The Second World War (147 page)

Just before midnight on 8 May the surrender ceremony in Berlin began in Zhukov’s headquarters at Karlshorst. The Soviet marshal was flanked by Air Chief Marshal Tedder, General Spaatz and General Lattre de Tassigny. Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, Admiral von Friedeburg and Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen Stumpff of the Luftwaffe were brought in. As soon as they had signed, they were led out again. And then the party began. All over the city, gunfire broke out as Red Army officers and soldiers, who had hoarded vodka and almost any form of alcohol for the long-awaited moment, blasted off their remaining ammunition. This victory salute killed a number of people. The women of Berlin, well aware of what the drinking would provoke, trembled with apprehension.

Stalin, afraid of Zhukov’s immense popularity both in the Soviet Union and abroad, began to torment him in minor ways. He blamed him for not having found Hitler, when SMERSh had already confirmed the identity of his corpse. They had found the assistant to Hitler’s dentist and made her examine the bridgework on his jaw. Zhukov did not discover that the body had been found until twenty years later. Stalin also used the deliberate mystery to suggest that Hitler had fled to Bavaria, which was occupied by the Americans. It was part of his campaign to insinuate that the Americans had a secret pact with the Nazis.

The longing for political change in the ranks of the Red Army had made the Soviet leadership very suspicious. Soldiers and officers alike had become outspoken in their criticisms of the Communist system. The Soviet authorities also feared foreign influences, after their soldiers had seen far better living conditions in Germany. SMERSh again referred to the threat of a ‘Decembrist’ mood, a reference to the young officers who returned from Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, recognizing that Russia remained politically primitive. ‘
A merciless fight
is necessary against these attitudes,’ the SMERSh report concluded. Arrests for ‘
systematic anti-Soviet talk
and terroristic intentions’ rose dramatically. In that year of victory, which saw little more than four months of fighting, 135,056 Red Army officers and soldiers and 273 senior officers were arrested for ‘
counter-revolutionary crimes
’. Back in the Soviet Union, informers were at work and NKVD arrests in the early morning had become a re-established pattern.

The population of the Gulag and of forced-labour battalions swelled to its largest level. The new convicts included both civilians and an estimated three million Red Army soldiers, sentenced for having collaborated as Hiwis, or simply for having surrendered. Large numbers of others,
including eleven generals, were executed after brutal interrogations at the screening centres run by SMERSh and the NKVD. Abandoned by incompetent or terrified superiors in 1941, Soviet soldiers had starved in the indescribable horrors of German camps. Now they found themselves treated as ‘traitors of the Motherland’ because they had failed to kill themselves. Those who survived this second round of punishment remained branded for the rest of their lives and restricted to the most menial work. Right up until 1998, well after the fall of Communism, official forms continued to demand details on any member of an applicant’s family who had been a prisoner of war. The bloody revolts which took place in Gulag camps in the years after the war were almost all led by former Red Army officers and men.

The chaos which the Nazis had brought upon the entire continental land-mass was demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons. ‘
On the roads of Germany today
,’ wrote Godfrey Blunden, ‘there is the whole story of Europe, or the world for that matter.’ Millions of forced labourers brought to the Reich from France, Italy, the Low Countries, central Europe, the Balkans and above all the Soviet Union began to make their way home on foot. ‘
An old woman traveller
’, Vasily Grossman noted, ‘is walking away from Berlin, wearing a shawl on her head. She looks exactly as if she were going on a pilgrimage–a pilgrimage amid the expanse of Russia. She is holding an umbrella across her shoulder. A huge aluminium casserole is hung by its ear on the umbrella’s handle.’

Blunden came across a group of young, half-starved American prisoners of war, with ‘xylophone ribs’, sunken cheeks, thin necks and ‘gangling arms’. They were ‘a little hysterical’ from the joy of meeting fellow English-speakers. ‘
Some American prisoners
whom I met this morning seemed to me to be the most pitiful of all I have seen. They had arrived in Europe only last December, gone immediately into the front line and had received the full brunt of the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that month. Since their capture they had been moved almost constantly from one place to another. They told stories of comrades clubbed to death by German guards merely for breaking line to grab sugar beets from fields. They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.’

