p>Fortieth anniversaries are in vogue, none more so than those celebrating the end of World War II. That war was won, against the unsurpassed valor and organizing skill of the Germans and the suicidal courage of the Japanese, by the collective strength of the British empire, which fought the longest, of the Soviet Union, which suffered the most, and of the United States, which fought doggedly on two fronts while at the same time supplying the essential needs of its allies. These were the three powers that won the war: it was the Soviets who won the peace.
The Soviet triumph was in large part due to the folly of American policy in the last, vital months of the fighting; and that folly stemmed from what Winston Churchill called “the deadly hiatus” between President Roosevelt’s losing his grip and President Truman’s imposing his. It occurred at precisely the most inopportune time. Eighteen days before Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, on April 30, 1945, President Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia, while having his portrait painted. He had been weakening fast and for several weeks before his death, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George C. Marshall, a soldier rather than a politician, was effectively in control of American policy.
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, had only been Vice President since the election in November 1944. During the intervening months he had been granted the privilege of seeing the President twice. He was pitchforked into a political and military maelstrom without having been informed, let alone consulted, about matters increasing in urgency and complexity day by day, indeed almost hour by hour. As Churchill put it, “The indispensable political direction was lacking at the moment when it was most needed.”
The background of the relationship among the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union is, of course, relevant to this tragedy. In November 1943, at the Teheran Conference of the Big Three and their numerous satellites, the Americans began to misread the directions on the signpost. The British were well aware that victory over the Axis depended on the latent power of the United States which had only recently shifted into high gear after years of isolationism and disarmament. Until Teheran the British empire had been the dominant partner in the Anglo-Saxon alliance, at any rate as far as combatant contribution went, having much the greater number of men and aircraft deployed against the enemy. That was a state of affairs which would not last.
At Teheran President Roosevelt, Britain’s stalwart and generous champion when it stood alone in 1940 and 1941, began to develop the strange conviction that the welfare of mankind should, when the war ended, lie in the hands of two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union—the latter, purged of its guilt by suffering, freed from its deep-rooted suspicions, and cauterized in the furnace of war. The British empire, by contrast, was played-out, exhausted by its superhuman efforts in the previous three years, and destined to be dependent on American charity.
Besides, Roosevelt believed the primary British war aim to be the restoration of the empire to its former grandeur. Among other things he was resolved that imperial preference in trade must go. Like many of his colleagues he gave little or no credit to the empire’s achievements and the material help it had brought to lawless, warring, tribal communities. The word “colony” made him, his chief assistant Harry Hopkins, his Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and even the Anglophile Allied Commander in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, shudder. It made them think of George III, the Redcoats, and Bunker Hill. Overseas empires, such as the British and French, and the Dutch, were an abomination; landlocked empires, such as the Russian and the American, with their 19th-century acquisitions, were not in the same category at all.
The American government and its military advisers also felt that the British, and Churchill in particular, had outsmarted them in 1942 by diverting their effort to North Africa and subsequently to Sicily and Italy, “the soft underbelly of the Axis.” Eisenhower and even the normally wise and level-headed Marshall had wanted to invade the European continent in 1942, an enterprise that would (as Marshall subsequently admitted) have led to a cataclysmic defeat. Even in 1943 the Allies did not have the landing craft and other equipment necessary to overcome the German defenders of France and the Low Countries. Now the outsmarting must stop. Stalin was assured that in the early summer of 1944 there would be an invasion of the north of France, Operation Overlord, and another less ambitious landing on the French Mediterranean coast (Operation Anvil). With the former, the British were in agreement; with the latter, much as it appealed both to Stalin and General de Gaulle, they were most emphatically not.
One of the main reasons for Anglo-American strategic discord which, as always in such disagreements, was softened by courtesy and never scarred by personal friction, was the American determination, supported if not indeed suggested by Stalin, to make this diversionary landing in the south of France. It had an effect on long-term strategy, political as well as military; for despite Churchill’s resolute and persistent opposition, eight divisions, of which seven were of high quality, were withdrawn from General Alexander’s Italian command as soon as Rome was captured on June 4, 1944. Churchill had hoped that with those divisions Alexander would have the strength to break through the German “Gothic Line” in Italy, defeat Field Marshal Kesselring in the north Italian plain, take Venice and Trieste, cut off supplies to the eighteen German divisions fighting Tito in Yugoslavia, and march through the Llubljana gap in the Alps to threaten Vienna from the east. As things turned out, Operation Anvil, later renamed Dragoon, was a waste of time and effort. The landing in the south of France was unopposed and Alexander’s lost divisions were able to join Eisenhower’s northern armies only in November. The futility of this operation was, however, no consolation to Churchill. It merely hampered Alexander in the further conduct of the Italian campaign.
