A World at Arms (160 page)

Ironically one of the most important issues Truman would be called upon to decide early in his administration was one on which Roosevelt had most reluctantly accepted a British proposal but on which Prime Minister Churchill had now changed his mind half a year after finally obtaining American agreement to his earlier position: the occupation zones in Germany. Roosevelt’s first preference had been to draw no lines at all until the Allies arrived in Germany; his general inclination to deferring choices reinforced by the knowledge that American power was steadily increasing and that a better deal could be made once American troops were in Europe, rather than in the training camps of the American South. When pushed into drawing lines, he had drawn a map which had an American zone in the northwest running to Berlin. It then turned out that the British government had drawn a map with the Americans in the southwest and Berlin deep inside the Soviet zone and obtained quick Soviet agreement to it. As the third preference, Roosevelt had grudgingly accepted this proposal, subject to special access rights and a port enclave (Bremen and Bremerhaven) in the British zone for the Americans. In the course of the fighting of the spring of 1945, American troops had advanced far beyond the zonal borders of the British map in central Germany and also a smaller distance beyond the
line as part of 21st Army Group in the north. Now Churchill wanted the Western Allies, in effect, to hold on to the territory occupied by their armies – Roosevelt’s original first preference–until the Soviet Union made concessions on a number of current matters in dispute.
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On this issue, Churchill not only broke with his own earlier views and the inclinations of Field Marshal Brooke
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but ran into the strongest opposition from the Americans. The earlier commitments to the Soviet Union were clear and in writing and were tied to the entrance of Western troops into Berlin, Vienna, and parts of Austria occupied by the Red Army.
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The idea of running the risk of war with the Soviet Union was “unthinkable” to the British Chiefs of Staff;
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they thought the chances of success “quite impossible;”
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nothing indicates that the American Chiefs thought otherwise. Truman decided against Churchill’s preference that the prior agreement would be adhered to; American forces withdrew from the two-fifths of the Soviet zone they had occupied though after moving out German scientists, records, and other materials–and the zonal and sector issues for Germany and Austria, for Berlin and Vienna, were resolved by June 29 with implementing moves scheduled for July 1–4, 1945.

The entrance of troops of the Western Allies into their sectors of Berlin paved the way for a final meeting of the victorious allies in Potsdam. It was during this meeting that the results of the British election, which removed Churchill as Prime Minister and installed Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labor Party and former Deputy Prime Minister, as head of the British government and delegation, became known. The coalition government which had directed British affairs since May 1940 was ended on May 23, the same day as the arrest of Dönitz and his associates.
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Churchill then headed a Conservative Party caretaker government until the election, held on July 5, but with the results not announced until July 26 so that the ballots of soldiers could be sent in and counted. Those results showed a decisive victory for Labor, primarily because a majority of the people wanted a new government in the post-war world. It had been ten years since the last election in the United Kingdom, and people had bad memories of the Conservative governments of the years after World War I. A Cabinet led by Attlee would direct Great Britain’s effort in what was expected to be at least another year of war.

Churchill had led Britain to victory in Europe from a time of terrifying peril to the largest wartime surrender ever of German soldiers to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. In the last months of his years as Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, he had become increasingly alarmed over the implications in Eastern Europe of Stalin’s insistence
on absolute Soviet control of Poland, as well as other signs of deterioration in the grand alliance which had seemed to have been restored at Yalta. He had tried to retrieve at the last moment some of the concessions to the Soviet Union he had himself wanted made earlier from a sense of Britain’s waning power, in the belief that it made more sense to delimit Soviet expansion by concessions early rather than late. He was greatly perturbed to see that it was now too late–but given the geographic and military realities, it was in any case certain that the Western Allies would move into Europe from the west while the Red Army would come from the east. Nevertheless Churchill still hoped that he could effect some changes in the situation. He also very much wanted to lead Britain to a share of the victory over Japan, which looked much more imminent as a result of the successful atomic bomb test in the interval between the voting and the counting and announcement of the results.

Whatever his differences with the Labor Party on domestic policy, on the subject of nationalization of industry as well as the field of social insurance, he had a huge difference with them on a subject close to his heart: the empire. All during the war, he had fought off pressures and even hints from the Americans on the issue of independence for India and steps toward independence for other colonial possessions. He had literally exploded on the Americans at the least reference to the subject, most recently in a violent outburst at Stettinius during the Yalta Conference. As a result, the Americans had restrained themselves somewhat, though Roosevelt could not refrain from occasionally twitting the Prime Minister.

A major concern of Churchill’s in connection with the war against Japan was his firm belief that British power had to be restored in Burma, Malaya, the British portions of Borneo and Hong Kong. He also strongly favored the full return of the former French and Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia to their previous colonial masters, in opposition to American preference for moving them toward independence. It is true that in Syria and Lebanon Great Britain followed a different line in the spring of 1945 in the face of vehement French opposition, but in this case there were earlier firm promises of independence which the French had made, the British had guaranteed, and the local population absolutely insisted upon. After the small share of the fighting which the French had done in Europe, Churchill was not about to help them in a major campaign to subdue the people of Syria and Lebanon.
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With the exception of an area where there were earlier promises of independence, the old order was to be restored, and the Prime Minister, who kept up with the latest techniques of radar and code-breaking, still
lived in the late nineteenth century whenever the colonial question was discussed. And he knew all too well that on this issue Labor held views of a very different sort: Attlee himself had been on the Simon Commission on the development of self–governing institutions for India, over which Churchill had broken with the Conservative Party and gone into the political wilderness for a decade. And now Attlee was to be Prime Minister. It was a double blow, but as a firm believer in free parliamentary government, Churchill immediately resigned and advised King George VI to have Attlee form a new government. Churchill had in fact taken Attlee along to the Potsdam Conference against that contingency, and after a brief break, when the conference resumed, the new Prime Minister represented Great Britain.

