Clever though he was, Stalin was no diplomatic genius. Yet the Big Three had conflicting interests and he took advantage. Stalin had been given his inch and aimed to take a mile. Already the idea had formed in his mind that the USSR should conquer territory in the eastern half of Europe so as to have a buffer zone between itself and any Western aggressor. Stalin had a decent working partnership with the exhausted Roosevelt; and although he and Churchill did not trust each other, they felt they could go on dealing across the table. Many in Poland and elsewhere felt that this co-operation was taken to excessive lengths. The Polish government-in-exile warned about Stalin’s ambitions, but in vain. On 12 April, however, Roosevelt died. Stalin, a man scarcely prone to sentimental outbursts, sent a warm letter of condolence to Washington. It was not so much the death of a fellow member of the Big Three as the collapse of a working political relationship that he mourned. Personal diplomacy had obviated many snags which could have disrupted the tripartite military alliance since 1941. Stalin had enjoyed being taken seriously as a politician by Churchill and Roosevelt for the duration of hostilities, and their meetings had enhanced his self-esteem. Roosevelt’s successor, Vice-President Harry Truman, had a more right-wing reputation. Stalin anticipated rougher modes of deliberation on world affairs in the time ahead.
43. LAST CAMPAIGNS
At last in summer 1944 the Western Allies were ready to open the second front. Operation Overlord began on 6 June, when American, British, Canadian and other forces under the command of Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches of Normandy in northern France. It was an amphibious operation of immense daring and cleverness. Having fooled the Wehrmacht about the precise spot, the Allied armies pushed the Germans into retreat. If Stalin had been beginning such an offensive in the East, he would have demanded that the Western Allies attack the Germans simultaneously. Yet he did not hurry his preparations any more than the Americans and the British had done in earlier years. The Eastern counterpart was to be Operation Bagration. The name was not chosen accidentally: Bagration was one of Alexander II’s most successful commanders in 1812; he was also a Georgian like the USSR’s Supreme Commander. Massive German forces remained in the east, 228 divisions as compared to the 58 facing Eisenhower and Montgomery. On 22 June, after months of preparation by Zhukov and Vasilevski, Operation Bagration was begun. It was exactly three years after the Germans had crashed over the River Bug in Operation Barbarossa. Deep, complex combinations of tanks and aircraft were deployed across the long front.1 In East and West it was clear that the final battles of the war in Europe were imminent.
The Pripet marshes between Belorussia and Poland were the next fighting ground, and Stalin basked in the glory obtained by the success of his military professionals. On 22 July Rokossovski’s forces crossed the Bug. Stavka concentrated the Red Army’s advance in the direction of Warsaw and Lwów. Stalin had last been involved in battles over the territory in 1920, and this time he was in total charge of the Red Army’s activities. When Lwów fell on 27 July, the Wehrmacht pulled back across the River Vistula. Neither Hitler nor his generals had a serious strategy to reverse the fortunes of the Third Reich. German forces faced the prospect of war against formidable enemies on two massive fronts. The Western Allies were grinding their way towards the Ardennes, while the Red Army could see Warsaw through their binoculars.
The Wehrmacht stood across the Red Army’s advance not only in Poland but also in every country of eastern Europe. The obvious temptation, after the Red Army crossed the Bug, was to order the pursuit of the enemy to Warsaw. Against this was the calculation that Soviet forces had not yet completed the reconquest of the Baltic states and that a massive defence had been prepared by Hitler in Poland itself. There were reasons for Stavka to allow the Red Army to be rested and resupplied for the arduous crossing of the Vistula. Stalin also needed to be assured that any thrust at Warsaw would not expose his forces to a wheeling movement by the Germans from Romania. Although he had driven the Wehrmacht off Soviet territory, he recognised that a serious military campaign lay ahead.2 A further problem was the weakness of Soviet intelligence in respect of the Polish situation. Stalin was largely to blame for this. By annihilating thousands of Polish communists in Moscow in the Great Terror, he had deprived himself of agents who could have been infiltrated behind the lines in 1944. And his murderous behaviour towards fleeing Poles in 1939–41 had added to the general suspicion of him in Poland.
