DIVIDING THE SPOILS

THE ALLIES CONFER AT QUEBEC, MOSCOW AND YALTA

As the purely military aspects of the war became increasingly clear cut following the Allied successes in 1944, the political considerations of victory began to have increasing significance in the minds of the Allied leaders. Roosevelt had become increasingly trustful and admiring of Marshal Stalin, a trait that Winston Churchill did not find to his liking but which may have had some of its origins in the pro-Soviet sympathies of the President's long-time confidant and adviser Harry Hopkins. Churchill, for his part, was deeply worried about Stalin's intentions in Eastern Europe, and, while confident of a successful and friendly relationship with the Russian leader for as long as Hitler's Germany remained their common enemy, was aware that divergent interests would almost certainly prevail once Germany was defeated.

A further factor in the equation was the imminence of the US Presidential elections of November 1944, and the President's failing health. Despite his obviously being sick and in a state of decline, President Roosevelt clearly felt it to be his duty to see America through the closing stages of the war he had done so much to bring to a successful conclusion for the Allies. He therefore ran for a fourth term of office, and, no doubt feeling that a lame horse was better than an unknown mount at this crucial stage of the war, the American people duly elected him for a further term on November 7th 1944. However, there is no doubt that his faculties were less acute than they had been, particularly by the time of the all-important Yalta Conference in the Crimea in February 1945, and that Stalin used this factor to his own and Russia's advantage, and to the disadvantage of the whole of Eastern Europe.

The development of the Allied agreements on the partition of Europe that emerged from the series of three conferences began when Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec on September 11th 1944. Called principally to discuss the role of Britain's armed forces in the defeat of Japan after the victory in Germany had been concluded, the Quebec conference tackled the partition of Europe almost as an afterthought - but the discussions were crucial. On the Japanese war, the decisions reached were all made on the assumption, then current in US Staff circles, that the defeat of Japan would take a further eighteen months after Germany had been conquered. The US Chiefs of Staff had hoped that substantial elements of the British Army would be sent as reinforcements to the Australian and New Zealand troops that had long been under General MacArthur's command, but Churchill was opposed to this. In a lengthy minute quoted in full in "Triumph and Tragedy", Volume 6 of his The Second World War , Churchill pronounced himself in favour of "British diversionary exercises on a major scale calculated to wear down the enemy forces by land and air, and also to regain British possessions conquered by the Japanese". He proposed to the Quebec Conference ... a direct thrust across the Bay of Bengal aimed at "Dracula'' (Rangoon), "Culverin'' (Sumatra) or other attainable preliminary objectives'.

According to Churchill, the British delegation at Quebec carried the Americans with it on the Rangoon plan, which he saw as having many advantages as a strategy. Churchill pointed out that six months' fighting in the hills and jungles of Burma and on the frontier of India was estimated to have cost the British and Empire forces 288,000 losses from sickness alone, but that a seaborne strike against Rangoon and a northward advance would cut the enemy's communications and divide his forces at minimum cost. Churchill in fact went so far as to suggest that the USA might care to lend Britain a couple of divisions to fight in Burma, but his suggestion was, he says, "not adopted".

Thus the final verdict at Quebec on the Far Eastern War was that Britain should "give naval assistance on the largest scale to the main American operations" but should "keep our own thrust for Rangoon as a preliminary operation ... to a major attack upon Singapore".

The Morgenthau Plan

The strangest and most controversial decision taken at Quebec was the adoption of the infamous Morgenthau Plan as Allied policy. With hindsight, it seems incredible that such a plan should have been suggested, let alone supported by Roosevelt and accepted by Churchill. That it was thus accepted, and that we find its acceptance so strange, is a measure of the extent to which attitudes to Germany and the German wars, and thought on issues of the rights of nations and peoples have changed in almost forty-five years.

Henry Morgenthau Junior was the Secretary of the Treasury in Roosevelt's administration. He became aware in August 1944 that there was discussion between General Eisenhower and the US War Department to formulate policies for the treatment of Germany and its population, industry and institutions once Germany had been defeated. Being in the President's confidence, he formulated his own proposals for the Allied treatment of Germany, and took them, behind the War Department's back, to Roosevelt. Roosevelt concurred in Morgenthau's proposals, despite the opposition of Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, and the Morgenthau Plan therefore went to Quebec as a firm American proposal.

