I was deeply disturbed by this news, which was to prove a pattern of things to come, but we were hampered in our protests because Eden and I during our October visit to Moscow had recognised that Russia should have a largely predominant voice in Roumania and Bulgaria while we took the lead in Greece. Stalin had kept very strictly to this understanding during the six weeks’ fighting against the Communists and E.L.A.S. in the city of Athens, in spite of the fact that all this was most disagreeable to him and those around him. Peace had now been restored, and, though many difficulties lay before us, I hoped that in a few months we should be able to hold free, unfettered elections, preferably under British, American, and Russian supervision, and that thereafter a constitution and Government would be erected on the indisputable will of the Greek people.
But in the two Black Sea Balkan countries Stalin was now pursuing the opposite course, and one which was absolutely contrary to all democratic ideas. He had subscribed on paper to the principles of Yalta, and now they were being trampled down in Roumania. But if I pressed him too much he might say, “I did not interfere with your action in Greece; why do you not give me the same latitude in Roumania?” Neither side would convince the other, and having regard to my personal relations with Stalin, I was sure it would be a mistake to embark on such an argument. I nevertheless felt we should tell him of our distress at the forceful installation of a Communist minority Government. I was particularly afraid it might lead to an indiscriminate purge of anti-Communist Roumanians, who would be accused of Fascism much on the lines of what had been happening in Bulgaria.
Meanwhile, the deadlock over Poland continued. All through March I was engaged in tense correspondence with Mr. Roosevelt, but although I had no exact information about his state of health I had the feeling that, except for occasional flashes of courage and insight, the telegrams he was sending us were not his own. The Soviet policy became daily more plain, as also did the use they were making of their unbridled and unobserved control of Poland. They asked that Poland should be represented at the forthcoming United Nations Conference at San Francisco only by the Lublin Government. When the Western Powers would not agree the Soviets refused to let Molotov attend. This threatened to make all progress at San Francisco, and even the Conference itself, impossible. Molotov persisted that the Yalta communiqué merely meant adding a few other Poles to the existing Administration of Russian puppets, and that these puppets should be consulted first. He maintained his right to veto Mikolajczyk and any other Poles we might suggest, and pretended he had insufficient information about the names we had put forward long before. It was as plain as a pikestaff that his tactics were to drag the business out while the Lublin Committee consolidated their power. Negotiations by our Ambassadors held no promise of an honest Polish settlement. They merely meant that our communications would be side-tracked and time would be wasted on finding formulæ which did not decide vital points.
I was sure that the only way to stop Molotov was to send Stalin a personal message, and I therefore appealed to the President in the hope that we could address Stalin jointly on the highest level. A lengthy correspondence followed between us, but at this critical time Roosevelt’s health and strength had faded. In my long telegrams I thought I was talking to my trusted friend and colleague as I had done all these years. I was no longer being fully heard by him. I did not know how ill he was, or I might have felt it cruel to press him. The President’s devoted aides were anxious to keep their knowledge of his condition within the narrowest circle, and various hands drafted in combination the answers which were sent in his name. To these, as his life ebbed, Roosevelt could only give general guidance and approval. This was an heroic effort. The tendency of the State Department was naturally to avoid bringing matters to a head while the President was physically so frail and to leave the burden on the Ambassadors in Moscow. Harry Hopkins, who might have given personal help, was himself seriously ailing, and frequently absent or uninvited. These were costly weeks for all.
All this time a far more bitter and important interchange was taking place between the British and American Governments and the Soviets on a very different issue. The advance of the Soviet armies, Alexander’s victories in Italy, the failure of their counter-stroke in the Ardennes, and Eisenhower’s march to the Rhine had convinced all but Hitler and his closest followers that surrender was imminent and unavoidable. The question was, surrender to whom? Germany could no longer make war on two fronts. Peace with the Soviets was evidently impossible. The rulers of Germany were too familiar with totalitarian oppression to invite its importation from the East. There remained the Allies in the West. Might it not be possible, they argued, to make a bargain with Great Britain and the United States? If a truce could be made in the West they could concentrate their troops against the Soviet advance. Hitler alone was obstinate. The Third Reich was finished and he would die with it. But several of his followers tried to make secret approaches to the English-speaking Allies. All these proposals were of course rejected. Our terms were unconditional surrender on all fronts. At the same time our commanders in the field were always fully authorised to accept purely military capitulations of the enemy forces which opposed them, and an attempt to arrange this while we were fighting on the Rhine led to a harsh exchange between the Russians and the President, whom I supported.