Among the displaced persons were many prisoners who had become brutalized by their treatment and longed for revenge on the Germans. Roving freely, looting and raping, they spread chaos and fear. Provost-marshals gave orders that justice was to be administered on the spot.
‘
Those identified as murderers
and rapists were summarily shot,’ a British soldier recorded. Yet German civilians who came to the occupation authorities to complain about the theft of food by forced labourers received little sympathy. Only a tiny minority had shown any compassion towards them when the Nazis had been in power.

For Churchill, in this immediate post-war period, the problem of Poland loomed above almost everything else. The prime minister’s failure to attend Roosevelt’s funeral had surprised and shocked people on both sides of the Atlantic. There can be little doubt that however much he vaunted their friendship later, Roosevelt’s appeasement of Stalin had gravely disappointed him. Churchill was initially encouraged that Harry Truman, the new President, seemed ready to take a much more robust line with Stalin, mainly as a result of Averell Harriman’s advice.

Roosevelt’s abrupt announcement at Yalta that he intended to withdraw American forces from Europe as soon as possible had alarmed Churchill. Britain alone was far too weak to resist both the strength of the Red Army and the threat of local Communists profiting from a devastated Europe. He was horrified by reports of Soviet revenge and repression behind what he already called the ‘iron curtain’: unfortunately, a term already used by Goebbels.

Within a week of Germany’s surrender, Churchill summoned his chiefs of staff. He astonished them by asking whether it might be possible to force the Red Army back in order to secure ‘a square deal for Poland’. This offensive, he told them, should take place on 1 July, before the military strength of the Allies on the western front was reduced by demobilization or the transfer of formations to the Far East.

Although the contingency planning for Operation Unthinkable was conducted in great secrecy, one of Beria’s moles in Whitehall passed details to Moscow. The most explosive was an instruction to Montgomery to gather up surrendered German weaponry, in case Wehrmacht units were reconstituted to take part in this mad enterprise. The Soviets, not surprisingly, felt that all their worst suspicions had been confirmed.

The planners studied the scenario in great detail, although it had to be based largely on speculation. They totally misread the reaction of British troops, thinking that they would follow such an order. That was most unlikely. The vast majority of British troops were longing to get home. And after all they had heard of the colossal Soviet sacrifice, which had spared them so many casualties, they would have greeted the suggestion of turning against their ally with incredulity and anger. The planning staff also made the unlikely assumption that the Americans would be prepared to join in.

Fortunately, the main conclusions of their report were quite clear. It was a very ‘hazardous’ project, and even if the Red Army were forced to withdraw after initial successes, the conflict would be long and costly. ‘
The idea is of course
fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible,’ Field Marshal Brooke wrote in his diary. ‘There is no doubt that from now onwards Russia is all powerful in Europe.’ ‘The result of this study’, he added later, ‘made it clear that the best we could hope for was to drive the Russians back to about the same line the Germans had reached. And then what? Were we to remain mobilized indefinitely to hold them there?’ The Second World War in Europe had begun in Europe over Poland, and the notion of a third world war following the same pattern represented a terrifying symmetry.

On 31 May, Brooke, Portal and Cunningham ‘
again discussed the
“unthinkable war” against Russia… and became more convinced than ever that it is “unthinkable”’. They were unanimous when they reported back to Churchill. Truman proved equally unreceptive to the notion of pushing the Red Army back as a bargaining counter. He was not even prepared to keep American forces in those areas of Germany and Czechoslovakia which were due to be handed over to the Soviets as stipulated by the European Advisory Commission. Truman had suddenly swung back to a more accommodating approach to the Soviet Union as a result of listening to Joseph Davies, a former US ambassador in Moscow and ardent admirer of Stalin. Davies had sat through the show trials of the 1930s and seen nothing suspicious about the grotesque confessions beaten out of the accused.