The Plan proposed that Germany would not only have all factories, steel production plants and industrial enterprises destroyed, but would also be forbidden the production of industrial raw materials. The coal and iron mines were to be flooded and destroyed, and the entire population was to be forced to return to an entirely agricultural and peasant way of life, dependent totally on the growing of crops and the breeding of animals.

Nobody seems to have made at the time the point that seems so obvious now - that the plan was, in all but the crucial aspect of mass murder, not unlike the SS ideals of the manipulation of populations and racial supremacy. The plan was both impractical and inhuman. On September 13th, Churchill is reported by his doctor, Lord Moran, as having said at a dinner in Quebec "I'm all for disarming Germany, but we ought not to prevent her living decently. There are bonds between the working classes of all countries, and the English people will not stand for the policy you are advocating. Yet by September 15th he had apparently been convinced by Professor Lindemann (Lord Cherwell) that the plan had the advantage of eliminating a postwar trade competitor, and should therefore be adopted. In all events, Churchill signed. Anthony Eden, then Britain's Foreign Secretary, remarked in his memoirs that its proposals for the Ruhr were like deciding to turn the Black Country into Devonshire.

Resistance to the Morgenthau Plan mounted once it was known that it had been signed. To Henry Stimson's side came Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Deputy Secretary of War John McCloy and General Eisenhower. Finally Harry Hopkins joined the protest movement - and at that point Roosevelt convinced Morgenthau that the plan must be shelved. It never saw the light of day again.

The Moscow Meeting

Churchill now turned his attention to his increasing fears that Stalin's political motives underlying the massive Soviet war effort were not entirely unblemished. It was by now clear that the Soviet Union had every intention of sweeping Europe on a massive front from the Baltic in the North, and (apparently) to the Adriatic in the South. Although Churchill was not over concerned about Rumania and Hungary, he was deeply interested to see that Poland and Austria were treated justly, and to ensure that Greece was not enslaved unwillingly (or even willingly) to Communism.

At the end of September 1944, Churchill therefore broached to Stalin the idea of a meeting in Moscow, and flew to see the Russian leader on October 9th. Roosevelt had declined to attend the conference on the grounds that the Presidential elections were close at hand, and delegated Averell Harriman as his observer, but with no power to negotiate on behalf of the United States. Furthermore, to Churchill's considerable chagrin, Roosevelt made it quite clear in a letter to Stalin that the would not be bound by any decision taken at Moscow, and that he regarded any discussions merely as a preliminary to a further conference of all three leaders. Churchill took this (correctly) as a lack of trust on Roosevelt's part in the conservatism of his (Churchill's) strategic thinking, but coming so soon after the Morgenthau episode, one might be forgiven for thinking that Roosevelt was being high-handed, to say the least.

Late in the evening of October 9th, immediately after their tiring trip to Moscow, Churchill and Eden met Stalin and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, for initial discussions. Harriman had yet to arrive, so there was no US presence. As if from a hat, Churchill produced immediately proposals for the possible division of Europe into spheres of influence after the end of the war. While the translators were explaining to Stalin and Molotov the Churchill plans, Churchill wrote down on a scrap of paper the world-changing proposal that influence in the Balkans and Eastern Europe should be apportioned as:

Rumania.

Russia 90%

The others 10%

Yugoslavia 50-50 %

Hungary 50-50 %

Greece

Great Britain (in accord with USA)90%

Russia 10%

Bulgaria

Russia 75%

The others 25%

According to Eden, Stalin simply ticked the piece of paper and returned it to Churchill, who subsequently wrote "it was all settled in no more time than it takes to write down".

The scene is unmistakably redolent of the meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938 when Hitler almost absent-mindedly signed Chamberlain's scrap of paper. Churchill was not sufficiently naive to claim "peace in our time" - but subsequent experience showed that his fundamental instincts about Stalin and the Soviet government were correct and that the Soviet Union had no intention of honouring any agreement in respect of Eastern Europe unless it operated to its advantage.

