‘I regret our domestic situation has caused delay in the Conference. We are willing to sit as long as necessary.’
Attlee at Potsdam, 28 July 1945
The end of the European war presumably entailed a European peace treaty. Everyone agreed on that. The First World War had led to the Paris conference, which spawned a series of peace treaties, the most important being that signed at Versailles. In one sense, nobody wanted a repetition of Versailles, which currently enjoyed a very bad press; it was blamed for betraying the hopes of the heroic Allied soldiers, for imposing an unworkable system of reparations, for creating a League of Nations that was crippled by lack of American participation, and ultimately for failing to keep the peace. Roosevelt and Churchill, both in subordinate office at the time of Versailles, had shown themselves determined not to make the same mistakes again; likewise the men to become their successors, Truman and Attlee, who had both served in the trenches as junior officers. Yet they all expected another Versailles, in the sense of a final peace treaty legally ending the war. As it turned out, though such a treaty was eventually to be signed (and again in Paris) this did not eventuate until November 1990, and all that happened in 1945 was a final meeting of the Big Three in an outer suburb of the capital of their defeated enemy, and with only one of the leaders who had attended the conference at Yalta still present for the conclusion of that held at Potsdam.
It was Churchill who had begun pressing for the Big Three to meet from the moment that the German surrender was in the bag. He was worried about the ‘iron curtain’ and, if Operation Unthinkable remained just that, still reluctant to surrender control of those parts of the assigned Soviet zone currently occupied by British trooops. As a potential bargaining counter against Stalin, this had to be played soon or not at all.
Truman, still feeling his way, was less anxious for haste. There was a widespread American view, not only in the press but also within the administration, that the British were using the current difficulties in Poland to drive a wedge between the United States and the Soviet Union. Isaiah Berlin reported from Washington: ‘The myth of Mr Roosevelt as a great and wise mediator between the powerful figures of Mr Churchill and Marshal Stalin, whose policies might otherwise have come into open collision seems to be deeply embedded in the popular consciousness of the American people.’1 Nobody had been more closely identified with FDR’s foreign policy than Harry Hopkins, who now told James Forrestal that ‘it was of vital importance that we be not manoeuvred into a position where Great Britain had us lined up with them as a bloc against Russia to implement England’s European policy.’2
The suspicion died hard, even among his American friends, that Churchill would use any ploy to prop up the power of the British Empire. In such matters Truman was Roosevelt’s successor in more than name (and initially relied on many of the same advisers, of course, from the quizzically Anglophile Hopkins to the frankly Anglophobe Admiral Leahy). In a re-run of Roosevelt’s manoeuvres before Yalta, the new President played for time and in particular resisted the suggestion that he might visit Great Britain first, using the well-worn argument that no impression of ‘ganging up’ on Stalin should be given in advance.
Truman wanted to be assured of a successful conclusion to the San Francisco conference before the Big Three met. He wanted this in itself but also because it would free him of his obligations to Stettinius, and thus allow him to take James Byrnes instead as his new Secretary of State to the projected summit meeting.
In parallel moves in late May, Truman sent two personal representatives to talk to Stalin and to Churchill respectively. For Moscow, the choice was deft: Hopkins, despite frail health, was persuaded to pick up the threads with Stalin, trading on the residual amity of Yalta to try to resolve outstanding difficulties. In their talks (again fully recorded by Chip Bohlen) Stalin blamed any Polish difficulties on the conveniently absent British – ‘he was speaking only of England and said that the British conservatives did not desire to see a Poland friendly to the Soviet Union.’ When Harriman, also present as US ambassador, took the opportunity to assert that ‘it was obviously desirable that the United States and the Soviet Union should talk alone’, Stalin agreed that this was ‘correct and very much to the point’. One assertion that Stalin repeatedly made to Hopkins – along with suggestions that Hitler was still alive – was that ‘he did not intend to have the British manage the affairs of Poland.’3
Nor were they given any chance to do so. A renegotiation of the Yalta stipulations about the future government of Poland, affecting its composition, was completed without British assistance. And the fate of the sixteen Polish prisoners? ‘I am doing everything under heaven to get these people out of jug’ were Hopkins’s soothing words to Churchill.4 But the real message, that the prisoners’ fate was a side issue, was one accepted by Britons and Americans alike. After Hopkins’s departure, Stalin put the sixteen through a brisk show trial; some were condemned simply for using radios to communicate with London, where The Times on 22 June nonetheless hailed the sentences as an example of Soviet forbearance. The new agreement offered the London Poles minority representation in a provisional government, which they were induced to accept. ‘How right you were to take the momentous decision you took in my room,’ Churchill later assured a doubtful Mikolajczyk.5 The Prime Minister himself, however, had only assented to it as a done deal that was better than deadlock. In a notably gloomy disquisition to the cabinet on 11 June he concluded that ‘never in his life had he been more worried by the European situation than he was at present.’6 His own marginal role in this essentially bilateral settlement on Poland starkly demonstrated his position as a charter member of the Big Three whose subscription had lapsed.