In February General Karl Wolff, the commander of the S.S. in Italy, had got into touch through Italian intermediaries with the American Intelligence Service in Switzerland. It was decided to examine the credentials of the persons involved, and the link was given the code-name “Crossword”. On March 8 General Wolff himself appeared at Zürich, and met Mr. Allen Dulles, the head of the American organisation. Wolff was bluntly told that there was no question of negotiations, and that if the matter were pursued it could only be on the basis of unconditional surrender. This information was speedily conveyed to Allied Headquarters in Italy and to the American, British, and Soviet Governments. On March 15 the British and American Chiefs of Staff at Caserta arrived in Switzerland in disguise, and four days later, on March 19, a second exploratory meeting was held with General Wolff.
I realised at once that the Soviet Government might be suspicious of a separate military surrender in the South, which would enable our armies to advance against reduced opposition to Vienna and beyond, or indeed towards the Elbe or Berlin. Moreover, as all our fronts round Germany were part of the whole Allied war the Russians would naturally be affected by anything done on any one of them. If any contacts were made with the enemy, formal or informal, they ought to be told in good time. This rule was scrupulously followed. On March 12 the British Ambassador in Moscow had informed the Soviet Government of this link with the German emissaries, and said that no contact would be made until we received the Russian reply. There was at no stage any question of concealing anything from the Russians. The Allied representatives then in Switzerland even explored ways of smuggling a Russian officer in to join them if the Soviet Government wished to send someone. This however proved impractical, and on March 13 the Russians were informed that if “Crossword” proved to be of serious import we would welcome their representatives at Alexander’s headquarters. Three days later Molotov informed the British Ambassador in Moscow that the Soviet Government found the attitude of the British Government “entirely inexplicable and incomprehensible in denying facilities to the Russians to send the representative to Berne”. A similar communication was passed to the American Ambassador.
On the 21st our Ambassador in Moscow was instructed to inform the Soviet Government yet again that the only object of the meetings was to make sure that the Germans had authority to negotiate a military surrender and to invite Russian delegates to Allied headquarters at Caserta. This he did. Next day Molotov handed him a written reply, which contained the following expressions:
“In Berne for two weeks, behind the backs of the Soviet Union, which is bearing the brunt of the war against Germany, negotiations have been going on between the represe
ntatives of the German military command on the one hand and representatives of the English and American commands on the other.”
Sir Archibald Clark Kerr naturally explained that the Soviets had misunderstood what had occurred and that these “negotiations” were no more than an attempt to test the credentials and authority of General Wolff. Molotov’s comment was blunt and insulting. “In this instance,” he wrote, “the Soviet Government sees not a misunderstanding but something worse.” He attacked the Americans just as bitterly.
In the face of so astonishing a charge it seemed to me that silence was better than a contest in abuse, but at the same time it was necessary to warn our military commanders in the West. I accordingly showed Molotov’s insulting letter both to Montgomery and to Eisenhower, with whom I at this time was watching the crossing of the Rhine.
General Eisenhower was much upset, and seemed deeply stirred with anger at what he considered most unjust and unfounded charges about our good faith. He said that as a military commander he would accept the unconditional surrender of any body of enemy troops on his front, from a company to the entire Army, that he regarded this as a purely military matter, and that he had full authority to accept such a surrender without asking anybody’s opinion. If however political matters arose he would immediately consult the Governments. He feared that if the Russians were brought into a possible surrender of Kesselring’s forces what could be settled by himself in an hour might be prolonged for three or four weeks, with heavy losses to our troops. He made it clear that he would insist upon all the troops under the officer making the surrender laying down their arms and standing still until they received further orders, so that there would be no chance of their being transferred across Germany to withstand the Russians. At the same time he would advance through these surrendered troops as fast as possible to the East.
I thought myself that these matters should be left to his discretion, and that the Governments should only intervene if any political issues arose. I did not see why we should break our hearts if, owing to a mass surrender in the West, we got to the Elbe, or even farther, before Stalin. Jock Colville reminds me that I said to him that evening, “I hardly like to consider dismembering Germany until my doubts about Russia’s intentions have been cleared away.”
On April 5 I received from the President the startling text of his interchanges with Stalin:
“You are absolutely right”, wrote Stalin, “that, in connection with the affair regarding negotiations of the Anglo-American command with the German command, somewhere in Berne or some other place, ‘has developed an atmosphere of fear and distrust deserving regrets’.
“You insist that there have been no negotiations yet. It may be assumed that you have not yet been fully informed.… My military colleagues do not have any doubts that the negotiations have taken place, and that they have ended in an agreement with the Germans, on the basis of which the German commander on the Western Front, Marshal Kesselring, has agreed to open the front and permit the Anglo-American troops to advance to the east, and the Anglo-Americans have promised in return to ease for the Germans the peace terms.
“As a result of this at the present moment the Germans on the Western Front in fact have ceased the war against England and the United States. At the same time the Germans continue the war with Russia, the Ally of England and the United States.…”
This accusation angered the President deeply. His strength did not allow him to draft his own reply. General Marshall framed the answer, with Roosevelt’s approval. It certainly did not lack vigour.
