foreigners, but none of this was so in the Balkans, where Western diplomats lived as if under house arrest. “An iron fence had come down around them,” Churchill protested.

  “Fairy tales!” Stalin replied.

  Eight days into the conference, British
election results that toppled Churchill’s government and made Labor Party chief Clement Attlee prime minister and Ernest Bevin foreign secretary opened an additional divide between Stalin and the West. Although British voters, having suffered through the depression and the war, had demonstrated their eagerness for a cradle-to-grave welfare state by electing Attlee by a landslide, Stalin saw Attlee as a stuffed shirt, a typically formal Englishman who lacked Churchill’s talent and effectiveness. Stalin also preferred Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to Bevin, an outspoken anti-Communist trade unionist. Churchill and Eden were the devils Stalin knew, as opposed to devils who had no motivation to accommodate him without a common enemy. With both wartime partners gone, Stalin could not imagine a future without a reversion to the natural antagonisms between evangelical capitalism and messianic communism.

  Truman was also disappointed by Churchill’s defeat. He wrote his daughter that “Attlee is not so keen as old fat Winston,” and while he thought Churchill was too “windy,” he was reliable. He didn’t feel comfortable with either Attlee or Bevin, who he called a couple of “sourpusses.” Attlee, “an Oxford graduate,” whose “deep throated swallowing enunciation” made him at times difficult to understand, and Bevin, “a John L. Lewis” or “tough guy” type, reminded Truman of the American labor bosses he had been dealing with all his life and didn’t like.

  Churchill’s defeat should have alerted Truman to the shifting mood in the victorious nations. Success in the war meant not just an end to the fighting but an opportunity to shift from wartime sacrifices to a focus on domestic benefits—the chance to use wartime savings to buy homes and cars and all the household electronic gadgets the war had taken out of production. The premium now was on not sacrifice but indulgence, a sort of reward for the hardships of the war years. Moreover, in Britain and America, people wanted not conservative rhetoric about self-reliance, free enterprise, and competition but assurances of well-paying jobs, affordable health care, and old-age pensions. Churchill’s loss marked a dramatic turn from war to peace in Britain. Until Japan was finished off, however, Americans would have to hold their yearnings for peace and material consumption in check.

  The continuing talks at Potsdam kept end-of-war issues very much before the Allied leaders. Although Stalin, Truman, and Attlee, who had replaced Churchill at the conference, managed to reach agreements on the occupation of Germany and distribution of reparations from its industrial plant as well as on a Soviet part in the war against Japan beginning in August, Truman, by the end of the talks, was not fooled by Stalin’s false camaraderie. Eager not to jeopardize Stalin’s promise to enter the Pacific War or to provoke domestic recriminations by showing any daylight between his and Roosevelt’s policies toward Moscow, Truman publicly put a positive face on Soviet-American dealings at this final Big Three wartime meeting.

  In private, however, Truman was scathing about what his discussions with Stalin and the Soviets taught him. He considered them impossibly self-serving and unyielding in their determination to squeeze every possible advantage from an adversary. “You never saw such pig-headed people as are the Russians,” he wrote his mother. “I hope I never have to hold another conference with them—but, of course, I will.” Worse, they were a ruthless crowd. He still thought Stalin likable enough, but the Soviet leader presided over a regime that was “police government pure and simple. A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.”

  During the conference, the Pacific War preoccupied Truman. Because the savagery of the fighting had increased as U.S. forces had advanced across the Pacific (over half of America’s military casualties in the Pacific fighting occurred in the last year of the war), he feared that an invasion of Japan could cost tens of thousands of American lives. Stalin’s promise to enter the fighting held out hope that Japan might surrender before U.S. air and land forces wreaked destruction on its home islands. At a minimum, Truman believed that a Soviet offensive could prevent possibly a million Japanese troops in China from returning to defend against an invasion.

  The other possibility was that atomic bombs would be ready before the end of the summer, and their use on Japan could bring a quick end to the war. Because Truman came to Potsdam uncertain about both Soviet intentions and the bomb’s availability, he worried that the Pacific War could last well into 1946 or longer and test the American public beyond its patience for unconditional surrender. It could also undermine his presidency and his power to manage a smooth transition to postwar life. Consequently, Stalin’s promise to join the fighting in August buoyed him greatly.

