A World at Arms (161 page)

These developments provided a major basis of public support and further impetus for American policy which looked to trials for war criminals after the end of hostilities. The experience with allowing the Germans to conduct such trials after World War I had been very bad;
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there was now no German government. There was no inclination to turn the issue over to neutrals like Spain and Argentina by definition the countries which had refused to join the war against Germany and
there was no indication that any of them was the least bit interested in doing so.
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The Allies would have to do it themselves. The initiative was taken by the Americans who, following the terms of the 1943 Moscow “Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe,” wanted criminals involved in a single area returned for trial there, and an international tribunal for those whose offenses were of a broader geographical nature. Roosevelt had taken a basic summary of the United States position to Yalta, and Truman appointed Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to represent the United States in preparing for such international trials. On the basis of a trip to Europe and plans discussed at the San Francisco Conference, Jackson represented the United States at a special conference held in London from June 26 to August 8, 1945.
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On this subject, the Soviet Union was, in general, closer to the American position than the British government.
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The latter from at least 1943 and into 1945 preferred declaring the top Nazis to be outlaws and summarily shooting them; and they most certainly opposed any Allied tribunal, a position the Cabinet confirmed as late as April 12, 1945.
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The Americans, with their fundamental objection to the bill of attainder concept, an objection growing out of eighteenth–century experience and anchored in the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 9,2, and Section 10, I), were adamant on this subject; and by early May 1945, the British were coming around.
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At the London Conference, agreement was reached on the establishment of an international tribunal and the procedures it would follow. Here was the charter for the Niirnberg trial; and the jail of those sentenced there would become, along with the air control system for Berlin, the last remnant of four–power cooperation in World War II.

The most obvious and striking aspect of the situation in Europe, however, was the general misery. There was destruction and hunger everywhere. Millions had been uprooted from their homes; many could not or believed they could not go back. The new term “Displaced Person” or DP was added to the vocabulary, and the immediate post-hostilities situation such as the expulsions from the German territories administered by Poland and the Soviet Union and from Czechoslovakia added to the numbers. Soon anti-Semitic riots in Poland convinced those Jews who had survived and attempted to return home that this would be impossible for them, so they too streamed into the DP camps in the western zones of occupation.
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The United National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) under Herbert Lehmann had been set up at Roosevelt’s initiative to cope with these problems; it worked hard at the enormous task, but there was enough misery to daunt even as dedicated a humanitarian as the former governor of New York.

These issues in the aftermath of war were all greatly complicated by the shortage of food which, in turn, was in part caused by a shortage of shipping. The end of hostilities meant that much shipping was needed for returning troops home; however, many of them were not going home but toward new battles. The pressing need for shipping was only one reflection of the fact that the war in the Pacific overshadowed the war in Europe in 1945; whether it was the need for ships to redeploy troops or the diplomatic discussions among the Allies, the war in East Asia was a determining factor in everything.

The last stages of the war in East Asia, reviewed in the following chapter, were getting more difficult even as the European War was winding down. The alternation in developments of the first half of the year underlines the pattern. January was the month of the Soviet breakthrough from central Poland into Germany; February was the month of the bitter battle for Iwo Jima; March saw the seizure of the Remagen bridge and other crossings of the Rhine; April, May, and June were the months of the bloodiest fighting of the Pacific War on the island of Okinawa. The Americans were planning to remove the bulk of their forces from Europe quickly, some to be discharged but many for redirection to the Pacific. “Redeployment” was the key word. On May 1, even before the end of hostilities in Europe, the headquarters of the American 1st Army was withdrawn for redeployment; on August 1 it was reactivated in Manila to participate in the 1946 landing in Tokyo Bay. The concern of Eisenhower as well as Roosevelt and Truman over troubles with the Soviet Union in the spring of 1945 cannot be understood without reference to their awareness of the terrible price being paid in the war against Japan, and the anticipation of worse to come when American forces landed in the home islands later that year.

Certainly the Japanese had no plans to quit, and Allied intercepts of Japanese telegrams made this as obvious as the terrible fighting on and around Okinawa. The Japanese Minister in Switzerland, Kase Shunichi, passed on the advice of German officials who urged Japan
not
to follow Germany’s example but to end the war quickly.
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But Tokyo made it as clear as it could that the war would continue. The Japanese would try to take over German warships in East Asia; they would not allow a German government-in-exile to be established; but they would fight on without Germany and avoid recriminations over her violation of the treaty of December 1941 not to make a separate peace.
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As the Allied leaders headed for Potsdam, they looked not only to the problems of a settlement for Europe but a continuing war in East Asia.

The Potsdam Conference of July 17 to August 2 was the longest of the Allied wartime conferences.
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The French did not participate as
both the Soviet and American governments saw no reason to invite them. The weakness of France was a key factor; in Soviet eyes this was a minor Western satellite whose presence would have called for admission of a Soviet satellite, perhaps Poland, which in turn would have caused problems for Britain and the United States. The Americans had no enthusiasm for the French either. Much attention has been paid to Truman’s rough treatment of Soviet Foreign Commissar Molotov when the latter was in Washington on April 23, 1945, without reference to the fact that the new President was an outspoken man who did not pull his punches with anyone, foreign or American, who in his judgement had broken his promises. On May 18 and 21 Truman read the riot act to French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault over the refusal of French forces in Germany to obey orders–a reference to the difficulties over Stuttgart and in northern Italy a short time earlier.
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While France, therefore, was excluded from the Potsdam Conference, many of the agreements reached on the German question would subsequently founder on French opposition. The French government did not feel bound by decisions in which it had not participated, and French vetoes quickly blocked the implementation of those portions of the Potsdam agreements which called for the administrative and economic unity of Germany. The question of Germany, however, was but one of two dominating the conference; the other was the continued war with Japan.

