The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Hollywood pitched in too. Though it had once scrupulously avoided making films about the Soviet Union, in July 1942, at least nine movies about the Soviet Union were in production or under consideration by such major studios as MGM, Columbia, United Artists, Twentieth Century–Fox, and Paramount.56 Five significant motion pictures eventually appeared: Mission to Moscow, North Star, Song of Russia, Three Russian Girls, and Days of Glory.

  A consensus was building that without the second front the war could not be won. After acknowledging that “the Russians have done most of the fighting and most of the dying,” the Atlanta Constitution contended that though a second front would bring tragedy to many American homes, it “must . . . be done if the war is to be won.” Leland Stowe reminded readers that the Soviet Union could not hold out alone forever: “In 13 months the Russians have suffered more than 4,500,000 in killed, wounded, and prisoners . . . probably six or seven times Great Britain’s losses in nearly three years of war . . . 20 times the total American casualties in the first World War.”57 He stressed that “Soviet Russia is the one great power which is indispensable as an ally of the United States—if we are going to win the war. . . . If Russia’s fighting millions were suddenly removed from the scene, they alone would be irreplaceable.”58

  American observers took special notice of the “heroic” struggle to repel the Nazi invaders by both the Red Army and Soviet civilians. Here a group of women and elderly men dig a trap to halt the German advance on Moscow.

  A group of distraught women in Kiev, Ukraine, gather during a Nazi attack.

  Frightened children look up from a bunker in Kiev during a German air raid

  Red Army soldiers in the Soviet Union

  With the steady barrage of pro-Soviet and pro–second front coverage, the American public rallied to the cause. In July 1942, Gallup reported that 48 percent of Americans wanted the United States and Great Britain to attack immediately, while only 34 percent wanted to wait until the Allies were stronger.59 Americans pasted bumper stickers reading “Second Front Now” on their cars. Readers flooded newspapers with letters calling for an immediate attack on Hitler’s forces in Europe. Among the many published by the Washington Post, one, inspired by the “spectacle of a courageous ally who alone has withstood and forced back the Nazi hordes,” demanded that Great Britain and the United States “divide the forces of Hitler by opening a western front and together with our Russian ally crush this menace to world freedom and civilization.”60

  Support was building in all directions. Thirty-eight leaders of the CIO told Roosevelt that “only immediate land invasion of Western Europe will guarantee winning the war.”61 Five days later the organization hosted a pro–second front rally in New York City’s Madison Square Park.62 Several AFL affiliates lent their support. Elected officials jumped on the bandwagon, including Senators James Mead of New York and Claude Pepper of Florida, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and New York State Representative Vito Marcantonio.63 In September, author Dashiell Hammett released the names of five hundred writers who, under the banner of the League of American Writers, declared themselves “enthusiastically behind President Roosevelt for the immediate opening of a second front now.”64 Twenty-five thousand people rallied in New York’s Union Square as Representative Marcantonio and Communist Party head Earl Browder addressed the crowd.65 The 1940 Republican Party presidential candidate Wendell Willkie added his endorsement following a meeting in Moscow with Stalin.66

  But despite the public demand for a second front in Europe, U.S. and British troops headed off to North Africa. Left to its own devices, the resurgent Red Army reversed the course of the war, vanquishing the Nazis at Stalingrad. More than a million soldiers were engaged on each side. The Germans, under General Friedrich Paulus, were pushing to take control of the Soviet Union’s rich oil fields in the Caucasus. The Soviets, under Marshall Georgi Zhukov, were determined to stop them at all costs. The six-month battle was fierce, the human toll horrific. Casualties exceeded three-quarters of a million on each side, and civilian deaths totaled over 40,000. After that colossal defeat, the German army began a full-scale retreat from the eastern front. Hitler, stunned by the surrender of twenty-three generals and the Sixth Army’s 91,000 troops, lamented, “The God of War has gone over to the other side.”67

  Echoing Americans across the country, twenty-five thousand rallied in New York’s Union Square on September 24, 1942, to demand that the United States open a second front in the war in Western Europe to relieve some of the tremendous pressure on Russia in its fight against Germany.

  By the time Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca in January 1943, the momentum had shifted. The Red Army was on the offensive and moving west. Roosevelt’s strategy of resisting Soviet territorial demands by substituting massive aid and an early second front had foundered. The Americans and the British would henceforth be on the defensive in trying to deny Stalin’s gains. To make matters worse, Roosevelt and Churchill decided to land in Sicily, again postponing the second front and relegating their nations to further irrelevance in determining the outcome of the war.

