A World at Arms (141 page)

These troublesome military disputes were all resolved or smoothed over, but their sharpness was in part a reflection of other tensions in the
Anglo-American alliance which had been simmering for some time and which increased in 1944. The most difficult and long-standing of these grew out of the fundamentally divergent views of the two countries on the colonial question.
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The American public maintained its fundamental opposition to colonialism, a view shared by most military leaders, while a substantial portion of the British public and much of its civilian and military leadership expected a continuation of the British empire in some form. The divergent views could not have been represented more sharply than by the two leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt, themselves. Churchill became positively apoplectic at any mention of decolonization; Roosevelt was even more certain that all colonies of Britain and other colonial powers were and should be headed for the earliest possible independence, after a period of some sort of trusteeship.

The fact that already in 1942 Churchill had threatened to resign rather than make substantial concessions to the movement for Indian independence supported by Roosevelt had made it clear to the latter that this was an issue on which the British leader simply would not budge. The President was on the whole careful not to push this matter too openly thereafter, but there could be no secrecy about his views. The fact that these were shared by his representative in India, William Phillips, a long-time friend of the President, only served to underline the gulf separating London and Washington on this issue.
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The fundamental difference over the colonial question was, in a way, closely related to another difference which was much more in the public eye at the time in both Britain and the United States: that over the governments being established or to be re–established in Italy and Greece. In both cases, the sentimental attachment of Churchill to the maintenance of monarchy in Italy and its restoration in Greece ran afoul not only of the antipathy, or at least indifference, of the Americans to the monarchical question but also the general identification in both countries of exceedingly conservative and even collaborationist elements with the monarchy. The reluctance, at least initially, of the Americans to work with such people was matched by Churchill’s aversion to anyone in either country whom he suspected of anti-monarchical sentiments. He objected not merely to Communists and those who were willing to work with them but to such respected liberal statesmen as the Italian leader Ivanoe Bonomi.

The American and British attitudes toward the internal evolution of Italian politics were fundamentally different, with Churchill adamant against what he perceived, largely correctly, as an increase in the role of those opposed to the maintenance of the monarchy, even if under King Victor Emmanuel’s son Prince Umberto. The Americans were far
more ready to accommodate the clear signs in Italian politics pointing in other directions. When the April 1944 agreement of the Allies and Badoglio for the all–party government under Victor Emmanuel to be replaced by one under Umberto after the liberation of Rome was to be implemented in June, the pressure of Italy’s parties brought an end to Badoglio’s role as Prime Minister. Bonomi, of all people, became the new Prime Minister, to Churchill’s outrage and quiet satisfaction in Washington.
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British–American quarrels over Italy continued thereafter, focusing later that year on Churchill’s veto of the appointment of Count Carlo Sforza as Foreign Minister.
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The steady drift of the Italian government into a moderate liberal direction, which the British government found impossible to halt, made Churchill all the more adamant in his attitude toward developments in Greece.

As the Germans evacuated their troops from Greece, British troops landed there. The major Greek resistance organization, the EAM, was dominated by the Communists, though many of the members and supporters were not aware of this fact.
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In an increasingly complicated situation’ these elements first agreed to a settlement, referred to as the Caserta Agreement, of September 26, 1944, with other elements in the resistance and the British as well as representatives of the Greek government-in-exile, but then reversed themselves and tried to obtain control of Athens. British troops played a major role in putting down this effort; and while the Soviet Union, for reasons to be reviewed later in this chapter, acquiesced in the British suppression of those who looked to the Soviet Union as a model, the American public reacted very negatively to the developments in Greece. An American public statement of December 5, 1944, originally designed to engage the veto of Sforza, also contained a pointed reference to the events in Athens and caused enormous resentment in England but elicited a favorable response from the American public. For weeks something of a publicistic controversy raged and came to be relaxed only by the end of January.
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The situation in Greece had exploded into something akin to civil war, with British troops playing a key role in putting down an attempted Communist insurgency in Athens. Whatever the obvious interest in obtaining absolute power on the part of the Communists, those on the British side had in many cases collaborated with rather than fought against the Germans. The voices of dissent in the British Parliament were mild compared to the uproar in the United States; Admiral King had American ships transferred to the Union Jack rather than give the appearance of American support by carrying British troops and supplies to Greece under the Stars and Stripes.
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A major effort was eventually made to smooth over the troubles, but there was legitimate concern that
the two allies would move apart. This was due partly to the greater interest of the American public in such countries as Italy and Greece than Romania and Bulgaria, partly to the perception that British actions were closely connected to her imperial interests which Americans in general deplored, and partly to the impact of the Battle of the Bulge and Montgomery’s unfortunate press conference, reviewed in the next chapter.

A further source of friction between the Americans and British was their troubled relationship with de Gaulle. Both found him exceedingly difficult to deal with, in part because the leader of the Free French appears to have thought it important for his own and French self–respect to make things as difficult as he could for the allies on whom he depended. In this he was certainly successful.
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Because they realized earlier than the Americans that de Gaulle was likely to have behind him the support of the liberated French people, the British made, on the whole, a greater effort to accommodate the difficult French leader. Once they had been concerned to keep him from flying out of England,
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now they tried hard to work with him and to persuade the Americans of the wisdom of doing the same.
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Roosevelt remained reluctant, partly because of his concern over the imposition of a military commander on a liberated France in which the last general to try to head the country had been General Boulanger, in part because those closest to him in Washington held an even more negative view of de Gaulle than the President himself. The July 1944 meeting of the two in Washington eased the strain considerably, but de Gaulle’s subsequent deliberate flaunting of his newly recognized status hardly helped. Because the British government, in spite of its own endless troubles with the French general, considered itself bound to him and was constantly urging Washington to follow a similar policy, the difficulties of both Britain and the United States with the Free French leader produced tensions in their relationship with each other.

