The Second World War (138 page)

On 6 February during the discussions on Poland, Roosevelt tried to act as if he were the honest broker between the British and the Soviets. The eastern border along the Curzon Line had been more or less agreed between the Big Three, but Roosevelt, rather to Churchill’s surprise, appealed to Stalin to allow the Poles to keep the city of Lwów as a generous gesture. Stalin had no intention of doing anything of the sort. It belonged to Ukraine, in his view, and, although Poles within the city were in an absolute majority, ethnic cleansing had already started. He intended to move them all to the eastern parts of Germany with which he proposed to compensate Poland. The citizens of Lwów would eventually be moved en masse to Breslau, which would become Wroc
aw.

Stalin was far more concerned about western proposals for a Polish coalition government based on leaders of all the major parties to supervise free elections. As far as he was concerned, there was already a provisional government in place: the Lublin Poles who had now moved to Warsaw. ‘
We shall allow
in one or two émigrés, for decorative purposes,’ he said to Beria, ‘but no more.’ He had recognized his own puppet government at the beginning of January, to the protests of the British and the United States. The French recognized Stalin’s puppet government, despite de Gaulle’s previous stance in December. The Czechs also recognized it under pressure.

Stalin became agitated during these discussions. After a recess, he
suddenly stood up to speak. He admitted that the Russians had ‘
committed many sins against
the Poles in the past’, but argued that Poland was vital to Soviet security. The Soviet Union had been invaded twice through Poland in the course of the century, and for that reason alone it was necessary that Poland be ‘mighty, free, and independent’. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could fully understand the shock of the German invasion in 1941 and Stalin’s determination to establish a cordon of satellite states so that the Russians would never be surprised again. One could well argue that the origins of the Cold War lay in that traumatic experience.

Stalin’s idea of ‘free’ and ‘independent’ was of course very different to a British or American definition, because he insisted that it should be ‘friendly’. He rejected any involvement in its government by representatives from the government-in-exile, accusing them of stirring up trouble behind Soviet lines. He claimed that members of the Home Army had killed 212 Red Army officers and soldiers, but of course made no mention of the appalling repression carried out by the NKVD against non-Communist Poles. The Home Army, according to his argument, was therefore helping the Germans.

It became clear the following day that any compromises on Poland and the United Nations would be linked. Stalin postponed the subject of the Polish government and thrilled the Americans by agreeing to their voting system for the United Nations. He did not want the Soviet Union to find itself massively outvoted in the general assembly. He therefore got Molotov to argue again that, on the basis that the British had several votes, if one counted the Dominions as likely to side with the mother country, then at least some member states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics should be admitted, especially Ukraine and Belorussia.

Roosevelt was not taken in. Nobody considered them independent of Moscow in any form and it undermined the principle of one country, one vote. To his surprise and irritation, Churchill sided with Stalin. But Roosevelt then conceded the next morning, hoping to get Stalin to commit to declaring war on Japan. Stalin’s own concession on the United Nations, however, had been an attempt to persuade Roosevelt to soften his line on Poland. The three-dimensional game was becoming complicated. It was made even more complicated by disagreements within the American delegation.

When the conference returned to the subject of Poland, Stalin pretended that Roosevelt’s suggestion that delegates from the rival governments should be brought to Yalta was impossible to fulfil. He did not know their addresses and there would not be sufficient time. On the other hand he appeared to offer encouraging concessions by talking of the possible inclusion of non-Communist Poles in the provisional government and the
holding of general elections afterwards. He rejected American suggestions of a presidential council to oversee elections. Both Molotov and Stalin were firm that the Warsaw provisional government would not be replaced, but it could be enlarged.

Churchill presented a powerful response, explaining why there would be deep distrust, if not outrage, in the west at the idea of a government which did not enjoy widespread support in Poland. Stalin replied with unmistakable warning signals to Churchill. He had honoured the agreement over Greece. He had not protested when British troops suppressed Communist partisans in Athens. And he compared the question of rear-area security in Poland to the situation in France, where he had in fact reined in the French Communist Party. In any case, he argued, de Gaulle’s government was no more democratic in composition than the Communist provisional government in Warsaw.

Stalin claimed that the Soviet liberation of Poland and his provisional government had been widely welcomed. This outright lie may have been highly unconvincing, but the message was clear. Poland was his France and Greece, only more so. Greece, as he knew, was the prime minister’s Achilles heel, and Stalin’s arrow was well aimed. Churchill was forced to acknowledge his gratitude for Stalin’s neutrality in Greek affairs. Roosevelt, afraid of losing ground on the United Nations, insisted that the Polish question should be put aside for the moment and discussed by the committee of foreign ministers.

The President agreed to Stalin’s price for entering the war against Japan. In the Far East, the Soviet Union wanted the southern part of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands which Russia had lost after the disastrous war against Japan in 1905. Roosevelt also conceded Soviet control over Mongolia, providing it was kept secret as he had not discussed it with Chiang Kai-shek. This was hardly in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, nor was the American compromise over Poland, announced by Stettinius on 9 February.