  The Red Army continued its advance, but at an enormous cost. In November 1943, Stalin commemorated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution with a speech celebrating the survival and future resurgence of the Soviet state. He decried the Nazis’ murder and pillage and promised revenge against the German invaders: “In the districts they seized, the Germans have exterminated hundreds of thousands of our citizens. Like the Medieval barbarians of Attila’s hordes, the German fiends trample the fields, burn down villages and towns, and demolish industrial enterprises and cultural institutions. . . . Our people will not forgive the German fiends for these crimes.”68

  The U.S. president and the Soviet premier met for the first time in Tehran in November 1943. Roosevelt had told Churchill in March 1942, “I can personally handle Stalin better than either 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.”69 After trying unsuccessfully to exclude Churchill from the meeting, Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s offer to stay in the Soviet Embassy. Roosevelt had indicated informally beforehand that he was open to establishing the Curzon Line as Poland’s eastern border. Despite these gestures, he found Stalin cold and aloof during the first three days of meetings and feared he would not succeed in developing the rapport he hoped for. He decided to try to reach Stalin on a more human level, employing the kind of charm and humor that would allow him to create a personal bond—the trademark of Rooseveltian diplomacy. He explained to Labor Secretary Francis Perkins:

  I thought it over all night and made up my mind I had to do something desperate. . . . I had a feeling that the Russians did not feel right about seeing [Winston and me] conferring together in a language which we understood and they didn’t. On my way to the conference room that morning we caught up with Winston and I had just a moment to say to him, “Winston, I hope you won’t be sore at me for what I am going to do.” Winston just shifted his cigar and grunted. . . . I began almost as soon as we got into the conference room. I talked privately with Stalin. I didn’t say anything that I hadn’t said before, but it appeared quite chummy and confidential, enough so that the other Russians joined us to listen. Still no smile. Then I said, lifting my hand up to cover a whisper (which of course had to be interpreted) “Winston is cranky this morning, he got up on the wrong side of the bed.” A vague smile passed over Stalin’s eyes, and I decided I was on the right track. As soon as I sat down at the conference table, I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits. It began to register with Stalin. Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him “Uncle Joe.” He would have thought me fresh the day before, but that da
y he laughed and came over and shook my hand. From that time on our relations were personal, and Stalin himself indulged in an occasional witticism. The ice was broken and we talked like men and brothers.70

  Roosevelt made important headway at Tehran. The United States and Great Britain promised to open the long-delayed second front the following spring. Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan once Germany had been crushed. Roosevelt acceded to the Soviet-desired territorial changes in Eastern Europe, requesting that Stalin implement them judiciously and not offend world opinion. He also proposed that the Soviets hold plebiscites in the Baltic states, but Stalin rejected that request. Roosevelt indicated that he would allow the Soviets considerable latitude in shaping those countries’ future. He came away from the conference encouraged that the trust he had established with Stalin would moderate the Soviet leader’s demands and convince him to hold free elections in Eastern Europe that would produce governments friendly to the USSR.

  The Red Army advanced into Poland in January 1944. That month, Stimson discussed Poland’s future with Secretary Hull, who thought it essential to establish the principal of “no acquisition by force.” Stimson recounted, “I thought we had to consider other things more realistic than that, such as the feelings which would actuate Russia: (a) that she had saved us from losing the war; (b) that she prior to 1914 had owned the whole of Poland including Warsaw and running as far as Germany and that she was not asking for restitution of that.”71

  The Soviet Union quickly set up a friendly government in Lublin, Poland, that excluded representatives of the exile government in London. Later that year, the Red Army moved into Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. When the United States and Great Britain complained that they were only allowed a token role in the occupation, Stalin replied that the Soviet Union had been given only a token role in the occupation of Italy.

  Finally, on June 6, 1944, the long-awaited second front was opened one and a half years later than promised. Over 100,000 Allied troops and 30,000 vehicles landed on the beach at Normandy, France. Nine thousand died during the landing. By that point, the Soviets, despite having suffered catastrophic casualties, were occupying much of Central Europe. Now the Allied forces would approach Germany from both the east and the west. Victory would soon be at hand.

  Up to that point, the Soviet Union had almost singlehandedly battled the German military. Until the invasion of Normandy, the Red Army was regularly engaging more than two hundred enemy divisions while the Americans and British together rarely confronted more than ten. Churchill admitted that it was “the Russian Army that tore the guts out of the German military machine.” Germany lost over 6 million men on the eastern front and approximately 1 million on the western front and in the Mediterranean.72

  As the fighting intensified on the battlefield, the pace of planning picked up in the boardrooms. The United States invited friendly governments to Bretton Woods in New Hampshire to design the postwar capitalist economic order. Conferees approved U.S. plans to establish two major economic institutions: the development-minded World Bank, with initial funding of $7.6 billion, and the finance-minded International Monetary Fund, with $7.3 billion. The United States, which controlled two-thirds of the world’s gold, insisted that the Bretton Woods system rest on both gold and the U.S. dollar, ensuring that U.S. economic hegemony would continue for the foreseeable future and the United States would be banker to the world. Soviet representatives attended the conference but later declined to ratify the final agreements, charging that the institutions they had created were “branches of Wall Street.”73 A Soviet official commented that “at first sight,” the Bretton Woods institutions “looked like a tasty mushroom, but on examination they turned out to be a poisonous toadstool.”74 The British understood that the new order would further erode their special sphere. Although Churchill had fulminated in late 1942, “I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” the balance of power had irrevocably shifted.75