Before the Potsdam Conference, to which Churchill had given the code–name “Terminal,” could meet, there were other matters left over from the hostilities which had ended in early May. The most anxious question secretly examined by the Allies was the discovery that the Germans had developed a series of new types of nerve gases, Tabun, Sarin, and Soman, of which they had had no inkling and for which they knew of no antidotes. The question was whether the Germans had passed on this weapon to the Japanese; when they learned that they had not, the British and Americans-and presumably also the Russians-decided to keep the information secret so that such gases could be used in retaliation against the Japanese should the latter decide to start the use of poison gas themselves.
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It was a long time since the British government had decided to use gas if the Germans were successful in establishing a beachhead on the British coast.

In public, there was a major inter-Allied dispute over the question of Lend-Lease. The Lend-Lease Act and the appropriations for American deliveries under it provided that it was to continue only for the duration of the war. The Americans and British had worked out an agreement for the period following the end of hostilities in Europe, what was referred to as “Second Stage” aid, during the Quebec Conference of October 1944. But the renewal of Lend-Lease in the spring of 1945, at a time when the administration’s relations with Congress were at their worst since 1933, had made emphatically clear that no money could be used after the war ended. There was endless bickering over the delivery of items ordered and in the pipeline but not delivered until after the end of the fighting.

What the Congress clearly wanted to avoid was post-war aid programs for relief and reconstruction under the cover of Lend-Lease; any such programs would have to come under special and separate legislation.
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The head of the Foreign Economic Administration, Leo T. Crowley,
was in favor of a strict interpretation of the law as it affected all of America’s allies. President Truman had himself cast the tie–breaking vote against even more restrictive language on April 10 when still Vice-President; in signing the bill extending Lend-Lease on April 17 as the first law of his administration he was thus naturally very conscious of the tenuous status of the whole Lend-Lease program. It should, therefore, not have surprised any of America’s allies that victory in Europe was quickly followed by dramatic reductions in aid, but both the British and the Russians who equally ignored the text of the relevant American legislation professed to be surprised and even shocked. While the cut-off in supplies not needed for the war against Japan was handled especially poorly in regard to the Soviet Union, the reality remains that American shipments to the Soviets reached their highest level of the war in May 1945.
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The stream of supplies, however, was hardly consistent with a deterioration of American-Soviet relations at a time when Soviet actions in Poland lent weight to those in the American government, such as the ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, and the head of the American military mission there, General John R. Deane, urging a tougher line on the new American President.

Both the Americans and the British felt that they had treated the Soviet Union most generously in providing aid while the Russians believed that, since they had done the bulk of the fighting, they were entitled to all they received and more.
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In this area, as in so many others, it had been a common enemy and a common danger which had held the alliance together and provided an incentive for settling outstanding differences; the defeat of that enemy dissolved the incentive.

In a smaller but equally dramatic way, the confrontation over the Italian-Yugoslav border also demonstrated the dissolving alliance. The race for Trieste, which has already been mentioned, was only the most conspicuous element in a very dangerous situation where British troops (backed by the United States),
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faced Tito’s army, which they had largely armed earlier in the war. In a series of tense confrontations, the danger of new hostilities was narrowly averted. The “Morgan Line,” named after the British commander on the spot, divided British and Yugoslav forces until a peace treaty with Italy settled the border, with Yugoslavia receiving much, but not all, of the territory Tito claimed. The city of Trieste remained the key to the dispute. Its hinterland was heavily Slovene in population, but the city itself had a majority of Italians. Whatever the economics of the situation, a division which ended up by allotting the hinterland to Yugoslavia and the city to Italy may have been the fairest way to cut the baby.

If there were great differences among the Allies, there was one subject
on which there was increasing agreement. During the fighting, reports on Nazi atrocities had led the Allies to announce that those responsible would be held to account. Repeatedly grisly news stories of new outrages had rebuilt interest in this subject, but nothing so placed the horrors committed by the Third Reich in front of the public in the Western allied nations as clearly as the arrival of their troops at concentration and labor camps in 1945. The Red Army had overrun some of the great murder factories earlier, and pictures had been printed in the United States and Great Britain; but somehow these places seemed far away, even if the numbers murdered in them were vastly greater than in the camps in western and central Germany. No one had to convince the Russians of the awful nature of the Nazi regime; now the American and the British peoples received a lesson on the reality of what they had been fighting against that was far more dramatic than the worst reports they had heard or read.

On April 12, 1945, near the town of Gotha in Thuringia, Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton toured Ohrdruf. They saw the gallows, the dead and the still dying, while Signal Corps photographers took pictures which would stun the American public.
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German civilians as well as GIs were instructed to see this camp or others like it; there were literally hundreds of these. In the following days, American and British troops liberated other far larger and later more famous–or notorious–camps: Buchenwald, and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Nordhausen, Mauthausen and, and, and. The whole impact was undoubtedly enormous. In an age when newsreels and magazines like
Life
provided the main visual impressions of events, the pictures of the camps brought reality to the home front the way nothing else had. It was known to some at the time and to more later that these camps were in fact but the tiny tip of a vast iceberg; that there were places where perhaps as many people had been murdered in one day as in the Ohrdruf camp as long as it existed, but the impressions had been made. Here was something quite different from the specific massacres–such as that of American prisoners of war near Malmédy or of British commandos after their capture. Here were the most tangible signs of a general horror in a form the ordinary person could only try to grasp.