The eclipse of Great Britain’s great-power status was signalled by Truman’s rebarbative choice of his emissary to England. Joseph Davies had been American ambassador to the Soviet Union, of which he had formed a benignly favourable impression. His wife was a major contributor to the Democratic Party. Joe Davies was the sort of regular party loyalist with whom Truman felt comfortable. But he was not held in any esteem in London, where the best Alec Cadogan could say of him on one occasion was: ‘J.D. didn't give himself away and said nothing startlingly stupid.’7 At any rate, Davies was hardly the ideal person to break the news to Churchill that the American President proposed to meet the Russian leader – and that perhaps the British Prime Minister might care to join the two of them at some later point.
This, at any rate, was the proposal as Churchill understood it in the course of an after-dinner discussion on 26 May that lasted deep into the night at Chequers. He later summarized the position in a minute which he obviously intended for the President’s benefit. ‘It must be remembered that Britain and the United States are united at this time upon the same ideologies, namely, freedom, and the principles set out in the American Constitution and humbly reproduced with modern variations in the Atlantic Charter,’ Churchill wrote, explaining his refusal ‘to accept the idea that the position of the United States is that Britain and Soviet Russia are just two foreign Powers, six of one and half a dozen of the other, with whom the troubles of the late war have to be adjusted’. Specifically, he made clear his refusal to attend any such meeting except as a full participant, adding with aggrieved formality: ‘The Prime Minister does not see that there is any need to raise an issue so wounding to Britain, to the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations.’8
Far from falling about in confusion or embarrassment, Joe Davies was not impressed, least of all by the Prime Minister’s anti-Soviet rhetoric. As he put it in his own report for the President, Churchill ‘was now expressing the doctrine which Hitler and Goebbels had been proclaiming and reiterating for the past four years in an effort to break up allied unity and “Divide and Conquer” ’.9
Truman clearly did not find, in the reports from either of his chosen emissaries, any encouragement for giving the British a central role. But the concept of the Big Three unexpectedly received artificial resuscitation from Moscow, perhaps because Soviet diplomacy was accustomed to proceed like a very slow tram following a very old schedule along very familiar tramlines. On 27 May an invitation arrived from Moscow for a Big Three meeting. So at least the Russians recognized Britain’s right to attend. Churchill thus found himself rescued by an independent initiative from Stalin, launched just before the latter’s talks had begun with Hopkins. The Russian motivation was that this proposed meeting of the Allies was to be held in the Berlin area, in territory currently occupied by the Soviet Union, thus focusing the attention of the world on the Red Army’s liberating role. After waiting for Davies to report back to him in person, Truman acquiesced.
The planned meeting of the Big Three thus had something for everyone. Churchill, despite a nasty moment along the way, was relieved to be invited at all. Stalin succeeded in making himself host in all but name. Truman was content that his wishes were respected in deferring the summit until 15 July. He had his own reasons for this choice of date. By then, as it turned out, all British and American troops had withdrawn within their own zones of occupation, thus allowing the Russians, as Churchill later put it in his 1946 Fulton speech, ‘to occupy this vast expanse of territory which the Western democracies had conquered’.10
But sticking to the assignment of zones, as agreed at Yalta, cut both ways. For it needs to be remembered that the Western democracies were meanwhile allowed to occupy their assigned three sectors of Berlin, which the Red Army had conquered. It was made clear to Eisenhower, when he negotiated with his Russian opposite number, Marshal Zhukov, that the status of Berlin and the Allied control commission would not be settled until and unless the British and US forces withdrew from the Russian zone. Neither Eisenhower nor his own commander-in-chief (Truman) nor any senior presidential advisers saw any point in prolonging this stand-off, especially since it would be a direct breach of the same Yalta agreements which they were currently trying to make the Russians honour. Again Churchill found himself forced to retreat from an isolated position. The parallel troop movements on all sides were in fact to be completed only ten days before the start of the conference.