The problem of de Gaulle in Anglo-American relations does not exhaust the catalog of frictions. There was a whole series of economic difficulties. The British realized that they were not only dependent upon American Lend-Lease aid during hostilities but would need assistance both for the interval between the defeat of Germany and the defeat of Japan and during the period immediately thereafter. Having poured their energies and resources into the fight against Germany, and at a level and cost far beyond the resources of their country, Britain’s leaders looked to the United States for continued aid until they could once again be self-supporting. It was their hope that the extensive “reverse Lend-Lease” which they were providing to the Americans and the great
role they had played in the war would combine with American self-interest in a prosperous post-war Britain to make some assistance program palatable to them.

At the Quebec Conference of September 1944 the Americans had promised a generous treatment of British needs in what was coming to be referred to as Phase II Lend-Lease, the period after the defeat of Germany. The British sent John Maynard Keynes to Washington to work out an agreement on this subject. Keynes, whatever his ability as an economist, was perhaps not the wisest choice, given the attitude of Roosevelt toward him, but that may not have been known to the British.
^b
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau in particular tried to accommodate the British, having himself played a key role at the Quebec meeting; but objections within the United States government and Congress, responsive to doubts among the American public, kept the resulting agreement–if the compromises arrived at can be called that–substantially below what the British had hoped for. And even that would be imperilled by legislative changes in Congress and the early end of the war with Japan.
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The difficult discussions of further aid .to Britain in the last months of 1944 were complicated by the differences between the American and British delegations at the international civil aviation conference simultaneously taking place in Chicago. At a time when British Airways is the world’s largest air carrier and dominates its most important and profitable route, that between New York and London, it may at first be difficult to follow the agitated debate over post-war civil aviation between Americans who wanted open competition and the British who were afraid that American wartime mass production of transport planes, when they themselves were concentrating on fighters and bombers, would drive them out of peacetime passenger traffic altogether. Massive American pressure brought agreement on terms close to what the British strongly objected to, but the pressure itself angered the authorities in London while Washington seethed over what was seen as British intransigence.
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Behind the angry dispute over the future of international civil aviation and also in the background of differences about Lend-Lease was always the argument over differing philosophies on international
economic policy. The Roosevelt administration, led on this issue by Cordell Hull, argued in favor of lowering barriers and controls. On this issue, there were two fronts: at home, against the advocates of protective tariffs, especially influential in the Republican Party, and abroad, against the imperial preference agreements embodied in Britain’s arrangements with her Dominions and colonies. If in the pre-war years the administration had concentrated its efforts on the passage and implementation of the reciprocal trade agreements act, fighting in the Congress against the domestic opponents of its lower tariff policies, during the war it tried hard to utilize the leverage provided by Lend-Lease to push the British into abandoning their special imperial preferences. The prospect of a terribly difficult recovery from the exertions of war made the London government most reluctant to yield to American pressure on this issue; it would affect relations between the two for years to come.
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In the period immediately following the end of the war in Europe, the question of relaxing British restrictions on Jewish immigration into the British mandate of Palestine was to poison Anglo-American relations, but this prospect was not apparent during the period of hostilities. It was the future of Germany and the relationship of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union that gave rise to different opinions in the two capitals and friction between them. On the future of Germany, the differences were worked out in the fall of 1944. After lengthy opposition, Roosevelt was finally converted to the British scheme of occupation zones, which left Berlin deep inside the Soviet sector and allocated the southern rather than the northwestern zone to the United States. The President’s mood was not improved by Churchill’s change of mind on the zonal question in early 1945, and his successor, Harry Truman, was also unwilling to break the zonal agreement once it had been reached. Both Churchill and Roosevelt at Quebec in September, 1944, agreed to the deindustrialization embodied in the Morgenthau plan and both soon after abandoned it, though not necessarily for the same reasons (an issue reviewed in
Chapter 15
). The policies of the Western Allies toward Germany would be somewhat different in principle but far more similar in practice than might have been anticipated, a reality which later facilitated the junction of the two zones.

Rather more difficult was the divergence in views concerning relations with the Soviet Union. Here there were on the one hand common Anglo-American perspectives which would produce major frictions between both and the Soviet Union, frictions to be discussed
later in this chapter, but there were also significant differences in approach between the two Western Powers.

THE WESTERN POWERS AND THE SOVIET UNION

On some points the British and American governments were in full agreement. Both very much preferred to keep their project to develop the atomic bomb secret from the Russians, though both were aware of Soviet espionage efforts to penetrate the work being done, with the Americans apparently being more aware of it and the British far more deeply penetrated. Both had in prior years made substantial efforts to work with the Russians on military matters and intelligence exchanges; both had been equally rebuffed and were by 1944 about equally disheartened on this score. Both still very much hoped for post-war cooperation with the Soviet Union, though both were becoming somewhat skeptical about the prospects for such cooperation. Where they differed from each other, and hence at times had substantial disagreements, was on how to deal with the Soviet Union in the meantime.