In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Commissioned a major in the infantry, he served from the summer of 1944 as aide to the commanding general of the French First Army, which invaded the Riviera coast and drove north along the Rhône and then on to Alsace and the Rhine. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel, awarded the Croix de Guerre, and admitted to the Legion of Honor. On Bastille Day 1945 Bullitt was among the French officers who drove up the Champs-Élysées leading the victory parade, taking the salute from de Gaulle in the reviewing stand.

  IN RETROSPECT, 1945 was a time of things and people and jobs coming to an end. The expected face was not behind the desk in the familiar office. Hull, very ill, and tired of not being consulted or even informed about the President’s foreign policy, resigned. He and Welles no longer headed the State Department. Stettinius, the former lend-lease chief, now was secretary of state, and Grew was undersecretary. Frank Knox had died in April 1944, and Forrestal had become secretary of the navy.

  In the depths of winter the President unwillingly voyaged to and from Yalta in the Crimea for what was to prove the last of his wartime conferences with Stalin and Churchill. On doctor’s orders he had lost weight—thirty-five pounds—and he looked frighteningly ill. But this was a meeting that he had to attend.

  The concerns that drove the President to make his final journey were so much creatures of that fleeting moment that only a year or two later, political colleagues and military advisers would forget why he went and what he accomplished there.

  Roosevelt journeyed to Yalta because General Marshall strongly urged him to get Stalin’s confirmation that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan and would do so within ninety days after Germany surrendered.* The chief of staff told the President that getting such a commitment was absolutely essential. The United States expected to lose at least hundreds of thousands of troops in invading the Japanese islands. Japanese plans called for a defending force of 3 million to meet the invaders on the beaches. Marshall believed that a Soviet attack pinning down a million Japanese troops in Manchuria would be indispensable. A MacArthur spokesman told journalists that “we must not invade Japan proper unless the Russian army is previously committed to action”; the general used such strong language along the same lines in appealing to Washington that the Joint Chiefs finally urged Roosevelt in effect to give Stalin whatever he asked in return for coming into the Far Eastern war.

  That the Russians would ask for something in return was taken for granted. “They simply cannot understand giving without taking,” remarked Marshall’s representative in Moscow, General John Deane. Harriman was able to give Roosevelt some idea in advance of what Stalin would ask.

  FDR’s triumph at the Yalta Conference (February 4–11, 1945) was that he won the very promise his generals told him they needed so much from Stalin: Russia would attack Japan—and in return for doing so, would have the Kuril Islands, the half of Sakhalin Island occupied by Japan, and concessions in northern China. Since the Soviet decision to declare war on Japan had to be kept a secret from the Japanese until it happened, the entire agreement had to remain secret.

  From Wilson administration days, warning bells should have sounded in some part of Roosevelt’s brain. He knew that the American public deplored secret deals, especially those promising territorial acquisitions to allies: it was the very point that he had made to Churchill in framing the Atlantic Charter in 1941. And he was aware of the uproar that would be caused when it became known that he had made pledges to Russia at China’s expense. Wilson had been most vulnerable on the issue of concessions to Japan in China’s Shantung province.

  Yet what else could he do? If his generals were right, he was saving perhaps as many as a million American lives. Unfortunately for Roosevelt’s reputation for statesmanship, Marshall, MacArthur, and his other generals were not right. They were as wrong as they had been when they estimated that Nazi Germany would defeat Soviet Russia in a few weeks, or as Marshall had been when he warned that Britain probably would fall in 1940 or when he told journalists in November 1941 that the American fleet had been sent to Pearl Harbor because then it would be safely “out of range of Japanese air power.”† At Yalta, Roosevelt was misled not by Stalin or Molotov, but by Marshall, MacArthur, and the American Joint Chiefs.

  Harriman was among the first to suspect—and then, only after the conference at Yalta had concluded—that the Soviet government actually wanted to enter the Far East war. The Japanese were on their last legs; they were nearing collapse. In attacking them Stalin rightly expected relatively easy pickings. For whatever reason, Marshall and his American military colleagues—MacArthur included—seem to have had no inkling of this. Even with the use of the A-bomb, they expected the rest of the Japanese war to be hard fought.

  But their mistake did not matter all that much; in the end, the secret concessions made to the Soviet Union in Asia had no significant effect on world politics.

  THERE WERE 700 MEMBERS of the Anglo-American delegations at Yalta. Many of them were interested in technical or detailed matters that were of little interest to the President. A question of great moment to them, and to the Congress and the American public, was the number of votes each country should have in the proposed United Nations Organization. FDR seems to have regarded the issue as unimportant; in his conception, all decisions would be made by unanimous agreement of the United States, Russia, and Britain (with France and China), so that the voting would be something of a charade. If seven countries were of one opinion, and forty-four were of the other opinion, the seven would win—if they included the Big Five. Therefore, the President cared little whether the Soviet Union was awarded one vote or, as Stalin asked, three. Yet the question excited the American electorate.

  So the UN question was discussed, voting rights included; some further agreements were reached on the structure of a postwar peacekeeping organization. But the drafting of the charter of the organization, and negotiation of the many details and questions that would have to be resolved, were postponed until a conference could convene dedicated solely to the creation of the United Nations. That conference was to take place in San Francisco in the spring of 1945.