“… With a confidence in your belief in my personal reliability,” he retorted, “and in my determination to bring about together with you an unconditional surrender of the Nazis, it is astonishing that a belief seems to have reached the Soviet Government that I have entered into an agreement with the enemy without first obtaining your full agreement. Finally I would say this: it would be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of the victory now within our grasp such distrust, such lack of faith, should prejudice the entire undertaking after the colossal losses of life, material, and treasure involved.
“Frankly, I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”
I was deeply struck by this last sentence, which I print in italics. I felt that although Mr. Roosevelt did not draft the whole message he might well have added this final stroke himself. It looked like an addition or summing up, and it seemed like Roosevelt himself in anger.
I wrote at once to him and to Stalin and a few days later got the semblance of an apology from the Russian dictator. “I would minimise the general Soviet problem as much as possible,” the President cabled to me on April 12, “because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out, as in the case of the Berne meeting. We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.”
President Roosevelt died suddenly that afternoon on Thursday, April 12, 1945, at Warm Springs, Georgia. He was sixty-three. While he was having his portrait painted, he suddenly collapsed, and died a few hours later without regaining consciousness. When I received these tidings early in the morning of Friday, the 13th, I felt as if I had been struck a physical blow. My relations with this shining personality had played so large a part in the long, terrible years we had worked together. Now they had come to an end, and I was overpowered by a sense of deep and irreparable loss. I went down to the House of Commons, which met at eleven o’clock, and in a few sentences proposed that we should pay our respects to the memory of our great friend by immediately adjourning. This unprecedented step on the occasion of the death of the head of a foreign State was in accordance with the unanimous wish of the Members, who filed slowly out of the chamber after a sitting which had lasted only eight minutes.
My first impulse was to fly over to the funeral, and I had already ordered an aeroplane. Lord Halifax telegraphed that both Hopkins and Stettinius were much moved by my thought of possibly coming over, and both warmly agreed with my judgment of the immense effect for good that would be produced. Mr. Truman had asked him to say how greatly he would personally value the opportunity of meeting me as early as possible. His idea was that after the funeral I might have had two or three days’ talk with him.
Much pressure was however put on me not to leave the country at this most critical and difficult moment, and I yielded to the wishes of my friends. In the after-light I regret that I did not adopt the new President’s suggestion. I had never met him, and I feel that there were many points on which personal talks would have been of the greatest value, especially if they had been spread over several days and were not hurried or formalised. It seemed to me extraordinary, especially during the last few months, that Roosevelt had not made his deputy and potential successor thoroughly acquainted with the whole story and brought him into the decisions which were being taken. This proved of grave disadvantage to our affairs. There is no comparison between reading about events afterwards and living through them from hour to hour. In Mr. Eden I had a colleague who knew everything and could at any moment take over the entire direction, although I was myself in good health and full activity. But the Vice-President of the United States steps at a bound from a position where he has little information and less power into supreme authority. How could Mr. Truman know and weigh the issues at stake at this climax of the war? Everything that we have learnt about him since shows him to be a resolute and fearless man, capable of taking the greatest decisions. In these early months his position was one of extreme difficulty, and did not enable him to bring his outstanding qualities fully into action.
Mr. Truman’s first political act which concerned us was to take up the Polish question from the point where it stood when Roosevelt died, only forty-eight hours earlier. He proposed a joint declaration by us both to Stalin. The document in which this was set forth must of course have
been far advanced in preparation by the State Department at the moment when the new President succeeded. Nevertheless it is remarkable that he felt able so promptly to commit himself to it amid the formalities of assuming office and the funeral of his predecessor.
He admitted that Stalin’s attitude was not very hopeful, but felt we should “have another go,” and he accordingly proposed telling Stalin that our Ambassadors in Moscow had agreed without question to the three leaders of the Warsaw Government being invited to Moscow for consultation and assuring him we had never denied they would play a prominent part in forming the new Provisional Government of National Unity. Our Ambassadors were not demanding the right to invite an unlimited number of Poles from abroad and from within Poland. The real issue was whether the Warsaw Government could veto individual candidates for consultation, and in our opinion the Yalta agreement did not entitle them to do so.
Our joint message was sent on the 15th. Meanwhile M. Mikolajczyk confirmed that he accepted the Crimea decision on Poland, including the establishment of Poland’s eastern frontier on the Curzon Line, and I so informed Stalin. As I got no answer it may be assumed that the Dictator was for the moment content. Other points were open. Mr. Eden telegraphed from Washington that he and Stettinius agreed that we should renew our demand for the entry of observers into Poland, and that we should once more press the Soviet Government to hold up their negotiations for a treaty with the Lublin Poles. But shortly after deciding this news arrived that the treaty had been concluded.
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