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

In the course of 1943, while Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were still devoting their chief attention to the conduct of the war, their foreign ministers, Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden, and Vyachislav Molotov, were giving increasing attention to planning for postwar problems. The chief of these problems which were discussed were: (1) the economic demobilization of the victor Powers, (2) the relief and rehabilitation of the defeated countries and of the liberated areas, (3) problems involving refugees and displaced persons, (4) problems of finance and of international monetary exchanges, (5) the punishment of “war criminals” in the defeated states, (6) the forms of government of these states and of the liberated states, (7) territorial questions such as the boundaries of Germany, of Hungary, or of Poland, (8) the disposition of the colonial possessions, or, as they were called, the “dependent areas,” of both victors and vanquished, (9) the problem of the postwar political relationships of the victorious states and of the world as a whole.

It is evident that many of these problems were of an explosive nature and could lead to disputes among the Allies and possibly even to a weakening of their joint anti-German efforts. As a consequence, the foreign ministers’ discussions of many of these problems were tentative and hesitant and were frequently interrupted to confer with the three heads of governments. Even on this higher level, agreement could not be reached in some cases, and these problems were generally put aside lest efforts to reach an agreement alienate the Allies to the detriment of their war efforts against Germany. This was most emphatically true of questions involving the possible postwar situation in eastern Europe where the frontiers of Germany, of Poland, and of the Soviet Union or the status of Poland and of the Baltic states were far too controversial to be raised except in a most tentative way.

It has frequently been argued in recent years that failure to reach any agreement on the territorial and governmental settlement of eastern Europe while the war was still in progress meant that these questions would tend to be settled by the military situation in existence at the end of the war with little consideration for questions of legality, humanity, freedom, nationalism, the rights of small states, or other factors which were mentioned so frequently in the Allied wartime propaganda. Specifically, this meant that the Soviet armies would undoubtedly dominate eastern Europe once Germany was defeated and that these armies could make a settlement based on force unless the Soviet Union had been compelled, before the complete defeat of Germany, to make agreements with its fellow Allies for some more desirable settlement in eastern Europe. These arguments usually assume that the Soviet Union was reluctant to make an early agreement on this subject and that it could have been forced to do so because of its need for American supplies during the fighting. This assumption implies that America should have threatened to reduce or to cut off Lend-Lease supplies going to the Soviet Union unless we could obtain Soviet agreement to the kind of eastern European settlement we wanted. These arguments are based on hindsight and not on any realistic understanding of the historical facts as they developed.

It is now clear, from the published documents, that the Soviet Union was eager to obtain some early agreement on the eastern European postwar settlement and that both the United States and Britain were reluctant to make such an agreement, apparently because of the fear that we could do so only at the price of extensive concessions to Russia at the expense of the smaller eastern European states. We were unwilling to use our control of Lend-Lease supplies to force concessions from Russia because any reduction of such supplies, by weakening the Soviet Union’s resistance to Germany, would increase Germany’s ability to fight the Anglo-Americans and would lengthen the war. Moreover, Soviet ideas on the Baltic states and the eastern frontiers of Poland were so rigidly uncompromising that no concessions could have been obtained on these points except, perhaps, by reducing Lend-Lease shipments to a degree which the Anglo-Americans, in their own interests, were unwilling to do. It was feared that any drastic Anglo-American pressure on Russia in this form would lead to violent protests from the electorate in Britain and in the United States, since the citizens of the two democratic Powers were much more concerned with getting on with the war than they were with the postwar situation of the Poles or of the Baltic states. Moreover, the Anglo-American leaders were fearful that, if Russia’s ability to fight Germany was reduced by any curtailing of supplies, the Soviet leaders might make a separate peace with Hitler, allowing the Nazis to turn the full brunt of their fury westward. Rumors of possible Soviet-Nazi discussions looking toward a separate peace were circulating in London and Washington at various times, particularly in the latter part of 1043, and the Anglo-American leaders were too clearly aware of the sudden Nazi-Soviet agreement of August 1939 to push the Russians so hard that they might make another, more fateful, agreement of a similar character.

The blunt truth which was faced by the Anglo-American leaders throughout the war was that full-scale Soviet resistance to Germany seemed essential if the Nazis were ever to be beaten and that what seemed, at the time, to be lesser or more remote considerations had to yield to that fundamental fact. Winston Churchill, in June 1941, had welcomed the Russians as allies against Hitler with the statement that he would be ready to ally with the devil in hell if the devil was ready to fight Hitler. Naturally, this point of view became less extreme as the defeat of Hitler became less remote, but the Germans fought so well, up to the very end of the war, that it never became possible to force any Soviet concessions in regard to the postwar political settlement in eastern Europe. Instead, the tactic was adopted, wholeheartedly by President Roosevelt, more reluctantly by Prime Minister Churchill, of trying to win the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, to a less suspicious and more conciliatory mood by full-scale cooperation in the war and by friendly concessions to Soviet sensibilities on wider issues. This alternative policy was by no means an easy one, for Soviet suspicions were so close to the surface and Soviet sensibilities were so touchy that cooperation with these people proved to be a very delicate and unpleasant business. It was, however, a business at which Roosevelt was personally adept, and it worked, adequately enough, until the war with Germany and Roosevelt’s life drew to their close together in the spring of 1945.

The various postwar problems we have mentioned were discussed at a series of high-level conferences during the war years. At a conference in Washington in March 1943, Eden and Roosevelt agreed that Germany should be broken up into three or four states after its defeat, but did not see eye to eye on many other matters. Roosevelt felt that only the four Great Powers would need to be armed in the postwar world and could keep the peace for all other states if they could agree among themselves. Other states, relieved of the burden of armaments, could devote all their resources to economic reconstruction. The four Great Powers would be helped in the task of keeping the peace for all by their joint possession of various strategic points throughout the world, like Dakar or Formosa, and could work together to instruct the public opinion of the world by a joint sponsorship of informational centers scattered about the globe. In such a system, in which lesser states did not have to defend themselves, there could be no objection, in Roosevelt’s thinking, to separating peoples, like the Serbs and Croats, who could not agree, or in providing independence for dependent areas, such as Hong Kong. Most of this made little sense to Eden, who was not prepared to give up Hong Kong or other portions of the British colonial possessions or to see the Soviet Union on the borders of a Europe in which all other states were disarmed. The chief areas of agreement at this conference were that Germany should be dismembered after the war and that Poland could obtain East Prussia.