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Meanwhile Churchill, unlike Roosevelt, had grown anxious about Stalin’s intentions. The genuine enthusiasm he had felt for Russia in June 1941, when Hitler invaded, was gradually eroded. The British shipped guns, tanks, and aircraft to the Soviet Union—in all 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft—losing many ships and men in the dangerous Arctic convoys. The ships’ crews received only surly treatment on arrival at Murmansk. The British and American military missions sent to Moscow to cooperate with the Soviet armed forces were disregarded and often snubbed. A major effort was made to supply every kind of equipment, often at the expense of home requirements. There was no word or gesture of thanks, but constant demands for more.
Even if the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, which had partitioned Poland and made war inevitable, and the Soviet attack on Finland in the early months of 1940, were tactfully consigned to oblivion, it was impossible to forget the atrocious Katyn massacre of 1940 when 14,000 Polish prisoners of war were butchered in cold blood. The Soviets said the Germans had done it, and the State Department in Washington tended to believe them; but British intelligence left Churchill in no doubt that the Soviets were guilty of that abominable crime.
At Teheran, to Churchill’s disgust, Stalin seriously suggested that after victory was won, a German military revival should be prevented by the immediate execution of 50,000 German officers. Then, in August 1944, came the martyrdom of Warsaw when Moscow radio called on the Home Army, loyal to the Polish government in exile in London, to rise against the German forces; the Soviet army then halted on the banks of the Vistula until the Germans had massacred the insurgents. One night at Chequers, his country retreat, Churchill said to Air Chief Marshal Harris and me that he viewed the future with growing apprehension; when Bomber Command had finished its destruction of Germany, and the American armies had gone home, what would remain between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?
Roosevelt and the State Department had no such misgivings about Soviet intentions, but their relations with their British allies remained friendly, if sometimes critical. Indeed, at the Second Quebec Conference of September 1944, in which only the Americans and the British took part, the President and the Prime Minister continued to set a cheerful example of cooperative good will which their staffs assimilated and echoed. I personally was shocked by the President’s appearance. His eyes were glazed and lackluster. I was not surprised when on the way home on the Queen Mary, Churchill told me that he felt deeply worried about the President’s health.
Perhaps if Roosevelt himself had been a little more worried, he would not have run for a fourth term as President of the United States the following November. But he was vain, he no doubt liked the thought of breaking all presidential records, and his courage was dauntless. He certainly wanted to be at the helm when the war was won; but an unfit helmsman is a liability in the calmest seas and in rough waters he is likely to be a disaster.
The Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence continued unchecked and totally frank. The courtesies were unblemished; but Roosevelt sometimes showed impatience with the Prime Minister, at any rate in the remarks he made behind his back, a practice begun at Teheran in his private conversations with Stalin. Roosevelt also seemed to think he had a right to intervene in matters which were not his concern at all. At Teheran he told Stalin he would like, some time, to discuss with him the future of India; and at Yalta, without a word to the British, he talked to the Soviets about the future status of Hong Kong. Folie de grandeur had taken command of a formerly remarkable man.
Churchill went to Moscow in October 1944, a month after the Quebec Conference, precisely in order to show Stalin that there was none of that Anglo-American “ganging up” which the Americans thought discourteous to the Russians. All the same, Roosevelt was far from pleased. He told his Ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, to let Stalin and his Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, know that he would not necessarily endorse the views Churchill might express. He wanted Harriman to act as a watchdog and he did not agree that Stalin and Churchill might be encouraged to reach agreement on the vexed Polish question.
Then came Greece. Churchill had no intention of allowing the Communists, certain by the end of 1944 to control most of Eastern Europe, to seize Greece by stealth or force. To Roosevelt’s impotent fury (but not, strangely enough, to Stalin’s), he himself went to Athens on Christmas Day and with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Field Marshal Alexander beside him imposed a democratic settlement of Greek affairs. Roosevelt should have been delighted that Greece, and in consequence Turkey, were excluded from Soviet domination. He was not.