Monday, 28 May, had found a cheerful Prime Minister, his invitation to Berlin in his pocket, presiding over a reception at 10 Downing Street. This was attended by both his present Conservative ministers and his former Labour and Liberal colleagues: a triumphant funeral wake for the Coalition Government that had won the war. Churchill addressed them all, with tears running down his cheeks, as he recalled their historic achievement: ‘The light will shine on every helmet.’ He went on to say that he was sure that, ‘if ever such a mortal danger threatened, we would all do the same again.’ Hugh Dalton, the likeliest choice as Foreign Secretary if Labour were to win the election, recorded this remark in his diary with evident puzzlement. ‘I wondered whether this meant anything. If so, it could only have meant Russia,’ he commented. ‘Probably it was only a phrase.’ Anything else seemed unthinkable at the time. Churchill’s own goodwill and good spirits were unambiguous in his announcement that ‘when he went to meet Stalin and Truman, he wanted to take with him “My good friend, Clem Attlee” to show that, whatever happened in the election, we were a United Nation.’11
Exactly a week later, Churchill made his first election broadcast. What attracted almost all the attention and comment at the time, as subsequently, was his warning against what a socialist government would mean: ‘They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.’12 It would be directed, presumably, by his good friend, Clem Attlee. ‘I met Attlee in the lavatory, and he seemed shrunken and terrified, and scarcely smiled,’ Chips Channon reported the next day from Westminster, and was himself in no doubt at the boost to Tory prospects – ‘Everyone is cock-a-hoop.’13
Not quite everyone. Jock Colville, amused to watch the Prime Minister delivering his broadcast from Chequers like an old-fashioned hustings orator, realized that it had not been a success. Lord Moran, listening with a group of academic colleagues in Birmingham, was disappointed: ‘It was plain that it had not gone down with anybody.’14 Leo Amery, beginning his own campaign for re-election as a Conservative candidate, was ‘greatly depressed by it'; he thought that ‘Winston jumped straight off his pedestal as world statesman to deliver a fantastical exaggerated onslaught on Socialism’ and, like many others, he blamed Lord Beaver-brook and Brendan Bracken, with their reputation as the Tory attack dogs.15 It did not really matter whether these two were personally responsible for the tone – Colville thought not. The next evening, in his reply for the Labour Party, Attlee struck home when he said that ‘the voice we heard last night was that of Mr Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook.’16
Again, there was general agreement about the impact of the broadcast, this time favourable. ‘I fear he scored off Winston,’ Harold Nicolson wrote, while to Amery it was ‘a very adroit reply to Winston’s rodomont-age’.17 What Attlee had done was to congratulate his opponent for demonstrating ‘the difference between Winston Churchill the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr Churchill the party leader of the Conservatives’. He delivered his reprimand with a magisterial authority not hitherto familiar to many outside the cabinet room (or even, like Chips Channon, inside the House of Commons lavatory). ‘Attlee, the “poor Clem” of the war years, did his piece tonight, and did it well,’ Moran acknowledged, going on to reflect that Churchill seemed on the wrong track: ‘For the first time the thought went through my head that he may lose the election.’18 To the few who took any notice of it, the Gallup Poll suggested that Moran was right, but for the wrong reason. Labour had long been ahead, with its vote steady since February at 45–47 per cent, against a Conservative figure in the range 27–33 per cent. A poll in mid-June, after the ‘Gestapo’ exchanges, showed the Labour vote stationary but the Conservatives rising to 37 per cent.
Churchill’s preoccupation with getting re-elected in 1945 was no greater than Roosevelt’s had been in 1944; it was a condition of democratic government. There is nothing surprising or discreditable in the way that his attention now focused primarily on the campaign. ‘No sign of Winston today – I suppose he was busy with his broadcast for tonight,’ Cadogan noted on 21 June. ‘Nothing is in his mind – or anyone else’s – but the Election.’19 It was at this point that the antics of the party leader of the Conservatives intersected with the plans of the great leader in war. Not only did he reconsider his invitation to Attlee to attend the Big Three meeting in July but also whether the conference should take place as agreed.
And all because of the Laski affair. Churchill, bereft of any better plan, had no intention of abandoning his robust right-wing approach, and found his efforts inadvertently encouraged from the left. Professor Harold Laski of the London School of Economics was one of the Labour Party’s leading intellectuals and was currently serving as chairman of its National Executive Committee, an influential but hardly commanding position. Already discontented with the parliamentary leadership – his recent suggestion to Attlee that he should make way for a more charismatic figure had received a terse and cutting dismissal – Laski intervened immediately after the announcement that Attlee would be attending the Big Three. In a statement published in the press on 15 June, Laski insisted that Attlee could go only as an observer. Again Attlee asserted himself, this time through a public exchange of letters with Churchill, defining to mutual satisfaction the active though non-governmental role proposed. Laski backed down on the immediate point he had raised.
