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

The Battle of the Bulge was hardly over before the German defenses in the west had to sustain a series of shifting hammerlike blows preparatory to the Allied invasion of Germany. Plans for the spring offensives showed 85 Allied divisions attacking 80 understrength German divisions. In the east the Germans were already reeling before the Soviet winter offensive of 155 divisions. On March 7, 1945, the American 9th Armored Division captured the Ludendorff Railway Bridge across the Rhine at Remagen a few minutes before it was to have been blown up by the Germans. In spite of desperate Nazi efforts to destroy it, this could not be done for ten days. By that time it was too late, for other crossings had been established, and many Allied divisions were across. By the end of March 1945, German strength in the west amounted to no more than 46 divisions heavily pressed by 85 Allied divisions. As the official History of the United States Army put it, “The German Army could no longer be considered a major obstacle.” But the German military leaders, under the fanatical insistence of Hitler and Himmler, were not permitted to surrender.

The Allied advance in the west was regarded with mixed feelings in Moscow, where there was real concern that the Germans might shift all their strength to the east to oppose Russia while admitting the Anglo-American forces in the west. The Germans regarded the Russians as sub-humans aroused to frenzy by German atrocities on Soviet soil, and had every reason to fear Russian occupation and retaliation, while everyone knew that any American occupation would be motivated by humanitarian considerations rather than by retaliation. The Nazi leaders were too much absorbed in their own irrationalities to adopt such tactics as these, however, although the Soviet leaders continued to dread the possibility and convinced themselves, in spite of the contradictory evidence, that it was likely. Accordingly, the Soviet advance became a race with the Western Powers, even though these Powers, by Eisenhower’s orders, held back their advance at many points (such as Prague) to allow the Russians to occupy areas the Americans could easily have taken first.

From midsummer of 1943 until the war’s end in May 1945, the Soviet offensive in the east was almost continuous. In January 1944, Russian forces crossed the old border into Poland; in February they pushed the Germans back from besieged Leningrad, and, in the following month, they began a southern offensive which crossed the Prut into Romania. In July 1944, the Soviet armies reached the Vistula River, across from Warsaw, and began an offensive to overrun Romania. These events raised in acute form the problem of who would rule over the liberated areas of eastern Europe.

In general, the Anglo-Americans recognized the Russian need for security along their western frontier, but felt that this could be obtained if independent states with constitutional governments (in which the Communist Party played a role) could be established in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia. They saw no hope of liberating the Baltic states from Russia, and paid little attention to Finland. It was generally felt that Russian security in eastern Europe could be assured if the victorious Powers, including Russia, could retain their unity in the postwar period and operate together in a United Nations organization in peacetime as they had done in war. While the Western Powers recognized that the Russians had a justifiable suspicion of international organizations based on their unhappy experiences with the League of Nations, it was felt that this could be overcome by the English-speaking Powers giving evidence of their new spirit of cooperation and by the existence of regional arrangements, such as the Anglo-Soviet twenty-year alliance of May 26, 1942, or the French-Soviet agreement of December 10, 1944. All efforts to achieve some arrangement with Russia over the lesser states was deeply involved with the indecisive negotiations about the fate of Germany.

There was general agreement about Germany to the extent that the errors of October 1918 would not be repeated: German military leaders would be forced to sign a total capitulation without any legal restrictions on the victors’ future behavior toward Germany; Germany would then fall under the victors’ rule directly through military government; considerable portions of eastern Germany, possibly as far west as the western Neisse River (the line of the Oder), would be taken from Germany; Germany would be completely disarmed and industrially crippled; and considerable reparations in kind would be taken from her. The apparent conflict between the desire to reduce Germany’s industrial level and the desire to obtain reparations from her was glossed over temporarily by a plan to dismantle German industrial plants as reparations for Russia.

These agreements about Germany left unsettled at least three major questions and, in consequence, left Stalin with a strong feeling of insecurity about Germany’s future: there was no agreement whether Germany would be dismembered or be treated as a unity, even under military occupation; there was no agreement about the nature of the future German government; and there was no agreement about methods for permanent enforcement of German disarmament and restricted industrial development.

We need not narrate the continuous series of negotiations, temporary agreements, misunderstandings, and reinterpretations which went on for years among the Allied Powers regarding the fate of Germany and of the liberated countries. The idea that the Soviet Union and the Anglo-American Powers could continue to cooperate in peace as they had done in war, either by diplomacy and conference of their leaders or within some structure of international organization, was naive. Such a possibility was foreclosed by two factors: the fundamental underlying suspicions on both sides, even in wartime, and the very nature of the political power of modern states.

For these two reasons, both sides, in the midst of reassuring public statements about their solidarity of outlook and plans for postwar cooperation, began to work toward another, more realistic arrangement of spheres of interest and power balances. This alternative, and ultimately inevitable, path was adopted earlier by Stalin and Churchill than by Roosevelt, not because the latter was naive or ill but because he wanted to smother the naked opposition of power balances by a chaotic blanket of legal restrictions, conflicting public opinion, and alternative institutional arrangements which would hamper the outright operation of power conflicts and which would allow men like himself to divert and postpone crises from day to day, while they improvised better economic and social arrangements for their peoples in the successive intervals of peace won from the postponement of forcible solutions to power conflicts. None of this could be achieved, in Roosevelt’s view, unless Stalin’s mania of suspicion of capitalist Powers could be reduced by granting him as concessions things he could not be prevented from taking anyway. In the last resort Roosevelt’s sense of the realities of power were quite as acute as Churchill’s or Stalin’s, but he concealed that sense much more deliberately and much more completely under a screen of high-sounding moral principles and idealistic statements of popular appeal. It is unlikely that Roosevelt had any alternative plan based on power politics to fall back upon if his stated aims of postwar cooperation and United Nations failed. Churchill, on the other hand, while sincerely pursuing cooperative goals, had a secondary outline based on power balance and spheres of interest. Stalin reversed Churchill’s priorities, giving primary position to spheres of power and secondary, rather ironic, acceptance of cooperation and international organizations.