Roosevelt did not want to put at risk agreements achieved on his two main priorities, the United Nations and Soviet entry into the war against Japan. He had given up on any hopes of forcing Stalin to accept a democratic government in Poland. All he wanted now was an agreement on a ‘Provisional Government of National Unity’ and ‘free and unfettered elections’ which could be sold to the American people when he returned home. This approach tacitly accepted the Soviets’ demand that their provisional government should form the basis of the new one and by implication cast the London government-in-exile into outer darkness. Molotov, pretending to put forward insignificant changes, wanted to drop terms such as ‘fully representative’, and instead of permitting ‘democratic parties’ to qualify
he wanted that changed to ‘anti-fascist and non-fascist’. Since the Soviet state and the NKVD already defined the Home Army and its supporters as ‘objectively fascist’, this was hardly a pedantic trifle.

Roosevelt dismissed Churchill’s concerns as no more than the interpretation of certain words, but the devil was indeed in the detail, as they would find later. The prime minister would not be put off. Knowing that he could not now win on the composition of the provisional government, he concentrated on the question of free elections and demanded diplomatic observers. Stalin retorted shamelessly that that would be an insult to the Poles.
Roosevelt
felt obliged to support Churchill, but the next morning the Americans, without warning the British, suddenly withdrew their insistence on the monitoring of the elections. Churchill and Eden were left out on a limb. All they could obtain was an agreement that ambassadors should have freedom of movement to report on events in Poland.

Admiral Leahy pointed out to Roosevelt that the words in the agreement were ‘
so elastic that the Russians
can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington, without ever technically breaking it’. Roosevelt answered that he could not do anything more. Stalin was not budging on Poland, whatever anyone said. His troops and security police controlled the country. For what appeared to be the greater good of world peace, Roosevelt was not prepared to stand up to the Soviet dictator. Stalin, disturbed to observe the frail state of the accommodating President, told Beria to provide detailed information on those around him who might play an important role after his death. He wanted every detail available on Vice President Harry Truman. He feared that the succeeding administration would be much less pliable. In fact, when Roosevelt died two months later, Stalin became convinced that Roosevelt had been assassinated. According to Beria, he was furious that the NKGB First Directorate could provide no information on the matter.

One of the last issues to be tackled at Yalta was the question of the repatriation of prisoners of war. With some camps already overrun by the Red Army, the democracies wanted to bring their men home and return the large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and those in Wehrmacht uniform. Neither the British nor the Americans had fully thought through the implications of this agreement. Soviet authorities misled their allies, by insisting that their citizens had been forced into German ranks against their will. They should be separated from German prisoners, treated well and not categorized as prisoners of war. They even accused the Allies of beating up the very prisoners whom they intended to massacre or send to the Gulag as soon as they had them back.

The British and Americans guessed that Stalin wanted revenge on all those Soviet citizens, around a million of them, who had served in
Wehrmacht uniform, or had been forced through starvation to become Hiwis. However, they did not foresee that even those taken prisoner by the Germans would be considered traitors. By the time the Allies discovered the truth about the murder of returned Soviet prisoners, they preferred to remain quiet so as not to delay the return of their own prisoners of war. And finding it impossible to screen their charges effectively to identify the real war criminals, it seemed easier to send the whole lot back, by force if necessary.

Military questions which had opened the conference were among the last to be settled. The Americans wanted Eisenhower to have the right to liaise directly with the Stavka in order to be able to coordinate plans. Although a perfectly sensible plan, this soon proved less than straightforward. General Marshall and his colleagues had failed to understand that no Soviet commander dared do anything which involved contact with a foreigner without having first had permission from Stalin. Marshall had also assumed that a genuine exchange of information would be in the interests of both parties, but again he, like all Americans without direct experience of Soviet practices, failed to understand the Russians’ conviction that the capitalist countries were always trying to trick them, so they must trick them first. Eisenhower was perfectly frank about his intentions and timetable–in fact far too frank and naive in Churchill’s view. The Soviets, on the other hand, deliberately misled Eisenhower on both their plans and timing, when it came to the Berlin operation.

Marshall regarded the clarification of the ‘bombline’, the boundary between western and Soviet zones of operation, as a matter of urgency. US aircraft had already attacked Soviet troops by mistake, thinking they were German. Again he was staggered to find that General Aleksei Antonov, the chief of the general staff, could discuss nothing without first consulting Stalin.

Churchill received little thanks from de Gaulle for having persuaded both Roosevelt and Stalin to allow France to join the Allied Control Commission with its own occupation zones. The French leader was sulking at not having been invited to Yalta, and at the refusal to give France the Rhineland. His mood was not improved when Roosevelt, on his way home, invited him to Algiers to brief him on what had been decided at Yalta. A hyper-sensitive de Gaulle did not appreciate receiving an invitation from an American to visit him on French territory, so he promptly refused. Word then leaked out that Roosevelt had called him a ‘prima donna’, and this further inflamed the situation.

The ‘spirit of Yalta’, a fairy dust which settled on American and British delegates alike, persuaded them that, even if the agreements achieved were far from watertight, Stalin’s overall mood of cooperation
and compromise suggested that peace could be maintained in the post-war world. It would not be long before such optimistic thoughts were upset.

While on the subject of the bombline in Yalta, General Antonov had asked for attacks on communication centres behind German lines on the eastern front. This was to prevent the transfer of German troops from the western front to the east to face the Red Army. It has been argued that ‘
the direct outcome
of that agreement was the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombing’. Yet Antonov never mentioned Dresden.

Even before the Yalta conference, Churchill was keen to impress the Soviets with the destructive power of Bomber Command, at a time when Britain’s armies had been so weakened by manpower shortages. It would also remind them that the strategic bombing campaign had been the initial Second Front, as he had attempted to persuade Stalin on several occasions earlier in the war.