World War II Behind Closed Doors (58 page)

One crucial matter had been finally settled before the Potsdam Conference – Western recognition of the government of Poland. In June the ‘new’ provisional government was established – although to the uninitiated it looked very much like the ‘old’ provisional government, with around 75 per cent of its members supported by the Soviets. The previous inability of the Western Allies to recognize the Soviet-backed Poles had, it was suspected, been the cause of Stalin's refusal to allow Molotov to attend a meeting in San Francisco to discuss the United Nations. This problem had concerned Roosevelt deeply during his last days, and although Stalin had finally relented and as a gesture to Truman agreed that Molotov could go to the meeting after all, it was a sign of just how ruthlessly the Soviets would play politics. There were many other ways in which the Soviets could destabilize the relationship with the West if they wished. And now that a face-saving formula had been found over the interim government of Poland, both the British and Americans embraced it with alacrity. In the process they confirmed once again their acceptance of the new borders of Poland, which gave the Soviet Union almost all the territory in the east of the country that they had taken in 1939 under the deal with the Nazis.

The Americans recognized the provisional government as the legitimate rulers of Poland on 5 July, and the British followed one day later. The bitterness of the remaining members of the Polish government in exile and the other Poles who had fought alongside the Western Allies was, understandably, immense. General Anders wrote: ‘Thus the Polish President, Mr Raczkiewicz, who in 1940 had been greeted at Paddington Station by King George VI, the
Polish Government in London, and the Polish forces, who had fought so long at the side of Great Britain and the United States, were discarded…. In 1940 Mr Churchill had assured General Sikorski that we were bound together in this war for life or death. But Soviet Russia was much stronger than these promises’.
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But unbeknown to Anders, by the time of Potsdam the British had already considered and rejected the possibility of imposing ‘upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire’. In the wake of the Soviets' perceived failure to stick to the Yalta agreement, Churchill had ordered British military planners to consider a worst case, military option against the Soviet Union. Called, aptly enough, Operation Unthinkable, the final report was completed on 22 May 1945. It is in many ways a bizarre document, not least because it represents the contemplation of a sudden and immense change of course for British policy. The conclusion of the report was stark – and somewhat obvious: ‘If our political object is to be achieved with certainty and with lasting results, the defeat of Russia in a total war will be necessary. The result of a total war with Russia is not possible to forecast, but the one thing that is certain is that to win it would take us a very long time’.
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The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, was less circumspect in his diary, writing on 24 May: ‘This evening went carefully through the Planners' report on the possibility of taking on Russia should trouble arise on our future discussions with her. We were instructed to carry out this investigation. The idea is, of course, fantastic and the chance of success quite impossible’.
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It was a long way from the initial military assessment of the capabilities of the Soviet Union back in the summer of 1941, when the Red Army had been expected to resist the Germans only for a matter of weeks. Now, the idea of ‘conquering’ the Soviet Union was something that few could contemplate seriously.

At the same time as Churchill was digesting this news, his relationship with Truman was getting off to a sticky start. Truman had recognized immediately that Britain was very much the minor partner in the triangular relationship with the Soviet Union. The new American President had not even bothered to discuss with
Churchill beforehand the Hopkins mission to Moscow. He had also declined Churchill's invitation to meet together to discuss tactics before the tripartite encounter with Stalin. And in a decision that added further tension to the already strained relationship, Truman sent Joseph Davies – the man who had memorably remarked to Stalin in May 1943 that after the war Britain would be ‘financially through’ – to Britain in order to explain American policy. The meeting between Davies and Churchill did not – to put it mildly – go well.

Truman had also received a number of passionate suggestions from Churchill about how the relationship with Stalin should be hardened because of the Soviets' failure to implement the Yalta agreement. In particular, Churchill suggested that the Western Allies should not withdraw from the area of Germany they currently occupied, which lay within the Yalta-agreed Soviet-controlled sphere. He even sent Truman a telegram warning that ‘an iron curtain is being drawn down on their [the Soviet] front’.
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But Truman wanted no dramatic confrontation with Stalin, especially one orchestrated by Churchill. The British Prime Minister got the impression that Truman was trying to edge him out of matters still more by asking the British to attend the Potsdam Conference only after the Americans had already spent time alone with Stalin. On this basis, said Churchill, he was simply ‘not prepared to attend’.
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As a result, the Americans agreed that he should be present from the beginning.