In fact the Polish anti-German resistance had secretly been preparing an uprising in Warsaw, and plans were at an advanced stage. Nationalists, far from wanting to welcome the Red Army, hoped to overturn Nazism in Warsaw without Soviet interference. The purpose was to prevent Poland falling prey to the USSR after liberation from Germany. The military organisation was led by the Home Army, and the Warsaw Uprising began on 1 August. It was a brave but doomed endeavour. The Germans brought in the Wehrmacht and steadily the rebels were picked off and defeated. The fighting was over by 2 October.
The Red Army’s lengthy period of recuperation and re-equipment caused much adverse comment both at the time and in subsequent years. The Home Army, while planning to defeat the Germans in Warsaw by Polish efforts, pleaded desperately for Soviet support and received almost nothing. Not that the question of earlier military intervention failed to be raised in Moscow; indeed there had been no angrier discussion in Stavka since before the battle of Kursk. Unfortunately almost nothing is known about who said what until the Warsaw Uprising was over. Zhukov, the military professional, was still arguing the need for a prolonged pause in early October. Molotov took the opposite side, demanding an immediate offensive. Beria made mischief among the disputants, delighting in pitting one member of Stavka against another. Stalin predictably leaned towards Molotov: action was his preference. But Zhukov persisted. Eventually Stalin gave way, albeit with his customary lack of grace.3 Zhukov had won the debate at the expense of piling up problems for his relations with Stalin at the war’s end. The Red Army drew itself up on the eastern bank of the Vistula and stayed put for the rest of the year.
What Stalin said to Zhukov was probably not the full extent of his thinking. The weary condition of the Red Army was only one of the factors to be weighed in the balance. Stalin was already looking for ways to secure political dominance over Poland during and after the war. His experience in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920 had convinced him that Poles were untrustworthy because their patriotism outweighed their class consciousness. ‘Once a Pole, always a Pole’ might have been his motto in dealing with them and their elites. He was determined that whatever Polish state emerged from the débris of the war would stay under the hegemony of the USSR. This meant that the émigré government based in London was to be treated as illegitimate and that any armed organisation formed by the Poles in Poland would be treated likewise. Stalin felt no incentive to handle Poles sympathetically. He had ordered the murder of thousands of captured Polish officers in April 1940 in Katyn forest in Russia. He no more wanted the survival of Poland’s political and military elite than he aimed to preserve the elites in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and he was long practised in the art of solving public problems by means of the physical liquidation of those who embodied them.
Stalin also had objective strategic reasons for refusing to start an early offensive across the Vistula. Hitler and his commanders in August had treated the Red Army as the most urgent enemy and left the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising to their security units while the Wehrmacht massed by the river to repulse any attempt at a crossing by Rokossovski. The German authorities were confident they could easily suppress Polish insurgents. What was militarily inexcusable in Stalin’s behaviour, however, was his rejection of all Polish pleas for assistance once the Warsaw Uprising had begun on 1 August 1944. Churchill detected the dirty work and rebuked the Kremlin.4 British aircraft based in Italy were dispatched to drop supplies to the Poles. But Stalin was immovable and the Red Army did not budge.
The Warsaw Uprising was neither soon n
or easily suppressed. While the Red Army took the opportunity for rest, recovery and resupply, the Home Army of the Poles got about its business. The insurgents were flexible, well organised and utterly determined. The Germans had no idea how to contain them until the order was given to raze the districts of insurgence to the ground. Stalin might have had justified doubts that aid for the Polish rebels by means of an amphibious assault across the Vistula would decisively weaken the Wehrmacht. But if it had been a large group of Russian or Ukrainian partisans rising against the Third Reich, he would surely have dropped guns and food for their use and bombed the Germans. His prevention of assistance to Warsaw involved a calculated decision about Poland’s future. Already Stalin had set up a Provisional Government. This was the cabinet, appointed by the Kremlin and beholden to it, which he intended to put into power after Germany’s defeat. Other Polish leaders, however popular they might be across the country, were to be kept away from the centre of events. Stalin aspired to rule Poland through his communist stooges. The more insurgents were wiped out by the Germans, the nearer he would come to his objective. Churchill’s imprecations about Stalin’s military and political measures were justified ones.
