To the Editor:
John Colville, in “How the West Lost the Peace in 1945” [September 1985], says more in six-and-a-half pages than some historians have said in hundreds of pages. He is concise, to the point, and fair to the leading participants. His observations concerning General Eisenhower are particularly relevant. And his conclusion that Harry Truman arrived in the White House “at least three months too late” is sound.
But Mr. Colville does not go beyond 1945, and does not ask if the “lost peace” could have been salvaged subsequently, at least in part. I believe this is important, because 1945 was not the only lost opportunity in dealing with the Soviets.
After the war, the U.S. rapidly demobilized a 10-million-man military force, in the naive belief that the Soviet Union would act responsibly and cooperate with the West in the pursuit of a just peace. The naive liberals, however, were not the only ones responsible for our rapid demobilization. Conservative forces (e.g., the Chicago Tribune) openly asserted that the Democrats wanted to maintain a large army as a way of helping them stay in power, and published top-secret U.S. intelligence documents in an attempt to prove their case. But blame also rests on the British and American peoples, who had become (as Mr. Colville points out) “unwavering admirers of Russia’s successful resistance” so that “any overt hostility to the Soviet Union would have caused an uproar in both the United Kingdom and the United States.”
Yet democratic leaders must sometimes go against the popular will, confident that once the Tightness of policies is demonstrated the people will give them their support. One of those times was after the Soviets had clearly shown that they had no intention of abiding by some of the Yalta agreements, notably the promise of “free and unfettered elections” in Poland. This was fairly clear by mid-1945, but the West could also have acted in 1946 or even 1947.
The West could have said to the Soviets: “We promised the Polish people a restoration of freedom and free and unfettered elections, and we are moving our military forces in to see to it that this promise is fulfilled.” There is nothing that the Soviets could have done but given in. If we had any doubts in 1945 or 1946 or 1947 about the Soviet response, they would have been dispelled with the publication in 1948 of the Soviet-Yugoslav correspondence, in which Stalin told Tito that he could not have helped him on the question of Trieste because the Soviet Union had been terribly weakened by the war and could not possibly have risked conflict with the West. . . .
Alex N. Dragnich
Charlottesville, Virginia
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To the Editor:
. . . The Atlantic Charter, proclaimed by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1941, called for the renunciation of territorial aggrandizement, the right of peoples to choose the form of government under which they would live, and the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those who had been forcibly deprived of them.
From hindsight of more than forty years, it is clear that if the principles of the Atlantic Charter had been followed, we would have neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact, and of course not the arms race and the mortal danger we are now facing. It is also clear that at the time the Soviets were in no position to contest the enforcement of the provisions of the Charter. Why then have they been violated?
We read in Churchill’s The Hinge of Fate that Churchill told Roosevelt on April 23, 1942: “The increasing gravity of war has led me to feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as to deny Russia the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her. This was the basis on which Russia acceded to the Charter.”
To understand the ethical, political, and even philosophical meaning of this recommendation, we should replace the words “the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her” with a quotation from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 23, 1939: “The spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San.” Thus, Stalin insisted on maintaining the sphere of influence Hitler had given him as a reward for signing the pact which enabled Hitler to start World War II. In other words, Stalin’s condition for acceding to the obligations of the Atlantic Charter was from the beginning that he be granted the right to violate it.
This situation had all the elements of tragedy, not only for Poland but for the whole world. . . .
On October 9, 1944, when Churchill negotiated with Stalin in Moscow, he proposed, according to his Triumph and Tragedy: “So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 percent predominance in Rumania, for us 90 percent in Greece, and go fifty-fifty in Yugoslavia? . . .” Thus long before 1945 the commitment to respect the self-determination of nations and the principle of nonaggrandizement was violated by the very authors of these policies. It is one of the tragedies of our time that Roosevelt and Churchill, the two greatest statesmen of our century, who saved democracy and showed us the way to create a peaceful world, violated their commitment and returned the world to the era of spheres of interests. . . .
Eugen Loebl
New York City
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To the Editor:
One question that remains after reading John Colville’s “How the West Lost the Peace in 1945” . . . is why, rather than how, we did so. As an Englishman, Mr. Colville is too polite to suggest that it was because of our historic naiveté and pragmatism. Thus, the day before he died FDR wrote to Churchill: “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out.”
In a similar . . . vein, Roosevelt’s aide, Harry Hopkins, said after the Yalta conference: “The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and farseeing and there wasn’t any doubt in the minds of the President or any of us that we could live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine.” . . .
Moreover, this pragmatic naiveté in the face of ideology was bipartisan. It was, after all, General Eisenhower who, as Mr. Colville points out, refused to allow our troops to take Berlin before the Red Army could get there, as might easily have been done with little sacrifice. How could even a tough-minded pragmatist like Ike have been so mistaken despite the warnings of Churchill? I think the answer can be found in Eisenhower’s wartime retrospective, Crusade in Europe, where we find that Ike was much taken by Marshall Zhukov, to whom he gave the highest form of pragmatic praise: Zhukov was “sincere” in his devotion to Communism. . . .
It is from these experiences that Eisenhower concludes:
Americans at that time—or at least we in Berlin—saw no reason why the Russian system of government, and democracy as practiced by the Western Allies, could not live side by side in the world, provided each respected the rights, the territory, and the convictions of the other, and each system avoided overt or covert action against the integrity of the other. Because implicit in Western democracy is respect for the rights of others, it seemed natural to us that this “live and let live” type of agreement could be achieved and honestly kept.
. . . But one cannot simply “live and let live” with ideological murderers. Ike’s great mistake—as well as Roosevelt and Hopkins’s—was to think otherwise. . . .
Kenneth Zaretzke
Arlington, Virginia
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John Colville writes:
Although, with hindsight, we may condemn the myopia of Roosevelt and Hopkins, of Eisenhower and occasionally (though much less often) of Winston Churchill, it is wise to remember three things.
First, although the Russians continually declined to let us know of their military plans, and were less than gracious in acknowledging the great material help they received from both America and Britain, they were nonetheless fighting heroically and losing many more men than their Western allies. Their efforts did seem to demand both admiration and assistance.
Secondly, in those pre-atomic days a long struggle against Japan was visualized after the defeat of Germany. It was estimated that we should lose half-a-million men in landing on the main Japanese islands. So Russia’s help and involvement in the Pacific seemed vital on both sides of the Atlantic. This was a prime reason for the Western appeasement of Stalin at Yalta.
Thirdly, public opinion in both America and Britain was vociferously pro-Russian. The Soviet armies’ courage and sacrifice crowned them with haloes. Small things shift public opinion: in Britain it was not until Stalin refused to let some dozen Russian girls who had married British soldiers during the war rejoin their husbands that anti-Soviet feeling was generated. Molotov’s consistent “nyet” to all reasonable suggestions brought far less popular reaction, though in 1948 the need for the Berlin airlift confirmed the suspicions created by “the Russian wives.”