Beginning perhaps in 1943, as Allied fortunes improved, the American government became more critical of Britain. As victory and a peace settlement drew nearer, the U.S. desire to dissolve European colonial empires came more to the fore. So did the question of which governments to restore in liberated Europe; Secretary Hull claimed the British “attitude is probably dictated by their desire to protect … monarchial institutions.” They proposed to crown kings, he said, while the United States cast its vote for establishing republics.
“Winston and I will write the Peace Treaty,” FDR had said; but as the United States increased its contribution to the war effort, American leaders began to ask why Britain should have an equal voice in deciding the fate of postwar Europe. “We are going to pay for it,” said Treasury Secretary Morgenthau. “The English are going to be busted.… I think it had better be Franklin Roosevelt, without Winston, [who] writes the peace treaty.…”
FDR told his Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1943 that political motives lay behind a whole range of British proposals and initiatives, from elevating France to great-power status, to overall strategy in the Mediterranean and in the Southeast Asia campaign, to planning for the postwar Balkans. He warned against allowing England to get the United States “roped into accepting any European spheres of influence.” For while Roosevelt did not want Churchill to take control of part of Europe by agreement with Stalin, neither did he want him to set up a bloc in Europe against Stalin—to oppose the USSR—which might lead to a new war.
WHEN GERMANY INVADED the Soviet Union and the Western democracies offered aid, Stalin’s first demand was for recognition of his country’s 1941 frontiers: the ones set by agreement with Hitler. Churchill came to believe he should consent, but Roosevelt was adamantly opposed. On the specific issues, he refused to concede that the Baltic republics or a large chunk of Poland should belong to Russia; in general, he was opposed to a redrawing of frontiers until the war was won. Sumner Welles told the British Foreign Office that its proposed appeasement of Stalin would be another Munich.
Churchill was afraid Russia might negotiate a separate peace if her demands were not met. Stalin linked his territorial claims to his insistence that America and Britain invade France to open up a second front in the European war against Germany: he insisted on having either one or the other.
In the spring of 1942 Roosevelt told Soviet foreign minister Molotov that he looked forward to establishing a new world order after the war, based on cooperation of the great powers. He said that he envisaged the Soviet Union as one of the policemen of the postwar world. Along with the United States and Britain—and perhaps China—they would be the only countries allowed to have arms. The others would be demilitarized. Moreover, the colonial empires of the European powers would be taken away and entrusted to the three or four great powers.
This did not satisfy Molotov, who wanted to occupy countries next door rather than in Africa or the Pacific, and who repeatedly asked for an assurance that a second front would be opened in 1942.
Roosevelt decided that if he could meet Stalin personally—and preferably alone—he could convince him to put aside his territorial demands for the duration of the war. He persuaded himself that it was not merely the State Department but also the British who stood in the way of reaching an agreement. “I know you will not mind my being brutally frank,” he wrote Churchill in 1942, “when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better and I hope he will continue to do so.”
A report from army intelligence claimed that Russians “do not understand our altruism” in sending lend-lease supplies and “fail completely to cooperate with us”—interestingly enough, because of British interference. The report warned of a possible new Nazi-Soviet deal arising from Russian distrust of the West caused by British behavior.
* See this page.
† He seems to have believed that de Gaulle held royalist sympathies and intended, if victorious, to place the Comte de Paris on the throne. But his true motives, his background, and the question of whether he was acting on the prompting of others remain subjects of debate.
‡ Churchill (a de Gaulle supporter at least at first) and the British Foreign Office were being generous in helping de Gaulle pretend that he incarnated France and therefore that France had not surrendered in 1940. It was a conscious act of mythmaking on their part. They wanted France to keep her pride so that she could become a great nation again. This (though France often had been a rival and even an enemy) was in Britain’s enlightened self-interest; and American officials took a cynical view of the British government’s motives in backing de Gaulle.
§ Though, in Roosevelt’s view, de Gaulle now spent his time making trouble for the Allies rather than making war against the Germans.
‖ The Declaration of the United Nations was signed in Washington on January 1, 1942.
a But Marshall was right to worry that, as in the First World War, the American army might be ready to launch its attack too late.
52
THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR
AS HE WAS SO OFTEN, Bullitt was the first: in this case, the first within the government to focus on the Russian threat. Working out of the Navy Department, where he was supplied with special projects from time to time to keep him busy, he bombarded the President in the middle of the war with long memorandums warning that this was the time for a showdown with the Soviet Union. “You have your power now,” he wrote, but “you will lose it the day Germany collapses. Wilson could have written his own ticket before the Armistice of 1918. You may be able to write yours—now.”
He was wrong on both counts. At no point after the United States entered the First World War was Wilson able to obtain Allied agreement to America’s proposed war goals; the President proclaimed the Fourteen Points unilaterally precisely because he knew Britain and France would not accept them.
As for the Soviet Union: even in the first days of the German invasion, when survival for more than a few weeks seemed unlikely, Moscow clung to its claims on the Baltic republics and Poland. Stalin could not be coerced into agreeing to FDR’s postwar plans for these areas; if he had promised to do so, it is a fair guess that once his armies were in control of the situation, he would not have kept his word.