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In the following February, on the way to the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, the President would pause only briefly at Malta for talks with the British, though the two Chiefs of Staff Committees did have useful meetings. He would not agree to any preliminary discussion of strategy or foreign policy. When he reached Yalta he pointedly avoided seeing Churchill alone until the fifth day of the conference, and in talks with Stalin he spoke, to Averell Harriman’s horror, of his differences with Churchill. Oblivious of the fact that the Russians had colonized the Crimea in the very same year that the British recognized the independence of the American colonies, he spent some time with Stalin poking fun at Churchill and at the British colonial conquests.
On the issue of reparations by Germany, the Soviets at Yalta asked for an exorbitant sum. Roosevelt supported them, but the British refused to accept a figure until a reparations commission should make recommendations. On Poland, the Anglo-American stance had been that there should be an entirely new Polish government containing representatives of all parties and pledged to free and unfettered elections. To the distress of Churchill and Eden, Roosevelt agreed to the Soviet demand that the existing Polish Communist regime, installed by the Soviets at Lublin, should be the government of Poland with the addition of a minority of non-Communist Poles from London and elsewhere. It was a complete sellout to Stalin, for once the presidential election was over and the Americans of Polish descent had cast their votes, Roosevelt had a diminished interest in Poland. What he wanted was to gain Stalin’s agreement to the conditions he favored for establishing a United Nations Organization and to ensure eventual Soviet entry into the war against Japan.
I did not go to Yalta, but I went to meet the returning British delegation and drove to London with Anthony Eden. I asked how things had gone. He replied that as Roosevelt was the sole head of state present, Churchill and Stalin being only heads of government, Roosevelt had been the chairman at every plenary session. That, said Eden, had been most hampering, for the President’s powers were obviously failing and Eden had the impression that half the time he was unable to concentrate. So the deadly hiatus was already beginning to have its effect. As far as military affairs were concerned, it was evident that General Marshall was now directing American policy. He was naturally worried solely about the military objectives, for the political overtones, daily more important, were no concern of the Chiefs of Staff.
At this stage there was in Washington, if not in the United States embassy in Moscow, little change in the American government’s optimism about future relations with the Soviet Union or in the belief that a policy of appeasement was the surest method of taming the bear. It was not a belief held at 10 Downing Street or in the Foreign Office, but the British and American peoples were unwavering admirers of Russia’s successful resistance and any overt hostility to the Soviet Union would have caused an uproar in both the United Kingdom and the United States.
Moreover, the British were no longer able to speak from strength. In June 1944 the troops of the British empire fighting in Normandy equaled those of the Americans. By September the ratios were changing; by March 1945 only 25 percent of General Eisenhower’s forces were British and Canadian, although they amounted in total to a million soldiers, in addition to the considerable weight of the RAF and, on the high seas, an undiminished naval power. The Americans were firmly in the driver’s seat.
Warnings from Averell Harriman in Moscow fell on deaf ears. In September 1944 he had written to Harry Hopkins, as close as anybody to Roosevelt: “I have evidence that they [the Soviets] have misinterpreted our generous attitude toward them as a sign of weakness and acceptance of their policies . . . unless we take issue with the present policy there is every indication that the Soviet Union will become a world bully wherever [its] interests are involved.” He advised Secretary of State Cordell Hull to beware of giving the Soviets a free hand with their Western neighbors, and he advocated a policy of demanding a quid pro quo for each Soviet demand. But, as he sadly recorded, after the 1944 election was over, “the President consistently shows very little interest in Eastern European countries except as they affect sentiment in America.”
Since 1941 goods shipped to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease had, by Roosevelt’s order, been sent without careful documentation or searching questions. Now the Soviet authorities were making enormous demands for aircraft and munitions, and for industrial equipment of a kind they could use only after the war. Roosevelt and Hopkins firmly declined Harriman’s proposal that these orders should be carefully examined. The State Department suffered from the strange delusion that a tough policy toward the Soviet Union might result in its making a separate peace with Germany—a reversion to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
The President, Harry Hopkins, and many in the State Department believed that the leopard really was in the process of changing its spots. To some extent they resembled those who in the early 1930’s argued that Hitler was not to be judged as the author of Mein Kampf, a book he had written ten years previously. He had mellowed; responsibility had sobered him; he should no longer be judged by his original ideology. What the gullible had said of Hitler, the White House and the State Department were in danger of believing of Stalin; and Roosevelt constantly declared that he knew how to handle “U.J.” (Uncle Joe). Churchill suffered from the same illusion; but unlike Roosevelt, he was not the dupe of Soviet policy and he was fully alive to the dangers. “U.J.” was in fact much more cunning than either of them and not in the least ashamed of duplicity.
