Again Poland was the engine of conflict, just as it had been in 1939 and before. The three leaders had agreed at Yalta that Molotov, Harriman, and Kerr would serve as a commission in Moscow to supervise the reorganization and broadening of the provisional Polish government. Crucial matters were left to the commission, such as what Poles should be initially consulted, whether the Lublin (now the Warsaw) Poles should constitute the core of the new government, with the other elements serving as window dressing, or whether the provisional government should be totally reorganized into a broad-based, coalition, antifascist regime. The underlying question was whether Moscow would control Poland.
Churchill knew the line that the Russians would take if he pressed them. Stalin would remind him that Moscow had not intervened in Greece; why should the British interfere in eastern Europe? Hence Churchill had to pitch the issue at a higher level and to do this he needed Roosevelt’s support. But the President seemed at first curiously unresponsive to elaborate British formulas to protect the non-Communist Polish elements; Churchill felt that he was not getting through to him. Time was running short, he saw, for every day the Kremlin and the Warsaw Poles seemed to be fastening their grip on the country. On March 13 Churchill cabled to Roosevelt:
“…Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?…I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States Government, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear that we are in presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what we settled at Yalta….”
Stalin seemed so rigid about Poland that Washington and London observers speculated that the Politburo was forcing a strong line on him. But the Marshal had not shifted ground. He had agreed to the Polish formula at Yalta because Churchill and Roosevelt were always talking about public opinion and he was willing to help them appease it with a formula. If Western public opinion was not satisfied with the formula, it should be re-educated. The blood of Soviet soldiers had been shed prodigiously to liberate Poland. Did Churchill and Roosevelt really think he would allow in Warsaw a bourgeois-dominated government that would threaten the Red Army’s rear today and Soviet frontiers tomorrow?
All through March the President had been putting off Churchill’s proposal that the two of them join in a stiff note to Stalin. Finally he decided to move on his own. On March 29 he cabled to Stalin that the high hopes and expectations raised by Yalta among the peoples of the world were in danger of being crushed. “Having understood each other so well at Yalta I am convinced that the three of us can and will clear away any obstacles which have developed since then.” He could not understand the Russian insistence on preserving the Warsaw government. “I must make it quite plain to you that any such solution which would result in a thinly disguised continuation of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable….”
Roosevelt was suffering from another bitter disappointment when he sent this letter. He had learned from the State Department that Ambassador Gromyko would head the Soviet delegation to the San Francisco conference—Molotov would not attend. For a second-rank official to represent Russia at the founding conference, on which Roosevelt had set his hopes, struck him as a veiled attack on the nascent organization. He appealed to Stalin to let Molotov come for at least the vital opening sessions; he warned of world reaction otherwise. Stalin was adamant; public reaction, he said, could not decide such matters.
The President had a public-opinion problem of his own at this point. After conceding the Soviet Union two extra Assembly votes at Yalta and winning Churchill’s and Stalin’s consent to two extra for the United States, Roosevelt abandoned the latter notion but kept the extra Soviet votes secret, possibly because he hoped he could talk Stalin out of them before San Francisco. Inevitably the story leaked out. An outburst of anger followed on Capitol Hill, and the President was left on the defensive.
Physically, Roosevelt seemed at a low ebb. He had again begun to work late into the evening. He complained of not being able to taste his food. But once again Bruenn found his basic condition unchanged: his heart size was unchanged, there were no cardiac symptoms, the systolic murmur had not changed. For the moment even the blood pressure values were somewhat lower. But few around him, medical or lay, could doubt that the election and then Yalta and now the crisis over Poland were taking their toll of his strength and vitality.
At the grand climax of coalition warfare, with German resistance buckling, everything seemed to be deteriorating politically: Russia and the West were at odds; even Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged some stiff messages as they groped for a way to deal with the Bear; the San Francisco Conference itself seemed flawed by power politics and compromise. “My God, what a mess Europe is in!” Eden said to Harold Nicolson. “What a mess!”
Observers were asking what had gone wrong. Internal tensions in the Kremlin? Anti-Soviet attitudes in the West? Stalin’s paranoia? Churchill’s old anti-Communism? Roosevelt’s fatigue, or his utopianism? Or simply the utter hopelessness of such ancient problems as Poland?
Few saw the main source of friction—the internal dynamics of a coalition in the process of losing the enemy that had united ideologically diverse partners—until an obscure event set off an illuminating blaze of fear and suspicion.
Early in March General Karl Wolff, SS commander in Italy, secretly met in Zurich with Allen Dulles, OSS chief in Switzerland, to explore the possibilities of some kind of German surrender in Italy. Eleven days later there was a second exploratory meeting. Churchill realized that the Kremlin might be suspicious of a separate military surrender in the south, which would enable the Anglo-American armies, he admitted later, to advance against lessened opposition as far as Vienna and beyond, or even toward Berlin or the Elbe, so he ordered that Moscow be informed. Molotov already knew of the “negotiation” and demanded to be told why the Russians had not been invited to take part. He suspected not just a misunderstanding, “but something worse.”