  The future of Germany also was discussed. Roosevelt always had taken the European view that the Reich was too powerful. Wilson’s program had been to change Germany; FDR’s, to break her into little pieces. Though generally known in American government circles as the “Morgenthau plan,” it was at least as much Roosevelt’s as Morgenthau’s, and it had been the program of the Big Three throughout the war. It called for changing Germany from an industrial to a pastoral society. It also called for splitting her up into several disarmed units. Into how many segments to divide up the country—and along which lines—had been the subject of lively discussion at the Teheran conference.

  Below the level of the President, however, the American government had never thought of Germany’s future in such terms. Stimson blamed the Second World War on the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty, and proposed this time to be generous. His War Department and Hull’s State Department always had been opposed to dismemberment. They had used delaying tactics with considerable success. In the autumn of 1944 details of the Morgenthau plan were leaked to the press, and the resulting furor led Roosevelt to back off from sponsoring it.

  The future of Germany was the question the Big Three had to resolve if they were to make peace. At Yalta, Stalin pressed for a definite and detailed dismemberment decision, but Churchill argued for not deciding how to cut up Germany until expert studies had been made; at FDR’s suggestion it was agreed to postpone the map-making for thirty days. Whatever his motive may have been at the time, Churchill told his private secretary a month later that “he hardly liked to consider dismembering Germany until his doubts about Russia’s intentions had been cleared away.” For, of course, if Russia had become an enemy, German power would be needed to counterbalance her; and if so, 1945 had stopped being postwar and had started to become what might well be prewar.

  THOUGH IT WAS NOT HIS MA
IN PURPOSE in undergoing the hardship of the voyage to Yalta,‡ politics drove FDR to try to bring his two wayward allies back into line. In liberated Europe, Great Britain seemed to be crusading for monarchy and Soviet Russia for communism, while the United States understood it to be a war for democracy.

  American public opinion was deeply disturbed by the actions of the British army in Greece. English troops were installing a royalist regime by force in a battle against pro-Ally guerrilla forces. Churchill said the guerrillas were communist-inspired, but at the time Americans did not believe it.

  Meanwhile, the Soviet takeover of Poland threatened FDR with the loss of the major Polish-American voting bloc, and he worried that the public as a whole would be so disgusted by the spectacle of rival British and Russian imperialisms that it would once again turn away from participation in international affairs.

  Before leaving for Europe, FDR had told congressional leaders that “the Russians had the power in Eastern Europe, that it was obviously impossible to have a break with them and that, therefore, the only practicable course was to use what influence we had to ameliorate the situation.” So he understood his chances were not very good, but also that he had to try his best.

  Most of the time at the Yalta Conference was spent disagreeing about Poland. Underneath the words spoken by the participants, it really was a discussion of Soviet expansion into all the surrounding territories in Europe. Stalin made no secret of his determination to guide the futures of the neighboring countries that his armies had occupied or were about to occupy.

  FDR knew that he could not prevent Soviet expansion. That could only be done by force of arms, and neither he nor the American people were in a mood to provoke a war with Russia. Moreover, as soon as Germany collapsed, the President would need to pull his armies out of Europe in order to send them to war against Japan.

  All that could be done was to occupy as much of Europe as possible before the Red Army did, but Roosevelt, in the American tradition, left such decisions to his generals—to be made on military grounds. It was for Eisenhower to choose whether to try to race the Russians to Berlin—and rather than take tens of thousands of casualties and at least some risk of an armed clash with the Red Army, Ike cautiously opted not to make the attempt. Events justified his decision: the United States received her agreed sector of Berlin to administer, without losing the 100,000 lives it would have taken to fight through to the German capital to win it on her own.

  Without wanting it, FDR was confronted with a spheres-of-influence peace settlement, for the Soviet armies were carving out a sphere of their own in neighboring Europe in which the Kremlin’s word was law. At the same time, they were leaving western Europe, Italy, and Greece to Britain and America as their sphere, to do with as they chose. It was a de facto partition of Europe.

  FDR did not merely not want the Soviet Union to have its own sphere (in Stalin’s sense) in Europe; he did not want the United States to have one, either. For one thing it would mean garrisoning Europe with American troops, and Roosevelt knew the public wanted the boys brought home as soon as possible.

  Then there were the endless involvements in foreign feuds and disputes to which a protectorate in Europe would lead. A year earlier, confronted with a British plan for an American zone of occupation in western Europe, FDR wrote Churchill: “I am absolutely unwilling to police France and possibly Italy and the Balkans as well. After all, France is your baby and will take a lot of nursing in order to bring it to the point of walking alone.” He wrote him again saying, “ ‘Do please don’t’ ask me to keep any American forces in France. I just cannot do it!… I denounce and protest the paternity of Belgium, France and Italy. You really ought to bring up and discipline your own children. In view of the fact that they may be your bulwark in future days, you should at least pay for their schooling now.”

