A World at Arms (142 page)

The British Prime Minister and most in his government were concerned that the waning power of Britain in the face of the growing power of the Soviet Union made early agreements with Moscow a necessity. Even if those agreements, and the concessions required to obtain them, were painful–especially for those East Europeans who would find themselves under Soviet control–it was better to get the best terms possible early and try to tie the Soviets down by such agreements than to wait until later when Britain’s power had ebbed further and the Russians could do practically what they wanted.
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This approach explains the course Churchill had tried to adopt in 1941–42 in accepting the essentials of Russia’s pre-June 1941 borders, a course from which he had been kept by American objections. As the Red Army beat back the German invaders and headed into Central and Southeast Europe, he wanted to return to it.

Roosevelt’s views were based on a different reality and drew quite different conclusions from that reality. The President was opposed to advance commitments about the post-war world not only on general principles, in part because of the believed bad effects of the secret treaties made during World War I, but also due to a view of the realities of power which was entirely different from Churchill’s, and for very good reasons. He knew all too well how poorly prepared for war the United States had been in 1939, 1940, and 1941, and how long it was taking to mobilize American military strength. He was equally conscious of the
difficulties of projecting the slowly but steadily growing power of the United States across the vast oceans separating her from the European and Pacific enemies in the face of the struggle with German submarines and other sources of ship losses. The obvious implication for a man who believed firmly in the long-term ability of the country to surmount these difficulties and attain victory was that a steady unfolding of American power was certain to improve the position of the United States in Allied councils. Generally a verse to making choices before they were absolutely necessary, in regard to the future of Europe Roosevelt believed that he had every incentive to postpone decisions. This was especially true at a time when American forces were not yet deployed on the continent in force; it would continue to be the case for some time thereafter as American strength in France grew.

As it was, American armies were to move far beyond the lines contemplated by Churchill even though there was some reluctance to move east of them in 1945; had the Germans not launched their last great offensive in the West, the Americans would quite likely have pushed yet further. If there was a case to be made for Churchill’s belief that a waning power had best make its deals early, then an equally good case can be made for Roosevelt’s view that a country growing in strength could benefit from postponing decisions until that power had unfolded to its full potential.

This differentiation in perspective hampered Anglo-American deliberations as they dealt with the Soviet Union and made it very difficult for the two powers to adopt a common line toward Moscow. There was certainly no lack of issues between the London and Washington governments on the one hand and Moscow on the other. These had been there from the beginning of the alliance forced on them by Germany; many came to a head in the summer and fall of 1944.

Undoubtedly the most important of the issues was that of the future of Poland. Neither the British nor the American government was an admirer of the pre-war government in Warsaw, and neither government was especially devoted to the pre-war eastern border of Poland. The point on which there was, however, basic agreement in both governments–as well as the public in the two countries–was a hope and a very strong desire for the future liberated Poland to have its independence. Here was the central and determining problem: given the geographic realities, Poland was most likely to be liberated by the Red Army; could it still be independent?

In the First World War, Serbia had been overrun by the armies of the Central Powers, but at the end of that conflict had emerged larger and independent because of the defeat of those Central Powers at the
hand of the Western Allies, Russia having previously been defeated by Germany. Now the situation was going to be different. The Soviet Union was obviously not only not being defeated by Germany, it was making a major contribution to Germany’s defeat and the Western Allies had every interest in urging and helping it to do so. How then enable Poland, wedged as it was between Germany and Russia, to retain an independence which Germany had hoped to extinguish along with much of its population and which Stalin appeared unwilling to allow?

The British government, which was closest to the Polish government-in-exile, located in London since the summer of 1940, took the view that the best hope for an independent Poland lay in that government-in-exile making almost any concession to Moscow that the latter might want as a means of assuring its return to a Poland that would in any case be liberated by the Red Army. If they could only get back into the country, the people there would surely rally to them rather than to whatever puppets the Soviet Union might prefer to install. Both before and after the Soviet Union broke off relations with the Polish government-in-exile, the British government, with Churchill playing an active personal role, tried hard to pressure the London Poles into making first territorial concessions and subsequently also some changes in personnel to accommodate Soviet demands.
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The Polish leaders in the West were on the whole unwilling to make the extensive territorial concessions asked for, though a few of them were willing to make some changes, especially in view of anticipated gains at Germany’s expense. They were, however, not inclined to accept the view that the Soviet Union could be a multi–national unit while Poland could not and were especially reluctant to agree to yield portions of pre-war Poland while the war was on and they were in exile.

It cannot, of course, be known what would have happened had they agreed to Soviet demands. It seems likely, however, that it made no difference and that the British were deluding themselves. There were already the germs of a Polish government and army under strict Soviet control being organized within the Soviet Union. Stalin’s policy clearly looked forward to an entirely new regime in Poland; and while he would and did make what he considered concessions to London and Washington to hold down the level of acrimony in the alliance, he appears to have made up his mind very early that none but his own hand–picked Poles would have any real say in Warsaw.
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American policy on the Polish question lagged behind that of England but engaged the same basic problem.
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In part because of domestic political concerns, President Roosevelt was most reluctant to push concessions on the Polish government-in-exile. There was, furthermore,
his hope that he could do more for the Poles as American power grew; as late as the Yalta Conference, at a time when the Red Army was in occupation of all of Poland, he still hoped to get a better deal for Poland.
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This hope would not be realized; geography and the Red Army ruled. But the issue of Polish independence came to the fore dramatically in the summer of 1944, and while it did not sunder the alliance between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union during the war, it turned the possibility of their continued cooperation in the post-war years from a hope to a highly unlikely prospect.