In a memo dated January 29, 1943, Bullitt ridiculed the prevailing view that Stalin had changed his beliefs, and the Soviet government its nature. Russia’s expansionism, he wrote, was like that of an amoeba. “He moves where opposition is weak. He stops where opposition is strong. He puts out pseudopodia like an amoeba.… If the pseudopodia meet no obstacle, the Soviet Union flows on.”
Attacking what really was FDR’s plan, but ascribing it to the British, Bullitt argued that instead of disarming the continent of Europe after the war, the United States should organize a united, integrated, and rearmed Europe that would stand in the way of Soviet expansion.
It should be carrot and stick, wrote Bullitt. FDR should arrange a face-to-face meeting with Stalin and offer him aid and credits in rebuilding the devastated Soviet Union in return for cooperation. But what if Stalin said no?
For one lucid moment before darkness descended on Bullitt’s mind, he saw all the way through to the core and essence of it: the Red Army was going to keep whatever territory it won. What that meant—though many Americans would not recognize or accept it, either at the time or later—was that the only way to prevent Soviet domination of central and eastern Europe was for the U.S. Army to liberate those areas from Nazi Germany before the Russians could get there.
So Bullitt proposed to change America’s war strategy in order to get there first. He wrote that the United States could do it “if we make our attack on the Axis not by way of France and Italy but by way of Salonika and Constantinople.” Of course, he knew that American doctrine required that strategy be adopted for military rather than political purposes. But he argued that his id
ea of attacking through Greece and Turkey was every bit as sound from a military point of view as that of attacking via Italy and France. “And if military considerations are equal, the strategic plan that promises political success is to be preferred to the strategic plan that promises political disaster.”
There is no evidence that Bullitt’s memorandums were considered seriously. Marshall never wavered in his belief that, to the extent possible, all forces should be concentrated on a cross-Channel invasion of France.
Bullitt coupled his strategic proposals with notions for cleaning out and streamlining the State Department. His purpose in suggesting changes at State was transparent: he was back to what was both his obsession and his undoing. He had the ever-faithful Carmel Offie distribute documents all over Capitol Hill describing Sumner Welles’s homosexual escapades—to which he himself added details of what he claimed were indiscretions on the part of Mrs. Welles that compromised national security.
After a terminally bitter argument with Hull, Welles was fired in 1943, bringing his career in the government to an end—and Bullitt’s. FDR would have nothing further to do with the ambassador who once had amused him.
Bullitt went around Washington pouring out to others his dark prophecies as to what the Soviet Union would do. Britain’s ambassador in Washington and former foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, reported in 1943 that he had found Bullitt “very anti-Russian. He thinks we and his own Government are completely blind to the kind of thing he anticipates Stalin will want to do. As he sees it he will seek to dominate and control all Central and South-Eastern European Governments … and one of these days we shall all wake up to find Russia a great menace to our free democracies. I told him that this was not the impression gathered by those who had had to do with Stalin, but this naturally made no impression on him. He is a strange fellow, and I don’t think judgment is his strongest quality.”
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1943 Harriman was sent out to Moscow as U.S. ambassador. He had graduated with Bullitt in the Yale class of ’13, was to serve in the post first held by Bullitt, and was assisted by the stars of Bullitt’s original staff, first Charles Bohlen, and then George Kennan. Like Bullitt, Harriman urged dangling the prospect of postwar credits in front of Stalin to secure his cooperation. And like Bullitt, though for different reasons, Harriman was unable to get through directly to the President. In Harriman’s case it was because his conduit, the ailing Harry Hopkins, had lost his place in the President’s full confidence—for reasons as vague as those that led Wilson to break with House.
From 1943 on, the President was alone in shaping America’s grand strategy for war and peace. In the past he had talked over these issues with Hopkins and Welles. Now he had nobody.
FDR became the solitary master of the White House map room, where developments on all fronts could be followed on detailed maps. The room served as intelligence headquarters at the highest level; on its military channels FDR communicated directly with Churchill, Stalin, and others and reached agreements. There and there alone were to be found the files of messages and transcriptions of telephone conversations that spelled out America’s commitments to and from her allies.
So secret was the map room that even the secretary of state—Hull—knew nothing of it.
THERE WERE VAST QUANTITIES of new data about the Soviet Union that the President had to assimilate in adjusting his policies to a fast-moving and confusing situation.
One item: Stalin, who had a secret atomic bomb program of his own, had learned (as Roosevelt and Churchill found out) of the Anglo-American partnership in developing an atomic bomb.
Another: Churchill had new evidence, which he forwarded to Roosevelt in the summer of 1943, of Stalin’s wickedness: it transpired that the 10,000 or 15,000 Polish officers killed at Katyn Wood in 1940 in order to destroy the nation’s elite had been killed not by the Germans, but by the Russians.
FDR’s request that the combined Joint Chiefs plan for U.S. and British troops to race to Berlin before the Russians shows that he believed that military operations might be conducted with political objectives in mind. But for whatever reason he continued to object to Churchill’s attempts to bargain with Stalin, and he persistently deplored British proposals to campaign in the Balkans and the Mediterranean as politically motivated.