The Potsdam Conference began on 17 July 1945, with meetings held at the Cecilienhof, the former home of the German Crown Prince Wilhelm. The American President stayed near by in a grand house that had until recently belonged to a wealthy German publisher, Hans-Dietrich Müller Grote. But Truman did not know about the sinister history of the place until the 1950s, when the son of the former owner wrote to him. ‘In the beginning of May the Russians arrived. Ten weeks before you entered this house, its tenants were living in constant fright and fear. By day and by night plundering Russian soldiers went in and out, raping my sisters before their own parents and children, beating up my
old parents. All furniture, wardrobes and trunks etc. were smashed with bayonets and rifle butts, their contents spilled and destroyed in an indescribable manner…’.
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But although at the time Truman did not know about these specific incidents, the general behaviour of the Red Army in Berlin was all too apparent. ‘The Soviets were, of course, “liberating” everything in sight’, says George Elsey, who was part of the American delegation at Potsdam. ‘Soviet trucks, mostly American-made, were hauling off anything that was haulable to be shipped back to the Soviet Union to help rebuild their economy. Even in the palace where the conference was being held, even when it was going on, the Soviets were stripping plumbing fixtures, stripping everything they could except from the small area where the conference itself was being held’.

Elsey and the other Americans were also aware of the attitude of the Soviets towards the Germans: ‘We were hearing about the rapes – we were hearing them from the soldiers. British and American soldiers that were in the area had quite unbelievable stories about the behaviour of Soviets to the German populace. But finally when it was repeated over and over again I had to accept that this indeed was happening…. I don't think it made me feel differently about the Soviet Union as a whole – this was just the behaviour of men who'd been under enormous pressure for years, reacting in a human, brute manner’. American and British soldiers were not behaving in a similar way because, Elsey believed, ‘their countries had not been subjected to all the problems that the Soviet Union had been for so many years. And we thought we had better discipline, better training, better behaviour, better education. They [British and American troops], after all, weren't peasants from God knows where – they were young, good British citizens, young, good American citizens. So we were proud of the fact that our troops were behaving well in contrast to the Soviets’.

At midday on 17 July, Harry Truman met Stalin for the first time. And Truman, like Roosevelt and Churchill before him, was impressed when he encountered the Soviet leader face to face. ‘I
can deal with Stalin’, he wrote in his journal.
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‘He is honest – but smart as hell’. The new American President was quick to tell his Soviet counterpart how he liked to work: ‘I told Stalin that I am no diplomat but usually said yes or no to questions after hearing all the argument. It pleased him’. They discussed Franco's role in Spain (‘He wants to fire Franco’, recorded Truman, ‘to which I wouldn't object’), Italy (Stalin, Truman wrote, wanted to ‘divide up the Italian mandates’) and the Chinese situation. Stalin also confirmed to Truman that he would be ‘in the Jap war on August 15’.

But, as Truman well knew, there was a massive subject that was as yet unspoken between the United States and the Soviet Union – something the new American President called ‘dynamite… which I'm not exploding now’. Truman himself had only learnt of the existence of this ‘dynamite’ less than three months earlier. On 25 April he had been briefed for the first time about the Manhattan Project – the attempt to develop a nuclear bomb. Despite the scale and cost of this work, Truman had not been told about it during Roosevelt's lifetime. Once he had been let in on the secret, however, he instantly grasped both the potential of the new weapon and its effect on the relationship with the Soviet Union. And just before the start of the Potsdam Conference a successful test of the weapon had taken place in the New Mexico desert – the bomb was exploded for the first time at the Almagordo test site on 16 July, the day before Truman met Stalin.