Nevertheless Churchill was to impress on Stalin at their Moscow meeting in October 1944 that he held no suspicion that the Red Army had been deliberately held back.5 The cohesion of the Grand Alliance took precedence. The Wehrmacht, despite being on the defensive in East and West, had not lost its resilience. The Allies knew they had a fight on their hands as Germans, despite grumbling about Hitler’s military and economic failures, stood by their Führer. Churchill and Stalin understood the importance of getting to Berlin first. The conquest of territory would put the conqueror in a position to prescribe the terms of peace. Roosevelt and Eisenhower felt differently; their strategy was premised on the desire to minimise casualties on their side rather than join a race to reach Berlin first. Stalin was determined to win the race even if the Americans declined to compete. He was worried that the USA and the United Kingdom might do a deal with the Germans for an end to the fighting. This could lead to a joint crusade against the Soviet Union; and even if this did not happen, the Germans might surrender to the Western Allies and deprive the Soviet Union of post-war gains. Stalin selected his finest field commanders — Rokossovski, Konev and Zhukov — to reinforce the campaign to seize the German capital.
The Red Army on his orders started the Vistula–Oder Operation on 12 January 1945. Although his Red Army outnumbered the Wehrmacht by three to one, the German will to resist had not faded. Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front burst forward on the southern wing of a military force which stretched across the length of the Polish lands. Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front advanced in the north. As German defences crumbled, Zhukov could report that he held the banks of the River Oder. The pockets of Germans who had not retreated were caught in a trap. Königsberg and its population were cut off. On its way through Poland the Red Army came across terrible sights as it entered the concentration camps. Evidence of mass murder had been obliterated at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, but at Auschwitz (Oswiecim) the fleeing Germans had not had time to disguise the incarceration, forced labour, starvation and murder. Soviet soldiers would have acted furiously even without such an experience. German atrocities in the USSR had been systematic from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and Soviet wartime propaganda had dulled any lingering sensitivities towards the Germans as a people. As it moved into central Europe, the Red Army went on the rampage; its troops pillaged and raped with almost no restraint by its commanders.
Red troops acted with almost no discrimination about nationality. Not only Germans but also other peoples were brutally treated and Stalin refused to punish the offenders. The Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas complained to him in vain. ‘Well, then,’ Stalin replied:6
imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade — over a thousand kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones. How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors? You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be… The important thing is that it fights Germans.
Djilas, who had fought in the Balkans and was not noted for sensitivity, could hardly believe his ears.
Careless about how his soldiers behaved off-duty, Stalin was determined that they should take the German capital. He deceived the Western Allies about his intention. On 1 April 1945, as he was settling his military plans in Moscow, he telegraphed Eisenhower, agreeing that Soviet and Western forces should aim to converge in the region of Erfurt, Leipzig and Dresden; and he added: ‘Berlin has lost its previous strategic significance. Therefore the Soviet Supreme Command is thinking of assigning second-level forces to the Berlin side.’7 Compounding the lie, he proposed that the ‘main blow’ should be delivered in the second half of May. Simultaneously he ordered Zhukov and Konev to hurry forward their preparations.8 Churchill became ever more concerned. Politically, in his view it was vital to meet up with the Red Army as far to the east as was possible. But he failed to get a positive response from Roosevelt before the Soviet forces were on the move again. On 19 April they threw down the Wehrmacht defences between the river Oder and the river Neisse. On 25 April they had reached the outskirts of Potsdam outside Berlin. This was on the same day that Konev’s divisions made direct contact with the First US Army at Torgau on the River Elbe. Yet the Reds got to Berlin first. Zhukov prevailed over Konev in their race. On 30 April Hitler, recognising the hopelessness of his position, committed suicide. Unconditional surrender followed.9
Many divisions of the Wehrmacht surrendered to the American and British forces on 8 May, whereas Zhukov received such offers only the next day. The collapse of German military power permitted Stalin to turn his face eastwards. The USSR could never be secure while an aggressive Japan sat on its borders. He was to refer to the ‘shame’ heaped upon the Russian Empire through defeat in the naval battle of Tsushima in 1905. Tokyo had put forces into the Soviet Far East in the Civil War. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. War had exploded between Japan and the USSR in 1938, involving the largest tank battles yet seen in the world. It was not until mid-1941 that Japanese rulers decided to undertake expansion southwards along the rim of the Pacific rather than westward through Siberia.
