Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Most of the secret discussions leading up to the publication of this declaration on January i, 1942 were concerned with verbal or procedural issues, but some of these were symbolic of future problems. There was considerable discussion as to the order in which the signatures should be affixed to the document; the decision to rank them in two groups, with the four “Great Powers” of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China followed by twenty-two lesser states in alphabetical order, was an early indication of the similar division which still exists in the United Nations today. The inclusion of China, in spite of its obvious weakness, among the Great Powers was a concession made to the United States by the other Powers. The American leaders, from Roosevelt down, insisted that China was, or at least should be, a Great Power, although the only evidence they could find to support this argument was its larger population. The Americans seemed to hope that by encouragement and reiteration, or perhaps even by invocation, China could be made into a Great Power, able to dominate the Far East after the defeat of Japan.

Other notable features of this United Nations Declaration were: (1) the fact that De Gaullist France was excluded from the signers in order not to recognize it as a government, (2) the fact that the United States was ranked first among the Great Powers, and (3) the difficulty in wording the declaration so that Japan, with which the Soviet Union was not at war, should not specifically be included among the enemy and yet, at the same time, should not be excluded from the “brutal forces” which were condemned.

In the meantime, in Moscow, Anthony Eden was being faced with Soviet demands for a specific delimitation of the postwar boundaries of eastern Europe. In the north, the Bolshevik leaders wanted explicit British recognition that Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were parts of the Soviet Union and that the Soviet-Finnish frontier should be as it had existed after the “winter war” of 1939-1940; in the center, the Soviets demanded a frontier with Poland along the so-called Curzon Line, which followed, it was true, the linguistic frontier, but was 150 miles west of the Polish-Soviet frontier of the 1921-1939 period; in the south, Stalin wanted Eden to agree to a Soviet-Romanian border which would have allowed Russia to have Bessarabia and Bukovina. These demands sought recognition of the Soviet Union’s western boundary as it existed between the Nazi-Soviet Pact of September 1939 and Hitler’s attack in June 1941, except that the Curzon Line was, in some places, slightly to the east of the 1940 line.

Although these Soviet demands were clearly in conflict with the high purposes of the Atlantic Charter, Churchill was not averse to accepting them on grounds of physical necessity, but American objections to any settlement of territorial questions while the war was still going on forced him to refuse Stalin’s requests. In general, the British found themselves in a difficult position between the high and proclaimed principles of the Americans and the low and secret interests of the Russians. Because of American pressure, Eden avoided any territorial commitments, and persuaded Stalin to accept a twenty-year treaty of alliance with Britain. This Anglo-Soviet Treaty of May 26, 1942 had no territorial provisions, and included a statement that the signers would “act in accordance with the two principles of not seeking territorial aggrandizement for themselves and of non-interference in the internal affairs of other States.”

Although the Soviet Union accepted the terms of the British alliance, in 1942 their suspicions of the West were still high, and their relations with Britain became increasingly unfriendly, reaching a critical stage by 1943. In Moscow there was fear that the West wished to protract the war in order to bleed both Germany and the Soviet Union to death. It was feared that this end could be obtained if American supplies to Russia were placed at a level sufficiently high to keep Russia fighting but insufficiently high to allow her to defeat Hitler. To avoid this, Moscow continued to insist, with unreasonable repetition, on the need to increase Lend-Lease supplies to it and, above all, on the need to open a second front on the Continent by an immediate Anglo-American invasion of Europe from England. Judging, perhaps, that American psychology would work along the same lines of “power politics” as their own, a mistake which the Japanese, with considerably greater reason, had made in the months before Pearl Harbor, the Russians could not conceive that the United States would grant sufficient aid to Russia to permit a speedy defeat of Hitler, since such a policy, almost inevitably, would leave the victorious Soviet armies supreme in eastern, and probably also in central, Europe.

As a matter of fact, while some Americans unquestionably did think in terms of “power politics” and may, in a few cases, have gone so far as to prefer a Hitler victory over Stalin to a Stalin victory over Hitler, such people were very remote from the centers of power in the American government. At those centers of power there was complete conviction in the value of unrestricted aid to Russia, the speediest possible defeat of Germany, and a full “cross-Channel” invasion of Europe as soon as possible. In fact, these aims were so firmly embraced by those Americans with whom the Russians had relationships, men like Harry Hopkins, General Marshall, or Roosevelt himself, that these men sometimes misled the Russians by expressing their hopes rather than their expectations, with the consequence that Russian suspicions were roused again, at a later date, when these hopes were not fulfilled. Immediately after the signing of the Anglo-Soviet alliance, Soviet Foreign Commissar Molotov came to Washington to urge the need for an immediate second front in Europe. Although such a project would have been unwise, if not impossible, in 1942, the White House communiqué of June 11, 1942 sought to satisfy the Russians and to frighten the Germans by saying that “full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942.”

In the early summer of 1942 Soviet messages to Washington and to London continued to insist on the need for an immediate second front in Western Europe in order to reduce the Nazi military pressure on the Soviet forces. Recognizing the impossibility of such a venture in 1942, the Anglo-Americans sought to relieve the pressure on Russia by landing at a place where the German defense would not be so strong. It was this desire which resulted in the decision of July 25, 1942 to invade North Africa in November. Having made the decision to substitute this project for any possible cross-Channel attack in 1942, it was necessary to convey the news to the Soviet Union. Churchill undertook this delicate task on his first meeting with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. The result was a most unpleasant explosion by Stalin. The Soviet leader charged that Molotov had obtained a definite promise for a second front in 1942, that failure to carry out this promise would jeopardize Soviet military plans, and that Churchill was opposed to such a venture from cowardice!

The strategic disputes among the three Allied Powers were sharp and based on very different outlooks, but in no case did cowardice play any role. The Soviet insistence on an immediate, all-out cross-Channel attack to relieve Nazi pressure on Russia was perfectly understandable, although insistence on such an attack in 1942 was unrealistic. Equally understandable was Russia’s fear that the Anglo-Americans might divert their power from Germany in order to avoid a Soviet-dominated postwar Europe, although this fear showed no realistic appreciation of the American outlook. On the other hand, the British reluctance to attempt the cross-Channel attack was perfectly clear. Sir Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, opposed all plans for such an assault, while others, like Churchill, wanted to postpone such an attack indefinitely or reduce it to no more than a series of small raids to establish permanent anti-German bridgeheads in western Europe. The difficulties of such raids were shown on August 19, 1942 when a force of 5,000 men, mostly Canadians, landed at Dieppe and suffered 3,350 casualties in a few hours.