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In February 1945, SS General Karl Wolff approached Allen Dulles, head of the American intelligence organization, OSS, in Zurich, to discuss the possibility of negotiating a German surrender in Italy. The Soviets got hold of the story even before the approach had been reported to the White House and Downing Street. They made a fuss which lasted over a month, accused the Western allies of plotting a separate peace with the Germans, and used such harsh language that even Roosevelt was roused to express resentment “for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted colleagues.” Stalin, who thought divisive tactics might be rewarding, then alleged that the plot was organized by the British, who in fact only knew about it secondhand. This episode left the Americans with a sense, not indeed of guilt, but of anxiety not to offend the Soviets further. Appeasement still had high priority in Washington and, what was still more serious, at Supreme Allied Headquarters (SHAEF) where Eisenhower held sway in Europe.
Stalin declared that he only wished to extend Russia’s boundaries for defense purposes. Primarily would have been a more appropriate adverb than only; for although the Soviet rulers were understandably determined never again to risk invasion of their Russian heartland, they did not discard the dream of Communizing the whole world in accordance with the prophecies of Marx and Lenin. The Comintern had been dissolved; friendship and even an occasional expression of gratitude were temporarily permissible; but further ideological aspirations had been shelved rather than abandoned.
For the present, the wretched Baltic states fell into the “frontier security” category. So did Finland’s Karelian isthmus, the Rumanian province of Bessarabia, and also Bukovina, which had never before been part of Russia, not even in the palmiest days of czarist expansion. Stalin was determined to hold all the territory which had been granted to him by the Nazis under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. Later on, by declaring war on Japan a few days before the Japanese surrendered, he acquired desirable accretions in the Far East. Rumania, Bulgaria, what remained of Poland, and in due course Hungary and Czechoslovakia might remain nominally independent; but they must be controlled by the Soviet Union.
It was the fate of Poland, for which Britain and France had gone to war in 1939, and which they had promised to restore to freedom, that was the main bone of contention in the early months of 1945. The legal Polish government had sought refuge in London and many thousands of Poles, under the indomitable General Anders, were fighting with their usual dash and gallantry in Field Marshal Alexander’s army. The British therefore felt a greater obligation to ensure an acceptable Polish settlement than did the Americans, though prior to the presidential election, as already noted, Roosevelt did have to bear in mind the sizable Polish element in the American electorate. The trouble was that the Soviet armies were already on Polish soil and they were not at all disposed to abandon control of it. Before the war the French had hoped to use the Little Entente of Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, originally formed to prevent a restoration of the Hapsburgs in Hungary, to help contain Germany. Stalin was understandably determined there should be no such peripheral arrangement to contain the Soviet Union.
In August 1944, the United States was at first grudging in providing airlifted aid to the beleaguered Home Army in Warsaw; but Roosevelt finally listened to Churchill’s urgent demand for support in augmenting the supply of arms and ammunition the RAF was dropping for the Poles. It was a long flight; the Soviets refused to allow British or American planes to land and refuel on Soviet territory; and the Americans had at first declined to agree to the use of two airfields in Italy under their control and in range of Warsaw. The State Department told Harriman it was anxious not to upset the Soviets by helping the Warsaw insurgents. Roosevelt instructed Harriman to let the Kremlin know that he would take no interest in Polish affairs until after the November election. Churchill prevailed, but despite all the efforts of the British and American air forces, the epic struggle of the Polish patriots ended in defeat.
Then, in February 1945, came the Yalta Conference. The British were insistent that a settlement of the Polish problem should be high on the list of priorities, and the Americans, though more cynical in their approach, did not demur. After long discussions and much argument it was agreed that some non-Communist Poles should be invited to join the government—though they would be but a minority—and that “free and unfettered elections,” in which all except the fascist parties should be allowed to put forward candidates, would be held within a few months. The British delegation was not content with the vagueness of the Soviet promises or the design of the proposed Polish government; but since the Soviets and Americans were in agreement, Churchill and Eden had to give way, though they knew there would be trouble in the House of Commons.
During the next two months it became clear that the Soviets had no intention of abiding by their undertakings. Stalin had told Harriman that he never broke a promise, but he did sometimes change his mind! The Soviets prevaricated, they arrested and incarcerated sixteen Polish leaders who had been given a safe conduct to visit Marshal Zhukov, and Stalin blandly stated that he was pledged to the formation of a pro-Soviet government “by the blood of the Soviet people which had been profusely shed on the fields of Poland in the name of liberation.” Nobody had the courage to mention the blood of the Polish people shed at Katyn and the murder of Polish leaders at Siedlec in East Poland and elsewhere. It was soon clear that the Yalta agreement on Poland was a dead letter.