  Some people have questioned the sincerity of Roosevelt’s anticolonial efforts during the war, and although he was certainly never the passionate crusader against colonialism that Vice President Wallace was, he did repeatedly express outrage at the colonizers’ unjust and inhumane treatment of subject populations. Elliott Roosevelt reported his father’s stern words to an “apoplectic” Churchill in 1941. “I can’t believe,” he said, “that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.” He pressed Churchill to end Britain’s rule in India and beyond.76 During a press conference in February 1944, Roosevelt publicly excoriated British colonial rule in Gambia in West Africa, which he had visited the previous year. “It’s the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life,” he declared. “The natives are five thousand years back of us. . . . The British have been there for two hundred years—for every dollar that the British have put into Gambia, they have taken out ten. It’s just plain exploitation of those people.”77

  Roosevelt spoke repeatedly about a postwar trusteeship system that would prepare the colonies for independence. One of the initial beneficiaries would be Indochina, which he insisted not be given back to the French after the war, as Churchill and Charles de Gaulle demanded it be. “Indo-China should not go back to France,” he told Secretary of State Cordell Hull in October 1944. “France has had the country—thirty million inhabitants—for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. . . . The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better than that.”78 Churchill feared that Roosevelt would use Indochina as a wedge to force full-scale decolonization. Churchill made it clear that he would not contemplate such a possibility. He told Eden in late 1944, “There must be no question of our being hustled or seduced into declarations affecting British sovereignty in any of the Dominions or Colonies. . . . ‘Hands off the British Empire’ is our maxim, and it must not be weakened or smirched to please sob-stuff merchants at home or foreigners of any hue.” Despite having Stalin’s support for his decolonization efforts, Roosevelt backed off from aggressively pressing the point out of fear of rupturing the wartime alliance with Great Britain. With even less justification and more tragic consequences in the long run, he even backed off from decisively pressing the point on Indochina. However, in what turned out to be his last press conference, on April 5 in Warms Springs, Georgia, exactly one week before his death, Roosevelt, accompanied by Philippine President Sergio Osmeña, promised that once Japanese troops had been ousted from the Philippines, the United States would grant the Filipinos “immediate” independence.79 Churchill did withstand U.S. pressure to grant India its independence after the war, but even that victory would prove ephemeral as the Indian people took matters into their own hands.

  Although the world of formal empires and closed trading spheres would not vanish overnight, the U.S. economic juggernaut would brook no rivals from among the war-shattered economies of Europe and Asia. And undergirding the newly strengthened dollar would be the enormous power of the U.S. military. Roosevelt allowed his military advisors to play a central role in policy making. In early 1942, he created the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In July, he appointed Admiral William Leahy to be his personal chief of staff and liaison to the Joint Chiefs. He also leaned heavily on Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall for advice.

  The War Department required an imposing new home that would come to symbolize its new role and the United States’ vast military power. In the summer of 1941, the War Department’s 24,000 civilian and military employees were operating out of seventeen different buildings. Brigadier General Brehon Burke Somervell informed Stimson that having everyone under the same roof would increase their efficiency by 25 to 40 percent.80 Construction on a new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, began on September 11, 1941. The builders kept the five-sided shape that had been chosen to fit the original site even though the location had been switched. The fi
rst occupants began moving in April 1942, although construction wasn’t completed until January of the following year. The man in charge of this massive construction project—Colonel Leslie Groves—would later make an even greater mark on the war effort. When finished, the largely windowless Pentagon was the biggest office building in the country, covering 29 acres and containing 17.5 miles of corridors. Visitors routinely got lost, and deliverymen were rumored to have wandered the halls for three days before being rescued.81

  Halfway around the globe, Churchill and Stalin met in Moscow in October 1944. The meeting was code-named Tolstoy. Churchill hoped to resolve the impasse over Poland. U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averill Harriman tagged along as an “observer” but was not present when the two leaders conducted the most important business. Sitting in front of a fireplace in the Kremlin, Churchill cracked some of his favorite Polish jokes. The two leaders then set about defining British and Soviet spheres of influence in the Balkans and laying the groundwork for Western recognition of Soviet interests in Poland. On the back of a scrap of paper, Churchill proposed the share of influence each nation would exert: the Soviet Union would get 90 percent in Romania and 75 percent in Hungary and Bulgaria; Great Britain would get 90 percent in Greece. Yugoslavia would be split fifty-fifty. Stalin took the paper, paused, and made a large check with a blue pencil before handing it back to Churchill, who commented, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.” But Stalin urged Churchill to hold on to the historic scrap of paper, which Churchill called a “naughty document.”82