by Walter Reid
Truman was no less committed to the United Nations solution: it was such a significant part of US foreign policy that he could not have done otherwise. But he, as Roosevelt was not, was influenced by those such as Leahy, who saw the inescapable reality, ‘that a Europe dominated by a single overwhelming power spelled danger to American security’.6 Thus the post-war settlement resulted not in the global New Deal, which Roosevelt’s critics on the right had feared, but in American military imperialism. Far from continuing with Roosevelt’s determined efforts to conciliate the Soviets and base the United Nations at all costs on Three Power unity, Truman told Molotov that he was going to go on with his plans for San Francisco, and the Russians could do what they wanted. ‘I gave it to him straight’ he said, with a ‘one-two to the jaw’. Molotov went white, and said ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life’ and Truman replied, ‘Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that’.7
Events were moving at a great pace. On 29 April the German armies in Italy surrendered unconditionally to Alexander. Mussolini was caught and executed and on 1 May Hitler committed suicide. On 7 May Jodl signed the German instrument of surrender. Fighting was to stop at midnight on 8 May. Captain Pimm brought the news to Churchill when he awoke. ‘For five years you’ve brought me bad news, sometimes worse than others. Now you’ve redeemed yourself.’
On 7 May also, Churchill managed to encourage Ike to enter Prague before the Russians. He did so, but promptly withdrew as soon as Soviet troops arrived. Even more reprehensibly, some five weeks later, on 14 June, Eisenhower ignored an appeal from Churchill and withdrew his troops from central Germany and Czechoslovakia despite the fact that Russia was putting Polish leaders arrested near Warsaw on trial in Moscow.
Eighth May was VE Day. From San Francisco, Eden, always decent and fair and not without some nobility, sent a telegram to his chief: ‘All my thoughts are with you today, on this day which is so essentially your day. It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you this day could not have been.’8 When Churchill spoke to the crowds in Whitehall from the balcony of the Ministry of Health and declared, ‘This is your victory’, the crowd roared back, ‘No – it is yours’.
Four days earlier, as it became clear that the end of the war was imminent, Ismay had written: ‘My dear Prime Minister, Your Defence Office, with intense pride and – if we may be so bold – with deep affection offer their most grateful congratulations to their Chief, whose superb leadership has today been crowned with a triumph which only History will be able to measure’.9 That was a tribute from the Ministry of Defence.
On the eve of VE Day, the Prime Minister and the Chiefs of Staff posed in the garden of No.10 for a group photograph. Churchill himself had put out a tray of glasses and a bottle of champagne. He did not overlook such practical arrangements: for VE Day itself he personally checked in advance with Scotland Yard and the Ministry of Food that there were adequate supplies of beer in the capital. He toasted the Chiefs as ‘The Architects of Victory’,10 drinking to each man in turn. The Chiefs failed to toast their great leader in response.
Ismay ranked below the Chiefs and it was not for him to take the initiative. He ‘hoped that they would raise their glasses to the chief who had been the master-planner; but perhaps they were too moved to trust their voices’.11 Brooke’s diary is very matter-of-fact about the occasion and discloses no pent-up emotion. In any event, he had seen his master in tears often enough to dispel any concern about appearing unmanned. Joan Bright, Ismay’s assistant, recalled later, ‘it was a sad example of human imperceptiveness that neither the Chief of the Imperial Staff, nor the First Sea Lord, nor the Chief of the Air Staff saluted him in a toast … Whatever the reason it was an opportunity missed that the Grand Old Man, who had been the architect of the victory that they were marking, did not receive a tribute from his three closest military advisers.’12
On 14 May the customary breadth of his spirit was again displayed when he thought to send messages to three French Prime Ministers who had been his colleagues in the dark days before the fall of France and who had been prisoners of the Germans: Léon Blum, Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud. Another telegram went to Harry Hopkins, whose visit before America entered the war had meant so much: ‘Among all those in the Grand Alliance, warriors or statesmen, who struck deadly blows at the enemy and brought peace nearer, you will ever hold an honoured place’.13
53
Potsdam
On 12 May, foreshadowing his Fulton speech, the Prime Minister telegraphed to Truman: ‘An Iron Curtain is drawn down upon [the Soviet] front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the region Lübeck-Trieste-Corfu will soon be completely in their hands.’ Once the Americans withdrew from central Europe and Czechoslovakia, as they threatened shortly to do, ‘A broad band of many hundreds of miles of Russian-occupied territory will isolate us from Poland’. He pressed Truman to come with him to a further meeting with Stalin before allied forces had left Europe and could no longer exercise any influence on Russia. It was agreed that they would meet at Potsdam.