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This Polish imbroglio, and the unscrupulous overthrow of the democratic leaders in Rumania, might have been expected to alert General Eisenhower and the American Chiefs of Staff to the fact that there were political factors to be taken into account as the Anglo-American armies continued their advance into Germany. Unfortunately they were wrapped up in a purely military cocoon from which Eisenhower only once emerged and that with dire consequences.
General Eisenhower was in no sense a “field commander” as Marshall and many other Americans maintained. But he ranks with Marlborough as the commander of an alliance. His scrupulous fairness, his untainted honesty, and his qualities of leadership were such that no criticism can diminish his fame as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Unfortunately in the last two months of the war, deprived of authoritative political advice when it was particularly important, he made a capital error; for with all his virtues he was remarkably naive.
His two principal lieutenants were the British General Montgomery and the American General Omar Bradley. Both were men of high quality, but Montgomery, who had fought throughout Word War I, and had already won high praise in this war for his command of the 3rd Division in the Dunkirk campaign and for having led the 8th Army to victory in North Africa, was incomparably the more experienced professional soldier. He had, however, shown signs of being, as Eisenhower (and indeed Churchill) thought, too slow and cautious in Normandy; his sole adventurous decision, at Arnhem, had failed tragically; he could not resist criticizing, with total lack of tact, both Eisenhower and Bradley, whom he considered military amateurs; and although he had been called in to retrieve the situation when, in December 1944, the Germans, bursting out of the Ardennes, all but broke the American armies in front of them, his subsequent boasting was insufferable. So, not surprisingly, Eisenhower preferred Bradley whom, in a letter to General Marshall, he described as “the greatest battle-line commander I have met in the war.” Americans often tend to make excessive use of superlatives.
The plan had been that Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, containing the large British 2nd Army, the Canadian Army, and the American 9th Army under the excellent General Simpson, should mop up resistance in north Germany, capture Hamburg and Lübeck, and then, once the Ruhr had been taken or surrounded, strike eastward to Berlin. Suddenly, late in March, Eisenhower altered his strategy. He removed Simpson’s 9th Army from Montgomery and gave it to Bradley’s central command. Impressed by false intelligence information that the German government had left Berlin and was intent on a desperate last stand in the mountains near Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden, he decided to change his objective from Berlin to Leipzig and Dresden.
He made this decision without consulting the President, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the Prime Minister, or even his own Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Air Marshal Tedder. The only person he did consult, without the slightest authority for so doing, was Marshal Stalin.
Stalin must have licked his lips. Eisenhower’s telegram was so incomprehensibly drafted that the American military mission in Moscow held it up for twenty-four hours for elucidation; but when it was delivered to the Kremlin on March 29, Stalin at once replied: “Your proposal entirely coincides with the plan of the Soviet High Command. Berlin has lost its former strategic importance. The Soviet High Command therefore plans to allot secondary forces in the direction of Berlin.”
Berlin, where Hitler, Goebbels, and Bormann were still installed, had not lost its importance. The capture of the capital of the Reich and the seizure or death of the Fuehrer could not fail to destroy any further German will to resist. Nor did the crafty Stalin have any intention of allotting the task to “secondary forces.” Few things were likely to have a greater psychological effect in Eastern Europe than the capture of Berlin by the Soviets.
Eisenhower informed Churchill on March 31 of his unorthodox action. The next day Churchill sent a telegram to Roosevelt pointing out that the Soviets were in any case sure to take Vienna. “If they also take Berlin, will not the impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly printed in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future? I therefore consider that from a political standpoint we should march as far East as possible and should Berlin be in our grasp, we should certainly take it.”
A day later Churchill replied to Eisenhower, including in his robust comments: “I am all the more impressed with the importance of entering Berlin . . . by the reply from Moscow to you which says Berlin has lost its former strategic importance. . . . I deem it highly important we should shake hands with the Russians as far to the East as possible.”