The answer lay partly with the Combined Chiefs. They did not want the Russians to be part of the early stages of the parley. The meetings, they contended, were preliminary, mainly about mechanics; no political matters would be discussed; if the Russians took part the meetings would be protracted, a great opportunity might be lost, more Allied soldiers would die.
He had to support officers in the field, Roosevelt told Stalin, when there was a possibility of forcing the surrender of enemy troops. As a military man the Marshal would understand this, he added. “There can be in such a surrender of enemy forces in the field no violation of our agreed principles of unconditional surrender and no political implication whatsoever.”
Stalin’s answer reflected all the fears and suspicions that were gripping the strategists in the Kremlin. Talks with the enemy, he said, were permissible only if they did not give the Germans opportunity to use the negotiations to cause German troops to be switched to other sectors—above all, to the Soviet sector. That was why he wanted Russians present at even the preliminary negotiations. The Germans had already taken advantage of the talks to shift three divisions from northern Italy to the Soviet front. What had happened to the agreement at Yalta to hold the enemy on the spot and to prevent him from maneuvering? The Red Army was living up to this, he said, but Alexander was not. The Red Army was encircling Germans and exterminating them. Were the Germans in the west opening their front to the Anglo-Americans?
Indignantly Roosevelt denied all these charges. There had been no general negotiations. Lack of Allied offensive operations in Italy was due mainly to transfer of Allied forces to the Western Front. The shift of German troops antedated all the surrender talks. The trouble, he concluded bitterly, was due to Germans trying to sow suspicion between the Russians and the West. Why let them succeed?
Instead of placating Stalin, Roosevelt’s message—and his continued protestation of innocence—brought to a pitch the pent-up distrust felt by the men in the Kremlin. Why were the Allies insisting on the Swiss talks in the face of Soviet objections? What were th
ey trying to hide? Was it simply a stratagem to permit Hitler to transfer even more troops to the east? Were the Anglo-Americans maneuvering to subdue the Communists and leftist elements in northern Italy, as they had in Greece? Were they still aspiring to get to Trieste—or even Vienna—before the Russians? Would they engulf whole sectors of Germany while the Nazis held back the Red Army? Or were there even more diabolical plans on foot? All these suspicions spilled over into Stalin’s reply to Roosevelt.
“You affirm that so far no negotiations have been entered into. Apparently you are not fully informed.” His military colleagues had information that negotiations did take place whereby Germany would open the front to the Anglo-American troops and let them move east, in exchange for easier armistice terms. This was why those troops were advancing into the heart of Germany almost without resistance. He saw the advantage for the Anglo-Americans, but why conceal this from the Russians?
“And so what we have at the moment is that the Germans on the Western Front have in fact ceased the war against Britain and America. At the same time they continue the war against Russia, the ally of Britain and the U.S.A.”
It was the most brutal message Stalin had ever sent Roosevelt; it was also the most portentous. The surrender discussions had incited the fear that had dominated Soviet strategy for over a decade—the fear that the fascist and capitalist powers would combine against Russia. Everywhere Stalin looked events seemed to be conspiring in that direction: the shift of German troops to the east; the furious defense by the Hitlerites of obscure towns in the east while they yielded big cities to the Anglo-Americans in the west; the mysterious discussions with Wolff in Switzerland, and the stubborn refusal to let the Russians take part. And always there was the secret Allied development of an atomic weapon. Roosevelt was the tool of Churchill—the same Churchill who had tried to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution at birth.
Once again Roosevelt responded indignantly. He had received his message with astonishment, he told Stalin. He asked the same trust in his own truthfulness as he had always had in the Marshal’s. Could the Russians believe that he would settle with the Germans without Soviet agreement? It would be a tragedy of history if, just as victory was within their grasp, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after all the colossal losses.
“Frankly,” he concluded, “I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”
There could be no question now—the edifice of trust and good will and neighborliness that Roosevelt had shaped so lovingly was crashing down around him. The same Stalin who was making these horrendous accusations was practicing power politics in Poland, withholding Molotov from San Francisco, and doubtless planning to use the veto to disrupt the United Nations. And Roosevelt was innocent of Stalin’s charges; he had neither the will nor the capacity to indulge in labyrinthine maneuvers at this point. But his innocence had a dangerous edge. He was being tripped again by his old tendency to compartmentalize military and political decisions. Because to him military negotiations need not have political implications, he did not see what Stalin saw: that any discussion with the enemy, on any kind of time schedule, inevitably created certain political possibilities and blocked others.
For a moment Stalin sensed that he might have gone too far in upbraiding the President. He assured Roosevelt that he did not question his trustworthiness, but then he repeated all his arguments. Time was running out. Stalin’s latest message on Poland was dated April 7, 1945.
ASIA: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER
Brilliant Allied victories amid deteriorating coalition politics—that was the strategic plight of Asia, too, in the late winter of 1945.