In response to Tito’s occupation of the Italian province of Venezia Giulia, Truman sent Churchill on 12 May what was described as a ‘most robust and encouraging telegram’. The President declared that he had ‘come to the conclusion that we must decide now whether we should uphold the fundamental principles of territorial settlement by orderly processes against force, intimidation or blackmail’.1
As Sir Martin Gilbert put it, the telegram ‘confirmed a harmony of Anglo-American interests towards Russia which had not existed during Roosevelt’s wartime Presidency’2 and Churchill certainly looked forward to Potsdam in the expectation that he would find Truman more of his mind than FDR had latterly been. But in his 12 May telegram Truman also made it clear that there was to be no suspicion of the English-speaking allies ‘ganging up’: he would therefore not visit Churchill in London, as invited, and travel together with him to Potsdam. He offered to make a London visit afterwards. Even that offer was significant and welcome, though the visit never took place: Roosevelt had repeatedly talked of accepting a visit to Britain, but had been scrupulously careful to avoid it because of the implications of old-world chumminess.
But it is important to remember that despite his realism, Truman remained the man that Roosevelt had chosen as his Vice President. On 10 May he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, talking of how difficult the Russians were, but adding that ‘the difficulties with Churchill are very nearly as exasperating as they are with the Russians’.3 Truman believed that only America, not Russia and equally not Britain, had the confidence of the smaller nations, and he reassured Russia by sending Joseph E. Davies, the pro-Russian former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, as envoy to London ahead of the Potsdam meeting. Davies was known not only for his sympathy for the Soviets, but also for his contempt for British imperialism. Churchill and Davies did not get on well. The exchanges between them reflected that fact.
By now Churchill was profoundly dispirited. America talked of withdrawing from Europe while all sorts of issues remained outstanding. The Russians were all-powerful. They could drive Britain off the Continent with ease: they had a majority of two to one over the Western allies, and that would increase if the Americans left. The victorious Prime Minister told Brooke that he had never in his life been ‘more worried by the European situation than he was at present’.4
With the military victory in Europe won, the question of the continuation of the coalition with Labour and the Liberal Party came into question. Churchill certainly wished it to continue, subject to a referendum of the people. Attlee probably shared this wish. He asked that Churchill, in his letter proposing a continuation, commit the government to implementation of social reforms. Churchill had no difficulty in agreeing. But the view of the Labour Party in conference at Blackpool was that it was time for the coalition to finish. The Grand Coalition, as Churchill liked to call it, ca
me to an end. At his own expense he distributed commemorative medals to all its members at a farewell party. With the tears running down his cheeks, he told his Cabinet colleagues, ‘The light of history will shine on all your helmets’. He now led a Conservative caretaker government until a general election could take place and its results were known.
The fruits of victory for Churchill were tainted by the bitter awareness that all his efforts over the last five years might have resulted in winning one war only to see the world punished in another, even more disastrous than the German conflict. On 18 May he met the Soviet ambassador, Gusev, and gave him a fierce talking-to. He complained about Soviet secrecy. He told the ambassador that demo-bilisation of the Royal Air Force was being postponed. On the previous day he had indeed ordered that the British Air Forces should be kept intact and all German aircraft in allied hands were to be preserved in operational condition.
He instructed the planners to prepare Operation UNTHINKABLE. The purpose of UNTHINKABLE was to assess the feasibility of imposing the allied will on Russia in relation to Poland and it assumed a hypothetical start of hostilities against the former Russian ally as soon as 1 July 1945. UNTHINKABLE remained unmentionable until 1954, when Churchill told his constituents at Woodford: ‘Even before the war had ended and while the Germans were surrendering by hundreds of thousands, and our streets were crowded with cheering people, I telegraphed to Lord Montgomery directing him to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so they could easily be issued again for the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued’.5 Challenged on the point, he could not find the telegram to which he referred. There was amusement and embarrassment and Churchill said, ‘I made a goose of myself at Woodford’. But later Montgomery claimed that while there had been no telegram, there had been an oral instruction from Churchill, as a result of which very large numbers of weapons were accumulated until he asked for a specific order, confirming or rescinding his oral instructions. When no such order came, he arranged for destruction of the weapons.
As well as being unmentionable, UNTHINKABLE was pretty well undoable, but the planners tried their best on paper, with the assumed use of German troops. The allies would have to go far further into the Soviet Union than the Germans had been able to do in 1942. Brooke said that the project was ‘fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible. There is no doubt that from now onwards Russia is all-powerful in Europe.’6 On 9 June 1945, as UNTHINKABLE was out of the question, Churchill asked the planners how ‘we could defend our island’ assuming an American abandonment of Europe. He was back to 1940.
Ultimately Truman was to be a greater enemy of the Russians than Roosevelt had ever been, but for the moment an initial spell of belligerence was followed by a return to conciliation. When Churchill first met Truman at Potsdam on 15 July 1945 he asked him squarely whether the President thought that the states that Russia now controlled were ‘free and independent or not’. Truman dodged the question and simply replied that while he did not want to see these states degenerate into mere Soviet satellites, he did not want to impede Stalin’s legitimate requests. He had no wish to be Churchill’s agent.