As described in the preceding chapter, the uprising of the Polish underground army in Warsaw which began on August 1, 1944, produced a major crisis in the alliance against Hitler. The Red Army halted its advance and withdrew its spearheads in the outskirts of Warsaw, shifting its emphasis to the creation of bridgeheads across the Narev river north and the Vistula river south of the Polish capital. The Russians, who had called upon the Poles to rise against the Germans, not only stood aside as the Germans crushed the uprising, they refused to allow British and American planes to land on Soviet airfields as they attempted to drop supplies to the insurgents. As a matter of policy, the Soviet Union even refused to allow British planes from Italy to fly over Soviet-occupied Hungary on their long and dangerous journey to the Polish capita1.
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The result of this general policy, as could be expected, was the crushing of the uprising by the Germans, which was followed by the systematic destruction of what was left of the city.

These events, it should be noted, took place very much in the public view. Unlike the relevant exchanges of diplomats and heads of states, most of which did not appear in print until long after the war, the dramatic events of the two months of fighting in the streets of Warsaw reverberated in Britain and the United States. Nothing could have done so much to undercut the admiration for the Red Army and with it sympathy for the Soviet Union as the spectacle of Soviet acquiescence in the defeat of the Poles. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could budge Stalin by their messages about the situation; neither believed that the alliance could or should be broken over it; but nothing about that alliance would ever be the same again.

It was not only that friction over the future of Poland, thrust into the limelight by the Warsaw uprising, highlighted the differences between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Even with the signs of approaching victory–perhaps because of them–the suspicion and hesitations of the Soviets in their treatment of the British and American military missions continued, and all attempts at more effective coordinations of military activities were frustrated.
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These difficulties shed an
interesting light backwards on the military talks conducted by the British and French with the Soviets in Moscow in the summer of 1939; cooperation on military affairs was most definitely not high on the list of Stalin’s priorities. Ironically it was precisely this unwillingness to work out practical arrangements that led to the worst incident in Allied affairs when American planes bombed and strafed a Soviet column believed to be German on November 7, 1944. This tragic event, in which a number of Red Army officers and men were killed, led to the effort to develop a strategic bomb line; but even that attempt never met with Soviet cooperation.
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These sorts of practical difficulties continued until the end of the war; the problem of what to do about liberated prisoners of war, discussed in the next chapter, being added in the final months.

The future of Poland was, furthermore, not the only liberated area at issue between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union. There were differences over the policy to be followed toward Italy not only between Britain and the United States but also with Russia. While the Western Powers took the lead there–when they could reach agreement–the Soviet Union also insisted on a voice and was eventually accorded one.
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The predominance of the Western Powers in Italy has sometimes been cited as a precedent for Soviet control of events in the countries of East and Southeast Europe, but this facile analogy ignores a critical difference. In all the liberated and occupied countries there were Communist Parties. In every area that came under Western control, these parties continued to operate and frequently participated in the government; in Italy, for example, it not only did both of these but remained a major force for decades. The converse was not true in the areas over–run by the Red Army. Precisely because in those states the Communist Parties were minute, the new masters not only put them in charge of the government, army, and police, but quickly pushed out and repressed those movements which represented the bulk of the population (a point which became dramatically obvious in 1989 when the people discovered that their local masters were no longer backed by the Red Army).
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As the Red Army in the fall of 1944 occupied first Romania and then Bulgaria and began to push into Hungary and Yugoslavia, the question of whether or not the people there would be able to influence the composition of the new governments came to the fore. The British and Americans discussed this problem at their meeting in September 1944 at Quebec, a conference Roosevelt and Churchill held in part because
Stalin had refused to meet with them. It was at this second Quebec Conference that the Americans originally agreed to the dispatch of British troops to Greece and, in the hope of maintaining Great Britain’s power into the post-war years, promised an effort to continue aid beyond the defeat of Germany.
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Even before the great offensives of June 1944 in West and East, there had been discussions about the possible switch of Germany’s East European satellites to the Allied side. When these had involved the Western Powers, as in the case of Bulgaria which was at war only with them, the Soviets had been kept informed.
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The converse, however, was not observed: when the Soviet Union began to deal with Romanian diplomats, the Western Powers were not told.
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Concern over the future of the East European countries had led the British to raise the possibility of a sort of “spheres of influence” agreement with the Russians already early in 1944. In May British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky had tentatively agreed that Romania would be in the Soviet and Greece in the British sphere, though it was pretended that the arrangement would hold only for wartime.
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In the face of American doubts, forcefully expressed by President Roosevelt, Churchill went forward with the concept of an agreement with the Soviet Union which, designed in the Prime Minister’s view as a means of restraining the Russians, allocated percentages to the West and the Soviet Union. Proposed by him to Stalin in Moscow in October, the notorious percentage agreement was to have little significance except in two ways.
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It confirmed Soviet willingness to refrain from interfering in Greece, a policy that it took Greek Communists some time to recognize and accept.
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The other effect was to show the Soviet leadership that little serious opposition from the West to the imposition of Soviet control was likely; certainly not the message Churchill had intended to give.