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It so happened that the climax of Molotov’s intransigence over Poland (and Molotov was, of course, obeying his master’s voice) coincided with Eisenhower’s approach to Stalin. Even this did not stir a dying President, a blind State Department, and generals who saw no reason to inject political considerations into strategic decisions. Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, the able and energetic Bedell Smith, made one of the few wholly silly remarks in his career when he told a press conference that Berlin had no significance by comparison with the (mythical) National Redoubt in the Alps and with clearing German troops from Norway. In Washington they put all their trust in Eisenhower: he must make the decision. The State Department was convinced that an Anglo-American entry into Berlin ahead of the Soviets would mean a fundamental change in American foreign policy. And who could authorize that? Only President Roosevelt, and he, who had once been such a fearless innovator, was long past taking such an initiative. His Vice President, Harry Truman, had no knowledge of what was happening.
The 21st Army Group had been poised to set off for Berlin since March 28, but Eisenhower told Montgomery: “As far as I am concerned Berlin is nothing but a geographical location.” So Montgomery was checkmated. However, General Simpson and his 9th Army, now detached from the 21st Army Group, were convinced that they could take Berlin on their own. They crossed the Elbe on April 12, the day Roosevelt died, and there was only one weak German force between them and the city. Simpson believed he could take it in less than forty-eight hours, but Eisenhower forbade him to move. It is said that on April 11, when the 9th Army first reached the Elbe, General Patton besought Eisenhower to let Simpson go for Berlin. “Well, who would want it?” Eisenhower is reported to have asked. “I think history will answer that question,” Patton replied. History’s answer was, of course, the Soviets. They reached Berlin on April 22; the Anglo-American armies had been standing within easy range for more than three weeks.
On April 13 there was a new President in the White House, a man of drive and courage who rapidly assimilated the information which had been so long denied him. It was too late; quick though he was to learn and to put a firm hand on the steering wheel of the world’s most powerful machine, he could not be fully briefed in three weeks. Churchill hoped to impress on him, as he had vainly tried to do on Roosevelt, that although in due course British and American troops would have to be withdrawn from all parts of the zone of occupation allotted to the Soviet Union, they should stand firm until an acceptable solution to the Polish question had been reached and an Allied Control Commission had been established in Berlin. The Soviets must also be forced to respond to the proposals made to them about Allied zones in Austria where they had denied entry to the Allied missions and had established a government to suit their own purposes.
To the same end Churchill also wanted American troops to take Prague where the Czech insurgents were in control and had invited their entry. The Americans were within a few hours’ distance, but Eisenhower thought it best not to risk upsetting the Soviets. So he stopped his men short of Prague and consulted the Soviets. Surprise, surprise; they at once endorsed his decision not to enter Prague; and though Churchill telegraphed urgently to Truman, the President, still too new to disregard the advice of his Chiefs of Staff, felt bound to uphold Eisenhower.
The sequel came three years later when the Soviets organized a Communist coup d’état in Prague and democracy vanished from Czechoslovakia.
Truman was not, however, prepared to accept continued Soviet assertiveness. He soon recognized the importance of building counterweights to Soviet importunities. No longer would it have been possible for the American Chiefs of Staff to decline to retaliate at Fairbanks, Alaska, when the Soviets grounded American aircraft and held their crews incommunicado at Pultava. No longer could the Soviets deliberately break promises given at Yalta, as when they refused to allow a United States naval team to visit Gdynia in Poland. Under the previous regime, when Harriman had protested to Washington about such unfriendly acts, and advised mild retaliatory action, his pleas had been unheeded. Now things had changed, and to Churchill’s joy, when he asked Truman to stand firm with him against Marshal Tito’s aggressive designs on Trieste and Venezia Giulia, Truman’s reply was prompt and affirmative. Indeed, only ten days after entering the White House, when Molotov called with his usual denials of breaches of the Yalta agreement, Truman was so wholesomely abrasive that Molotov complained that no one had ever spoken to him like that in his whole life.
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It was no use for Stalin to continue his strategy of playing off the Americans against the British, as he tried to do in May when an ailing Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman went to Moscow for talks in the Kremlin, talks replete with expressions of good will but achieving nothing. Truman was more impressed by the telegram Churchill sent him on May 12, first using the words “Iron Curtain,” which he repeated in the world-shaking speech he made at Fulton, Missouri, the following March. As Churchill subsequently wrote: “New perils, perhaps as terrible as any we had surmounted, loomed and glared upon the torn and harassed world.”
No doubt those perils would have loomed in any case, but they might have been mitigated if longer and wider views had prevailed in Washington under the eye of one of the greatest of American Presidents which had so unfortunately glazed over at a time when clear-sightedness was essential. His successor, also a great President, did all he could to restore sense and sanity; but he arrived in the White House at least three months too late. Churchill had good reason to call the last volume of his history of World War II Triumph and Tragedy.
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