Before adopting this more conciliatory tone towards Russia, Truman had been suggesting a joint display of force over Trieste, to check Tito’s acquisitiveness. ‘If we stand firm on this issue, as we are doing on Poland, we can hope to avoid a host of other similar encroachments’, he said to Churchill. The latter commented to Alex that ‘This action if pursued with firmness may well prevent a renewal of the World War’.7
But after the Trieste affair, Truman was increasingly influenced by Joseph E. Davies, now back from his role as Envoy to London. Davies advocated a policy of appeasement to avoid a breakdown in US–Soviet relations. Truman told Davies that Churchill was causing him as much difficulty as Stalin; when Davies visited Churchill he had concluded and reported to the President that Churchill was ‘more concerned over preserving England’s position in Europe than in preserving peace’, a simplistic caricature of the Prime Minister’s position. He further said that Churchill’s position had directly accounted for the Soviet attitude since Yalta.
The President’s name was eventually to be commemorated in history in the policy of containment of communism known as the Truman Doctrine. The journey to that declaration from a philosophy of détente was a long one in terms of theory, but a short one in terms of time. The evolution of the doctrine began as early as February 1946 with the ‘Long Telegram’ to the US Treasury from George F. Kennan, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR, which properly analysed the nature of Soviet communism and distinguished it from social democracy. Kennan went on from that to predict accurately the development and nature of what turned out to be the Cold War. He expanded his thesis in an anonymous piece, the ‘X Article’, more formally ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs; but even before then Truman had endorsed the new policy in his Declaration of 12 March that year. Churchill was aware of the irony: what immediately prompted the Declaration was the continuing Greek Civil War. Truman said it was now ‘the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures’. How different from December 1944 when Churchill made his lonely and dangerous Christmas visit to Athens, in the face of ill-informed and facile hostility from the United States. If his perception of the true nature of militant communism had been shared by the naïve and blinkered White House of that time, how different the post-war years might have been.
Churchill had been furious to discover from Davies that Truman wanted a one-to-one meeting with Stalin before the Big Three summit at Potsdam. He had done very much for the United States: he had supported ‘unconditional surrender’ rather than making peace with Hitler. He expected a special relationship in return. Davies took it much amiss that Churchill should be so ‘violent and bitter’ about the Soviets. Churchill told the President that the British government would not ‘attend any meeting except as equal partners from its opening’, and Truman backed down.
But a month later, taking the Davies line, he told Churchill that he could see no reason for not implementing the Yalta agreement on occupation zones in Germany. To fail to implement it would harm Soviet–American relations. ‘This’, said Churchill, ‘struck a knell in my breast’. There were 3 million American soldiers in Europe and only 1 million British: ‘I had no choice but to submit … Soviet Russia was established in the heart of Europe. This was a fateful milestone for mankind’.
The general election was held on 5 July. The service vote had to be collected from the theatres throughout the world in which British servicemen and women were based and to enable the vote to be brought in and counted there was a three-week delay between the date of the election and the announcement of the results. During the break Churchill took a week’s holiday in Biarritz. Colville describes him in the sea, floating ‘like a benevolent hippo’. France provided a team of detectives who had been kitted out by la Sûreté in old-fashioned bathing costumes. Together with Churchill’s own detective, the team swam round and round the Prime Minister, creating a cordon sanitaire. Their efforts were indeed necessary, because they succeeded in keeping at bay a flaxen-haired French countess who hoped to enlist Churchill as her protector to avoid the consequences of enthusiastic collaboration. In the event her golden locks escaped the scissors of unofficial justice, and she got off with a short spell of imprisonment.8
Churchill flew on to Berlin, and the conference, on 15 July. Among those who were there to meet him was Attlee, attending the conference as an observer pending the outcome of the election. Churchill met and liked Truman. He surveyed the ruins of Hitler’s chancellery. All the Germans who were watching, except for one old man, began to cheer. ‘My hate had died with their surrender and I was much moved by their demonstrations, and also by their haggard looks and threadbare clothes.’
The first p
lenary session took place on 17 July. There were private meetings as well as formal ones. Stalin told Churchill that he had started smoking cigars. Churchill said that if a picture of Stalin smoking a cigar could be ‘flashed across the world, it would cause an immense sensation’. He pressed on Truman a continuation of the closest of relations between Britain and America. He was dissatisfied with the cold response: such relations would have to be carried out within the context of the United Nations. He said that was not what he wanted. If a man proposed marriage to a woman it was ‘not much use if he were told that she would always be a sister to him’.
He wanted a continuation of provision of reciprocal facilities, for instance in regard to bases for fuelling operations. He wanted, in effect, in a real, tangible form, a special relationship. Truman did agree to a suggestion that the combined Chiefs of Staff should be kept going until conditions were more stable, but later Churchill was told that if there were any disagreement, the United States would make the final decision.
The planners had told the President about Britain’s ‘melancholy’ financial position. Britain ‘had spent more than half her foreign investments for the common cause when we were alone, and now emerged from the war with great external debt of three thousand million pounds’ (my emphasis). Truman said to Churchill on 18 July at Potsdam that he would do his best to help, but that he might have domestic difficulties. A month later, when Churchill was out of office, Truman abruptly terminated Lend-Lease. At the 18 July meeting the President had referred to the ‘immense debt’ that America owed to Britain ‘for having held the fort at the beginning … If you had gone down like France, we might well be fighting the Germans on the American coast at the present time.’9