Certainly President Truman went to Potsdam determined both because of the advice of American military leaders and his own inclination to obtain an early entrance of the Soviet Union into the war in the Pacific. He had approved the invasion of Kyushu for November 1 in June and was aware of the large anticipated cost in casualties. Stalin had previously promised to enter the war against Japan, but for Truman, as for Roosevelt, the critical issue was one of timing. All sorts of countries had rushed to declare war on Germany when they would no longer be called on to participate actively. The Soviet Union might well do the same thing in East Asia, and what the Americans as well as the British wanted was a timely entrance of Russia which would tie down the Japanese forces in Manchuria and north China. At a time when the high casualty list of Okinawa was on everyone’s mind in Washington, this was Truman’s key concern.

It is in this context that his great pleasure on learning from Stalin at their first meeting on July 17 that the Soviet Union would enter the Pacific War on August 15 must be understood.
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As he wrote Mrs. Truman on the following day: “I’ve gotten what I came for-Stalin goes to war August 15 ... I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now,
and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That is the important thing.”
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The other major issue, that of Germany, occupied much of the discussion thereafter, but the leaders knew that they would return to the Pacific War at the end of the conference.

The fate of Germany was, naturally enough, the subject of lengthy discussion at Potsdam. President Roosevelt had predicted with considerable accuracy the basic nature of the problems which the Allies faced. He had expressed dislike for “making detailed plans for a country which we do not yet occupy”
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and had repeatedly based this reluctance on the inability to predict “what we and the Allies find when we get into Germany.”
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It had turned out that the Allies found a Germany without government or administration, but with massive destruction, misery, and dislocation. As for what they could do about it, another prediction of Roosevelt’s proved to be correct: “In regard to the Soviet government ... we have to remember that in their occupied territory they will do more or less what they wish. We cannot afford to get into a position of merely recording protests on our part unless there is some chance of some of the protests being heeded.”
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There were three practical issues about Germany facing the Potsdam Conference. One was the establishment of a government machinery, the second was that of borders, and the third reparations. On the first, agreement was reached on an administration which would be directed and controlled by an Allied Control Council, with each zonal commander able to act on his own if no agreement or policy were reached in the ACC. Since the French vetoed the establishment of a common central German administrative apparatus and the four ACC representatives rarely agreed on policy, this really ended up meaning that each zone would go its own way. Dismemberment had been rejected in theory but was put into effect in practice. Certainly the new government the Soviet Union had begun establishing in its zone would not be accepted in the other zones, and the Soviet edict of June 10 authorizing political parties only reinforced the trend toward differing development in the zones.

The border and reparations issues were partially related. Soviet insistence on having the future border between Poland and Germany on the western rather than the eastern Neisse and actually turning that area, along with the rest of eastern Germany (except for northern East Prussia) over to Polish administration had a double impact on the reparations issue. It meant that Germany would have substantially less agricultural land at the same time as there would be more mouths to feed in the western zones–because of the settlement of refugees expelled from areas turned over to Poland. The British and the Americans were still a little reluctant to agree to such enormous territorial and population
transfers, and they argued that there was no way to reconcile such a procedure with reparations from the over–burdened western zones.

The Soviet Union wanted Poland pushed to the western Neisse but also wanted massive reparations; at Potsdam Stalin repeated the demand, for half of a total of twenty billion dollars, which he had voiced at Yalta. The British, who had the zone with the greatest food deficit, insisted on food deliveries from the eastern zone so that the German workers could be fed; the Americans were sure, on the basis of their reading of the post-World War I experience, that they themselves would end up paying for the reparations as they paid to keep the Germans in all three western zones from starving.

The Soviet Union, nevertheless, insisted on heavy reparations, very reasonably arguing that the terrible destruction wrought by the German invasion of their territory should be repaid as much as possible by German labor, German machinery, and German goods; the United States, on the other hand, was reluctant to endorse forced labor and could not see how goods for reparations could be produced by a wrecked economy and hungry people. A compromise, suggested by the new United States Secretary of State James Byrnes, was eventually agreed upon. The Western Allies agreed to Soviet action in transferring the territory east of the Oder and western Neisse to Polish administration while reserving final border settlement to the peace conference. Since they also agreed to the removal, supposedly under humane conditions, of the German population from this area, they had in reality accepted the new border as permanent in fact if not in law: no one was likely to reopen the border issue for any but the most minimal corrections once the German population had been replaced by new Polish settlement.

In return, it was agreed by all that the Soviet Union would satisfy its reparations needs primarily out of
its
zone of occupation and would receive a portion of the industrial facilities from the other zones ruled to be not needed for Germany’s peacetime economy. Part of this would be transferred to the Soviets without any payment–thus fulfilling the Russian demand for 50 percent of all German reparations–while part would be exchanged for food and coal from the Russian zone, so that less of the food deficit in the western zones would have to be made up by the Western Powers.
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In practice, the reparations agreements soon
led to further disputes and eventually a breakdown, but the compromise deal did give the Soviet Union recognition for the border it wanted for Poland and western acceptance of its exactions from its zone of occupation plus some from the western zones. In exchange, the Western Powers had accepted a border change they could not alter anyway and had made theoretical economic concessions the practical scope of which they could themselves control.