The Western Allies, having to husband their human and material resources, continued to need help from the Red Army. There was every sign that the Japanese were readying themselves to defend their territory to the last soldier. Stalin at Yalta had exacted the promise from Roosevelt and Churchill that the USSR would receive the Kurile islands in the event of Allied victory. This was still Stalin’s objective after the victory in Europe. Rapid preparations were made by Stavka for the Red Army’s entry into the war in the Pacific. Having suffered from Japanese expansionism in the 1930s, Stalin intended to secure a peace settlement that would permanently protect the interests of the USSR in the Far East. Nearly half a million troops were transferred along the Trans-Siberian railway to the Soviet Far East. Yet the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek refused to accept the terms which had been put by Stalin to the Western Allies. Stalin conducted further negotiations with the Chinese and made an unadorned case for concessions from China and territory from Japan. Otherwise, he asserted, the Japanese would remain a danger to its neighbours: ‘We need Dairen and Port Arthur for thirty years in case Japan restores its forces. We could strike at it from there.’10
By 16 July 1945, however, the Americans had successfully tested their A-bomb at Alamogordo. It had also become clear that the Japanese would fight for every inch of their islands, and President Truman saw nuclear weapons as a desirable means of avoiding massive loss of lives among the invading American forces. He no longer saw any reason to encourage Soviet military intervention. Having seen how Stalin had tricked Roosevelt over Berlin, he was not going to be fooled again. American polic
y towards the USSR was in any case getting steadily sterner. What Truman would not do, though, was retract Roosevelt’s specific promises at Yalta to Stalin about China and Japan: he did not want to set a precedent for breaking inter-Allied agreements. Stalin did not know this. He had yet to test Truman’s sincerity as a negotiating partner. He sensed that, unless the Red Army intervened fast, the Americans might well deny him the Kurile Islands after Japan’s defeat. Stalin wanted total security for the USSR: ‘We are closed up. We have no outlet. Japan should be kept vulnerable from all sides, north, west, south, east. Then she will keep quiet’11 The race for Berlin gave way to the race for the Kuriles.
Stalin, Truman and Churchill came together at the Potsdam Conference from 17 July. This time there was no argy-bargy about the choice of venue; the leaders of the Big Three wanted to savour victory at the centre of the fallen Third Reich. While Stalin took his train from Moscow, Truman made the long trip across the Atlantic and joined Stalin and Churchill in Berlin. Meetings were held in the Cecilienhof. The wartime personal partnership was already over, with Roosevelt’s replacement by Truman. Perhaps Roosevelt would anyway have ceased to indulge Stalin in the light of American global ambitions after the world war. Certainly Truman already felt this way.
The other great change in the Big Three occurred in the course of the Potsdam Conference. On 26 July the British elections swept the Labour party to power. Churchill ceded his place at the negotiations to his Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee. The new government was no gentler on Stalin than Churchill, and the Potsdam Conference turned into a trial of strength between the USA and the USSR with the British regularly supporting the Americans. Several topics were difficult: the Japanese campaign; the peace terms in Europe; and Poland’s frontiers and government. The Americans, buoyed by their monopoly of nuclear-weapons technology, were no longer eager for Soviet military assistance in the Far East. This time it was Stalin who stressed the need for the USSR’s participation. On Europe there was agreement on the Allies’ demarcation of zones of occupation. But wrangles remained. It was decided to hand over the details for resolution by the Council of Foreign Ministers. Poland, though, could not be pushed aside. The Conference at Stalin’s insistence listened to the arguments of the USSR-sponsored Provisional Government. The Americans and British complained repeatedly about Soviet manipulation and about political repression in Warsaw. The Western Allies expected Stalin to respect Polish independence and to foster democratic reform.
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