The prime minister had to accept defeat, but he soon came back to the chiefs of staff and asked them to study plans for the defence of the British Isles in the event of a Soviet occupation of the Low Countries and France. By this time he was exhausted by campaigning for the general election, and became increasingly irrational. He even warned of a Gestapo under a future Labour government. Voting took place on 5 July, but because of the need to collect the ballot papers of the armed forces from all round the world, the results would not be known until three weeks later. As well as the problems of Poland, Churchill was also vexed by General de Gaulle’s rash decision to send troops to Syria, where the reimposition of French colonial rule was being resisted. De Gaulle was going through a paroxysm of anglophobia and anti-Americanism at this stage, much to the distress of Georges Bidault, his foreign minister. De Gaulle still resented the failure of the Big Three to include him at Yalta, and he knew he was about to be ignored again at the forthcoming meeting in Potsdam.

Truman, on the advice of Joseph Davies, decided that only a more friendly approach to Stalin could resolve matters. Harry Hopkins, whom
the Soviets trusted more than most westerners, was despatched to Moscow to arrange ‘
a new Yalta
’. Although gravely ill, Hopkins accepted, and as a result of several meetings with Stalin at the end of May and the beginning of June, the discord over the constitution of the Polish government was settled on Stalin’s terms.

The problem of Poland henceforth became the embarrassing one of quietly dropping a brave ally, unavoidably sacrificed on the altar of real-politik. ‘
In a few days
,’ Brooke wrote in his diary on 2 July, ‘we shall be recognizing the Warsaw government officially and liquidating the London one. The Polish forces then present a serious conundrum which the Foreign Office has done little to solve in spite of repeated applications for a ruling ever since May!’ He wondered next day ‘how the Polish forces will take it’. He had recently spoken with General Anders, before he returned to the Polish Corps in Italy. Anders made it clear to Brooke that he wanted to fight his way back to Poland if the opportunity arose.

On 5 July both the United States and Britain recognized the puppet government, which had agreed to include several non-Communist Poles. The sixteen arrested by the NKVD, however, were still to face trial on the trumped-up charge of killing 200 Red Army soldiers. And in a shameful gesture of appeasement to Stalin, the next British government decided to exclude Polish forces from the victory parade.

On 16 July, the day before the Potsdam conference began, Truman and Churchill met for the first time. Truman was cordial but guarded, after Davies had warned him that Churchill would still seek to involve him in a war with the Soviet Union. Stalin arrived in Berlin that day from Moscow in his special train. More than 19,000 NKVD troops were allocated by Beria to guard his route, and seven NKVD regiments and 900 bodyguards to provide
security in Potsdam
. Special security precautions were taken on the line through Poland. Stalin drove from the station with Zhukov to his accommodation in the former house of General Ludendorff. Everything had been exactingly prepared by the newly promoted Marshal Beria.

Later in the day Truman received the signal: ‘Babies satisfactorily born’. The test explosion of the atomic bomb in the desert near Los Alamos had been carried out at 05.30 hours. Churchill, when told, was exultant after being forced to acknowledge that Unthinkable was out of the question. Field Marshal Brooke was ‘
completely shattered
by the Prime Minister’s outlook’, and the way that he ‘was completely carried away’ by the discovery. In Churchill’s view, ‘It was now no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war, the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter.’ He did not seem to grasp the fact that, after all the American requests to Stalin to enter the war against Japan, they could
not now disinvite him, having promised him such rich pickings in the Far East.

Brooke then recounted what was closest to the prime minister’s heart, paraphrasing his words. ‘Furthermore we now had something in our hands which would redress that balance with the Russians! The secret of this explosive, and the power to use it, would completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium which was adrift since the defeat of Germany. Now we had a new value which redressed our position–(pushing his chin out and scowling)–now we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Kharkov, Sebastopol etc etc.’