  THE TALKS WITH STALIN about a new government for Poland were an effort by Roosevelt and Churchill to work out some rules of conduct to which the Soviet government would pledge itself in administering the European countries that were about to come within its sphere. It was the most they could hope to accomplish in the circumstances.

  It could be argued that such a statement of principles might conceivably have imposed some restraint on Russian behavior, and it certainly would help FDR win support from the Congress, the press, and the public. Stalin duly signed the document: a Declaration on Liberated Europe. It was an imprecise agreement, left open to diverse interpretations—and as Roosevelt had told Stalin he needed it for domestic political reasons, Stalin may have assumed that all members of the U.S. delegation recognized that the declaration was being issued only for cosmetic purposes. FDR apart, the others in fact took it more or less seriously, and in months and years to come Americans were to blame either Stalin for breaking his word or Roosevelt for taking it.

  About at least this one thing critics of FDR at Yalta were wrong: he was not defrauded by the declaration. Even if it turned out to be a piece of paper worth not little, but nothing, the President had not been outbargained, for he had given nothing for it. And since he was getting it, so to speak, free of charge, why not take it?

  George Kennan, then little known and not listened to, an officer of the American embassy in Moscow, believed the United States should be honest about the hard, unpleasant facts FDR was obliged to recognize at Yalta. He argued that the government should openly admit that the Soviet army had conquered half of Europe and was likely to hold on to it; that within its sphere, the Kremlin would do unilaterally whatever it chose; that there was nothing in the realm of practical politics that America could do about it; and that in consequence Europe had been partitioned into two spheres, one Soviet and one Western. Kennan was right; that was the truth about Yalta.

  But it was not FDR’s way to tell the public the truth if it was unpalatable.

  ROOSEVELT HAD INSISTED that James Byrnes accompany him to Yalta. Byrnes managed all domestic policy for the President and argued that he should not leave Washington. Perhaps he was flattered by the invitation, or maybe he felt obliged to obey orders. For whatever reason, he went along with FDR.

  Twice in a row, in 1940 and 1944, Byrnes’s old friend Roosevelt had manipulated him, putting him up for Vice President and then arranging for someone to knock him down. It could be argued that by making such a point of the need for his presence on the world stage at Yalta, FDR was trying to make things up to him. Byrnes himself professed to be mystified. Thirteen years later he wrote: “Why the President insisted on my going I still do not know.” But by then he really did know the reason: FDR was setting him up to be used once again.

  The President managed the Yalta schedule in such a way that Byrnes attended only those sessions in which events occurred that FDR wanted the Congress and the public to know about, such as Stalin’s promises of democracy in eastern Europe. Everybody knew of Byrnes’s pride in his shorthand; he took notes and returned to Washington early, with the authoritative record on paper (of which he was also very proud) of what had happened.

  As the first one back, and the custodian of a written record, Byrnes provided the initial authoritative account of the Yalta Conference to political Washington. FDR was known to be slippery, but Byrnes was trusted; his glowing account of what had been accomplished helped gain enthusiastic acceptance of the accords.

  The President himself returned from the Crimea only slowly—and painfully. Bullitt’s man Carmel Offie saw Roosevelt aboard ship on the return voyage and remembered later that “he looked ghastly, sort of dead and dug up.” The President’s personal aide, Pa Watson, was under an oxygen tent and died on the way home. Harry Hopkins was carried off in a stretcher, to be nursed back to sufficient strength so that he could be flown back to the Mayo Clinic. A friend of Roosevelt’s from college days was shocked by what he saw when he came aboard: “This is a ship of death,” he said.

  Roosevelt returned to the United States and told the Congress and the public the opposite of the truth about the Crimean con
ference—which is what they wanted to hear. The Yalta settlement, he reported, “ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.” In fact it was a spheres-of-influence agreement. The President may have believed that if he did not call it that, the public might learn to live with it.

  But the President in the end could not hold things together, and his last few weeks after returning from Yalta were a time of disintegration. At a preliminary San Francisco conference to plan the United Nations, news came out of Stalin’s claim to have extra votes. “This will raise hell,” wrote Senator Vandenberg, one of the delegates, in his diary on March 23. “We began to get some of the inside ‘bad news’ from Yalta today. It is typical of the baffling secrecy which leaves one eternally uncertain of what deals have been made.”

  On April 3 Vandenberg wrote: “There is a general disposition to stop this Stalin appeasement. It has to stop sometime.” The President himself allowed it to be understood that he was troubled by Soviet behavior. Stettinius, who reflected his views, had told the War and Navy secretaries on March 13: “A most successful meeting at Yalta, particularly … as regards Russian-American relationship. Every evidence … of the Russian desire to cooperate along all lines with U.S.…” But on April 2 he told Forrestal and Stimson “of serious deterioration in our relations with Russia.”

  Forrestal copied page after page of Harriman’s cables into his diary. (From Moscow: “I cannot list the almost daily affronts and total disregard which the Soviets evince in matters of interest to us.”) Harriman suggested that Stalin and Molotov might believe they had been given the green light to do as they wished in Poland because of FDR’s willingness to accept the loose language of the declaration issued at Yalta. It was only by being tough, Harriman reiterated, that the United States could do business with the Stalin regime.