On October 13th, delegates of the Polish government in exile, who were naturally deeply concerned at the existence of a Russian-backed communist Lublin "National Committee", met Stalin, Molotov, Churchill, Eden and Harriman. Their mission was to discuss two issues - the formation of a unified Polish government after the ejection of Germany from their country, and the troubled question of the postwar Polish eastern frontier. The unfortunate Poles, led by their Prime Minister Stanislas Mikolajczyk, discovered for the first time at this meeting that the Allies had already decided at Teheran that the Curzon Line was to become their postwar frontier - which meant the loss to Russia of 48 per cent of the territory Poland had had in 1939, including the cities of Lvov and Vilnyus. Expecting support from the British delegation against this plan - after all, Britain had gone to war in 1939 over a much smaller part of Poland - the Polish government team found that Churchill was vehement in his support for it. In this, Churchill was doing no more than recognising the inevitable, but to the Poles it looked like, and possibly was, a sell-out.

And so to Yalta

During the winter of 1944/45, much occurred which altered the world stage and the dispositions of the politicians upon it. Roosevelt, re-elected on November 7th, had a new and effective Vice-President to replace the professional nonentity, Henry Wallace, who had been his understudy almost since America's war had begun. Harry S. Truman, though inexperienced in government, rose well to the occasion when catapulted into one of the most powerful positions on earth in April 1945, and was an able and worthy man.

During that same winter, the President had become visibly more frail and ill, and Lord Moran, when he saw him in February at Yalta, diagnosed at a distance advanced atherosclerosis and gave as his unofficial opinon that he had only months to live. On the military front, as we have seen, the Ardennes offensive had come and gone, and the Allies in the West were poised for the assault on the Rhine. In Eastern Europe, the Russians had swept into Poland and were about to stabilise their front on the Oder. Germany was demonstrably defeated. The matter of final decisions on territorial rights and the administration of Germany after the war had become urgent.

On February 2nd 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill arrived in Malta to confer with the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, who had been finalising over the previous few days the plans for the final sweep into the centre of Germany from the West. Having agreed the plans, the two leaders flew to the Crimea for the Yalta Conference, the first meeting of which took place on the following day, February 4th. From the start, Stalin had the conference under control. He proposed that the ailing Roosevelt should be in the chair, and thereby effectively reduced the influence of Churchill's ally in the discussions. Of the other US delegates to whom Churchill might have turned, Harry Hopkins was very pro-Russian and, by now, somewhat out of favour with Roosevelt, and the US team even included a diplomat called Alger Hiss, who in 1950 was convicted in the USA for perjury in respect of his communist party membership. Clearly the pro-socialist camp was in the ascendant.

The troubled conference came to final decisions on three major areas of concern-Poland, Germany and the Far East. Let us look at the conclusions on each in turn.

Poland: It was agreed that the Oder and the Neisse were to become the Western boundary of Poland, although Stalin took the opportunity to claim that he had reffered all along to the Western Neisse, when everybody else had been referring to the Eastern Neisse, which actually passes through the town of Neisse. Stalin's winning of this point meant the uprooting of 8 million Germans. The Soviet leader made some modest concessions on the location of the Eastern frontier, but they were of relatively little significance. The Polish government was to be created from both the Communist Lublin Committee and from the London government in exile, but nobody specified how many members of the government were to be allotted from each. Since Molotov was to chair the steering commission, the outcome was never in doubt.

Germany: After some difficulty, the British delegation persuaded Stalin to accept that France should be a member of the Allied Control Commission that would administer Germany after the surrender. The borders of the Allied occupation zones were decided, and the principle of dividing Germany permanently was agreed, although without any detailed proposals being settled. Innstead, acommission was set up under the chairmanship of Britains Anthony Eden to study the problem. Roosevelt and Stalin agreed between them that Germany should pay '20,000 million dollars in reparations, half of it to be paid in kind to the Soviet Union by the transfer of industrial equipment, anuual deliveries of goods and the use of German manpower".

The Far East: In return for the return to the USSR of the Southern part of the island of Sakhalin, the port of Dairen, the Manchuria Railway and its lease on Port Arthur, all lost to Japan after the war of 1905, plus the Kurile Islands, Russia undertook in a secret agreement to lend forces to the defeat of Japan after the defeat of Germany.

Thus did a tyrant, a dying President and and a great Prime Minister with few cards to play settle the fate of a large part of Europe and the Far East in the space of a few days. Meanwhile, far from their remote meeting-place in the Crimea the war raged on.