Roosevelt could not help but be impressed by the disproportionate contribution the Soviet Union was making to the war against Hitler. Some 80 percent of Germany’s forces were engaged by Russia. The destruction wrought by the Nazi invaders was on a scale that challenged the imagination. Describing Soviet losses for the whole of the war, an American historian has written: “German invaders had destroyed over 1,700 cities and towns and more than 70,000 villages and hamlets. They demolished more than six million buildings and over 31,000 industrial enterprises. They wrecked 61 of the largest power stations, 1,100 coal pits, and more than 3,000 oil wells. They dismantled 40,000 miles of railroad track, blew up 56,000 miles of main road, and ruined 90,000 bridges. The Germans ransacked the countryside, destroying tens of thousands of collective farms and machine and tractor stations. They stole and slaughtered 17 million head of cattle, 20 million hogs, 27 million sheep and goats, 110 million poultry, and 7 million horses. More than 20 million Soviet lives were lost in the war.…” More recent estimates have put the number of Soviet dead at upwards of 25 million. This compares with 400,000 battle deaths suffered by the United States in the Second World War against Japan, Germany, and Italy.
More to the point as far as inter-Allied politics was concerned, at Stalingrad in 1943 the Red Army had won the victory that proved to be the turning point in the war. By mid-1944, when the United States and Britain now planned to invade France, the Russians were going to be poised to march into Poland. Never was the realism of Stalin made more clear. From the beginning he had said that America and Britain had to choose one or the other: either they landed in Normandy in 1942 or 1943, or else they accepted the Soviet frontiers he claimed in eastern Europe; for his armies would get to such countries as Poland and Romania first. (Of course, he may have been lying. He might have taken central and eastern Europe even if the Western powers had invaded France in 1942 or 1943.)
The situation confronting FDR as he planned a face-to-face meeting with Stalin and Churchill at Teheran at the end of 1943 was like that encountered by Wilson at Paris in 1919. Roosevelt had lived through that episode and knew it well. In the First World War the United States had been too late; France was in a position to claim that she had won the war, and therefore was able to impose her own peace terms. In the Second World War, the United States was too late again: D day should have been in 1942 or 1943 if America were to stand a chance of freeing central and eastern Europe. Yet that might not have been possible. A U.S. invasion of France in 1942 or 1943 might well have been defeated.
Now Stalin would take half of Europe and do as he chose with it. Roosevelt, who had a kind of pride in power just as he had pride of birth, was drawn away from Churchill and toward Stalin by the disappointing performance of Britain’s ground forces in various campaigns and the extraordinary accomplishments of Russia’s.
Roosevelt nonetheless made an effort to persuade the Soviet dictator to modify his goals. At the end of 1943 FDR had his long-awaited chance to meet privately (at first) with Stalin at the Teheran conference. Differences were papered over, but Stalin would not budge; he would keep his 1941 frontiers, including the Baltic republics and a section of Poland. It was Roosevelt who backed down.
The President now treated Churchill as only a minor partner. Ickes recorded in his diary that “the Roosevelt-Stalin axis is gaining strength and the Roosevelt-Churchill axis is losing strength in about equal ratio.” Apparently imagining that Stalin was opposed to empires, FDR spoke to him of dismantling Britain’s—and may have been surprised by the communist leader’s response: that “because of the British military contribution, the Soviet government considers that there should be no reduction in the British Empire, but on the contrary it
should if necessary be increased by turning over to Great Britain on the basis of trusteeship certain bases and strong-points throughout the world.”
Or perhaps Roosevelt was not surprised, for there were times when he was ruthlessly realistic. On returning from Teheran in January 1944, FDR told Otto, heir to the Hapsburg throne, that he “had told the Russians they could take over and control completely as their sphere—so completely that the United States could from this moment on have no further policies with regard to them”—not only the Baltic countries and eastern Poland, but Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria.
A COINCIDENCE that had consequences was that Bullitt had been placed in the Navy Department. The position created for him was special assistant to the secretary. The undersecretary, James Forrestal, was repelled but also fascinated by communism, and was in search of some way to understand it. He fell (Forrestal’s most recent biographers tell us) under Bullitt’s influence.
Forrestal agreed entirely that the Soviet Union was expansionist and dangerous. From Bullitt he derived the key perception that communism was a kind of religion. It apparently was new to him—though John Maynard Keynes had made the point in a well-known essay in 1925—and it struck a responsive chord in one whose central inner conflict was the attempt to escape his religion.
Forrestal began to take a serious interest in the reports of Ambassador Harriman, whose views were similar to Bullitt’s though not identical to them. Harriman seemed more inclined to believe the United States could do business with the Soviets—but only by being tough with them, not friendly and generous.
The picture painted by Bullitt was darker. He saw communism as relentlessly expansionist—and Forrestal was inclined to share that vision, too. In their emerging view, the Soviet Union had stopped being an ally and was about to become an enemy. Forrestal was to become a leader of the American crusade against world communism.
In the Time of the Americans Page 61