  News of a successful atomic test at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert boosted Truman even more. On the evening of July 16, Truman received first word of a successful test explosion earlier that day. On the morning of the eighteenth, additional word came of the successful test results. But it wasn’t until July 21 that he had a detailed report on the power of the new weapon.

  General Leslie R. Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, the officer in charge of the Manhattan Project, as the bomb’s development organization was code-named, described the extraordinary power of the explosion. “The test was successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone,” equivalent to fifteen to twenty thousand tons of TNT, at a conservative estimate, he wrote, with “tremendous blast effects … a lighting effect … equal to several suns in midday … a blind woman saw the light … a huge ball of fire … mushroomed and rose to a height of over ten thousand feet … light from the explosion was seen … to about 180 miles away”; a window was broken 125 miles from the blast; a seventy-foot steel tower, the equivalent of a six-story building, half a mile away, which “none of us expected to be damaged,” was pulverized.

  Groves also sent Truman and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson the eyewitness account of General Thomas F. Farrell, who was at a control shelter ten thousand yards from the point of explosion. The test results produced shouts of glee from the scientists, who had worked so hard to achieve what at times appeared impossible: “All seemed to sense immediately that the explosion had far exceeded the most optimistic expectations and wildest hopes of the scientists. All seemed to feel that they had been present at the birth of a new age—The Age of Atomic Energy. As for the present war, there was the feeling that no matter what else might happen we now had the means to insure its speedy conclusion and save thousands of American lives. As to the future … the effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying.”

  Truman was “immensely pleased. The President was tremendously pepped up by it and spoke to me of it again and again when I saw him,” Stimson recorded. “He said it gave him an entirely new feeling of confidence and he thanked me for coming to the Conference and being present to help him in this way.” Churchill and Harriman saw a striking change in Truman’s demeanor and behavior after he read Groves’s report. “He stood up to the Russians in a most emphatic and decisive manner,” Churchill noted. “He told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting.”

  Some of the scientists greeted the successful A-bomb test with as much anguish as elation. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead physicist on the project, was exhilarated at the culmination of the work, but he told one of his colleagues, “Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.” Within days of the test, Oppenheimer rued the forthcoming use of the bomb on Japan: “Those poor little people, those poor little people,” Oppenheimer said, “referring to the Japanese.” Three months later, Oppenheimer wrote, “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”

  Truman was not unmindful of the future dangers posed by the weapon. “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” he recorded in a diary on July 25. Remembering his Bible, he said the bomb could be “the Second Coming in Wrath. It may be t
he fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era after Noah and the fabulous Ark.” Yet he saw an upside to the discovery: “It is certainly a good thing for the world Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered but it can be made useful.”

  But how? He hoped that telling Stalin might pressure the Soviets into more accommodating dealings with his allies. Truman knew that Roosevelt and Churchill had tried to keep Moscow in the dark about the development of the bomb. Truman had no quarrel with that act of distrust. He consulted Churchill at once on how to tell Stalin so that it would do more to limit than increase tensions with Moscow. They agreed that he should not be given “any particulars,” meaning that they would continue holding back information that could help the Soviets develop the bomb. They also considered whether a formal or informal discussion would be best.

  Truman preferred a casual approach. A formal conversation might produce pressure to tell more than they wanted to say and could lead to demands that tripartite scientific and military committees be set up to bring Moscow into discussions of the bomb’s development and use against Japan. They thought that they could avoid such demands by mentioning the weapon to Stalin almost as an afterthought at the conclusion of a conference session.

  At the close of the July 24 meeting, Truman stood up from the conference table and walked alone over to Stalin, who was standing next to his translator. “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” Truman remembered saying. “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’” Churchill, who was standing fifteen feet from them and knew what Truman was doing, watched with the keenest interest. The expression on Stalin’s face never changed. Churchill was “sure that he had no idea of the significance of what he was being told…. If he had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress his reactions would have been obvious…. [Instead] his face remained gay and genial and the talk between these two potentates soon came to an end.”