The existence of the bomb brought many new political questions to the fore: not least, whether or not to tell Stalin about it. Churchill and Roosevelt had both previously agreed not to inform Stalin about the development of the bomb – a sign that both of them still harboured suspicions about Stalin's ultimate trustworthiness; though some of their staff, such as George Elsey maintained that since the Soviet Union wasn't yet involved in the war against Japan, the conflict in which the bomb would be used, the existence of this new weapon was simply none of his business. The committee that Truman set up to advise him about the use of the bomb initially suggested a continuation of this policy and that the Soviets should learn about the new weapon only when it was
used against the Japanese. But before Potsdam the advisers changed their minds and recommended that Stalin should be told. Truman discussed the question at a private lunch with Churchill on 18 July, and recorded that they now ‘decided to tell Stalin about it’. Truman also said he believed the ‘Japs will fold up before the Russians come in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland’.

Significantly, in that same journal entry Truman waxed lyrical about his chat with Stalin. He wrote that he had invited the Soviet leader to visit America, and was prepared to send the US battleship
Missouri
to collect him. Stalin had told him that ‘he wanted to cooperate with US in peace as we had cooperated in war but it would be harder. Said he was grossly misunderstood in US and I was misunderstood in Russia. Told him that we could help to remedy that situation in our home countries and that I intended to try with all I had to do my part at home. He gave me a most cordial smile and said he would do as much in Russia’.

Churchill, despite his angry telegrams about Stalin's perceived breaches of the Yalta agreement, similarly softened once more when he met Stalin in the flesh. As Cadogan recorded in his diary: ‘He is again under Stalin's spell. He kept repeating “I like that man”’.
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Cadogan, ever an intelligent if cynical apparatchik, added: ‘I am full of admiration of Stalin's handling of him’.

Truman finally mentioned to Stalin, after the plenary meeting at Potsdam on 24 July, that the United States had ‘recently tested a new weapon of unusual destructive force’.
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Stalin asked no questions about the ‘new weapon’ and replied that he hoped the Americans would make good use of it against the Japanese.

The explanation for Stalin's lack of curiosity is simple: he already knew all about the Manhattan Project. The Soviets gained their information from spies who were scientists at Los Alamos, notably Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass. At his trial in 1951, Greenglass revealed that he had been passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union since November 1944. The motive of many of these spies was not just straightforward Communist sympathies, but a desire that the Americans (and British, who shared in the
research) should not have a monopoly on the physics behind the atomic weapon.

Zoya Zarubina was one of the Soviet officials trusted with the secret task of translating the American information about the nuclear bomb. ‘We got these papers from somebody – well, let's call it “friends of the Soviet Union” – and from our own intelligence services, and we were very, very rapidly translating them for the Russians to understand’. Most of the material she worked with was of an extremely technical nature and so ‘little by little we had engineers attached to us. We would do two pages and then the engineers would come and say: “No, no. This is foolish – can it be that?” We thought it a little like a mosaic, a puzzle…. Stalin knew more than I did – he knew from A to Z’.

Stalin had been so concerned to gain what advantage he could from Nazi atomic research that he had authorized Beria to send a specialised search team to comb Soviet-occupied Germany for information about German progress in this most crucial scientific area. The team, led by Colonel General Zavenyagin, arrived in Berlin even before the end of the war in Europe, and several prominent German scientists were traced, detained and transported to the Soviet Union.
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Truman had first mentioned the existence of this ‘new weapon’ to Stalin at the end of a fractious discussion among the three leaders about the Soviet attitude to the Yalta agreement. It was a meeting that crystallized the differences between them. The Western Allies complained that restrictions were being made on their representatives in the countries occupied by the Soviet Union. Stalin simply denied that this was so. Truman reiterated the demand that ‘all satellite governments are reorganized on democratic lines as was agreed by all at the Yalta conference’. Churchill for his part said that ‘With regard to Romania and in particular Bulgaria we know nothing. Our mission in Bucharest has been penned up with a closeness that approaches internment’.