In mid-February a fast carrier force under Spruance slipped through thick weather to a point seventy miles from the Japanese coastline and sent several hundred bombers over Tokyo. It was the first naval attack on the capital since Doolittle’s raid. Next day a huge amphibious force appeared off Iwo Jima, a tiny island which, with its three airfields, flat surface, and steep mountain at one end, was like a stationary aircraft carrier seven hundred miles from Japan. On D day—February 19—seven battleships and an armada of cruisers and destroyers smashed the beach areas with the most concentrated prelanding bombardment of the Pacific war. The defenders had mainly fortified the higher ground inland, however, and as soon as the bombardment lifted and the assault craft hit the beaches, the Marines were pinned there under withering fire. The attackers held on and began the bloody business of blowing and burning out deep underground strong points. Over 6,000 Marines died during the next five weeks of cave-to-cave fighting, along with virtually all the 21,000 defenders. Kamikazes sank an escort carrier and crippled the fleet carrier Saratoga.
Iwo Jima proved that the American Navy could seize enemy territory within a few hundred miles of the Japanese mainland and thus thrust its line of steppingstones almost to the heartland; it also demonstrated that the enemy could exact a fearful price for a few square miles of volcanic ash. Roosevelt, returning from Yalta, could feel vindicated in paying a price for Soviet participation in the Asian war.
It was this same price, however, that was causing unrest in Chungking during the weeks after Yalta. Rumors were circulating through the capital that the independence of China had been gravely compromised by a deal between Roosevelt and Stalin. Hurley felt he must return to Washington to ascertain from the President his long-range plans for China. He left in mid-February, with General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had succeeded Stilwell as Chiang’s Chief of Staff.
Hurley had other reasons to see his chief. After a promising start, his mediation between the Nationalists and the Communists had collapsed. In November he had won Yenan’s adherence to a five-point agreement providing for “unification of all military forces in China for the immediate defeat of Japan” and for a new coalition government “of the people, for the people, and by the people” that would control all the military forces in the country, including the Communist. Triumphantly Hurley had brought to Chungking not only the draft agreement, but Chou Enlai himself to take part in the negotiations, only to be accused by the Nationalists of having been sold a bill of goods. To agree to a coalition government, the Generalissimo said, would be to acknowledge total defeat. In return he offered a three-point proposal that would recognize the Communists as a legal party in exchange for control by the Nationalist government of the Communist armed forces. The Communists turned this down fiat on the ground that they were simply being asked to surrender. The indefatigable Ambassador managed to persuade the two sides to resume talks. All in vain. The distrust was too deep.
“China is in a dilemma,” Stettinius summed it up to the President early in January. “Coalition would mean an end of Conservative Kuomintang domination and open the way for the more virile and popular Communists to extend their influence to the point perhaps of controlling the Government. Failure to settle with the Communists, who are daily growing stronger, would invite the danger of an eventual overthrow of the Kuomintang….”
Hurley had troubles of his own. He had become convinced that the Foreign Service officers in China not only held different views from his own but also were sabotaging his relations with the State Department. He was certainly right on the first point. In contrast to the Ambassador, who liked Chiang, had confidence in the long-run survival and improvement of his government, and, with Wedemeyer, came to believe he was making a fair fight against the enemy, the China hands, who had had far more opportunity to observe, deemed Chiang and the Kuomintang ineffective, corrupt, reactionary, insensitive to the misery around them, incapable of reform, and not only unable to fight the Japanese but also unwilling to do so because they were hoarding their men to fight the Communists after the war. Late in February the Chargé d’Affaires at Chungking reported to Stettinius that American aid to the Nationalists was threatening to drive Yenan closer to Russia, that China was headed toward a disastrous ci
vil conflict, and that Washington should deal directly with and aid Yenan. This message arrived at the State Department while Hurley was in Washington and led to a confrontation between Hurley and officials of the Far Eastern office.
So it was an indignant Ambassador who reported to the President. Just what happened when he went to the White House twice during March is not wholly clear. He said later that he wanted a showdown with the Commander in Chief but “when the President reached up that fine, firm, strong hand of his to shake hands with me” and Hurley found in his hand a “loose bag of bones” and saw the wasted face, he lost some of his nerve. Apparently the President was in better shape than he looked, for he scoffed at Hurley’s worries and stated vigorously that he had not surrendered the territorial integrity or political independence of China. “You are seeing ghosts again.” He was loath to let Hurley have the Yalta documents on the Far East, but Hurley insisted on seeing them, and in a later meeting the Ambassador felt—or so he testified later—that the President seemed less confident about the agreements and had decided that Hurley should see Churchill and Stalin to discuss them. The President stuck to the basic policy of giving military aid only to Chiang, but he urged Hurley to continue to conciliate the Communists and he approved representation for Yenan on the Chinese delegation to the San Francisco Conference. Hurley left the White House satisfied that he had been thoroughly sustained in his fight with the young China hands.
Thus passed a last opportunity for Roosevelt to abandon his China strategy. Yet despite all the illusions that dominated American thinking about China it was not ignorance or stupidity or illness that was the prime source of Roosevelt’s continuing gamble on Chiang. It was a combination of Utopian hopes for the possibility of Chinese unity, stability, progress, and democracy, Western-style, and of hard-nosed military planning to minimize American casualties in the conquest of Japan.
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