This was not, however, the end of the matter. Bracken and Beaver-brook may not have been behind the Gestapo broadcast but they were directly responsible for inflating the Laski affair. Bracken used an election broadcast to demand whether continuity in foreign policy had now been abandoned. Cadogan dismissed this broadcast as ‘very bad. Imitating Winston’s style, and no stuff.’20 Even to a senior diplomat of Conservative outlook, then, this sounded like empty bluster. If Sir Alec had deigned to read the Daily Express over the next few days he would have found Beaverbrook in full cry. ‘SOCIALIST SPLIT: ATTLEE REPUDIATES LASKI ORDER’ on 16 June, with a photograph captioned ‘Laski on the throne’, and on 19 June publicity for the phrase (coined by Harold Macmillan) ‘Gauleiter Laski’.
Yet it would be wrong to think that this was simply a Tory election stunt, of the kind that the Labour Party customarily expected. For one thing, nobody knew how the foreign policy of a majority Labour government would turn out; perhaps Attlee would be merely the Kerensky of a socialist takeover, Laski its Lenin; perhaps it was not such a good idea for Churchill to take Attlee to Berlin as a human shield. At any rate, Alan Brooke was disconcerted to learn on 19 June that the Prime Minister was contemplating a further step over the Laski affair. ‘As a result,’ the CIGS noted with dismay, ‘the Big Three meeting is now to be put off from July 15th to August 15th, with all the incumbent disadvantages to the war by delaying the decisions of our badly wanted [Combined] Chiefs of Staff meeting!’21 Cadogan heard the same news and, in attendance at the following day’s cabinet meeting, listened to ‘a long rambling talk about desirability of postponing Big 3 meeting in view of the Attlee–Laski imbroglio’. The preparation of draft messages to Stalin and Truman testifies to the seriousness of this possibility, though Cadogan’s private view remained cynical – ‘I think in these days everyone, at the back of their mind, is searching how to turn everything to party advantage.’22
The idea of postponing the Big Three proved to be a passing whim for Churchill. Maybe he blenched at the enormity of asking Stalin and Truman to throw over all the arrangements, in effect to propitiate Professor Laski. Maybe it struck Churchill that he risked being absent from a meeting that they might nonetheless hold without him. It may even have occurred to him that he could not count on being Prime Minister on 15 August. More likely, having put himself in the hands of Bracken and Beaverbrook, he probably thought that the Conservatives were doing nicely in exploiting these events. The Daily Express, confident that the Conservatives were winning, saw no reason to change tack. At any rate, with polling day now only a couple of weeks away, the political temperature was rising in Britain.
There was a last-minute scramble to make ready for the Big Three conference. The Russians chose exactly where in the Berlin area it would meet: not within the ruined city, for obvious reasons, but about fifteen miles south-west, in Potsdam and its neighbouring suburb of Babelsberg. There each delegation could be given suitably dignified if cramped quarters. The former crown prince’s Cecilienhof Palace – described by Attlee as a ‘Stock-Exchange-Gothic mansion’23 – was chosen for the plenary sessions. To veterans of Yalta, the scenario was familiar. ‘In some ways I think this is odder,’ wrote Cadogan on arrival. ‘Here we are, in the midst of this devastated and denuded country, living in a little town of our own, consisting of villas set amidst trees (not unlike Le Touquet) with more or less every comfort of a somewhat rough and ready kind.’24
The name of Potsdam, then, was to join those of Teheran and Yalta. Nominally at least, the Americans and British went in their own right, not as the guests of the Russians. The French, although now an occupying power, were piqued at not going at all and tended to blame the British for such snubs. This was a backhanded compliment to the abiding prestige of perfidious Albion. Actually, the Big Three was less likely to have been turned into the Big Four than into just the Big Two.
Field Marshal Lord Wavell returned to Delhi on 5 June. He was determined to make up for lost time in broaching his plan for democratization of the Indian government from above, by using his viceregal powers to reconstruct his Executive Council on a broadly representative basis. This would give it a legitimacy plainly lacking in existing arrangements. In San Francisco, Mrs V. L. Pandit, Nehru’s sister and herself a considerable figure in the Indian National Congress, had made a strong moral impression in campaigning against the seating of an Indian delegation composed of the Viceroy’s nominees. There is no need to accept that the Indian members of the Executive were simply stooges of the British, nor to suppose that its British members, like Sir Archibald Rowlands, failed to urge the Indian position on matters like the sterling balances. The problem was not personal but structural.
Wavell had imagined that his proposals might offer a way forward, if not to immediate independence, then to full self-government. Belatedly, he had been given his chance by Churchill, who was readier to run the risk of a settlement than risk dragging India into the election campaign. The fact that only 6 per cent of candidates mentioned India in their election addresses (8 per cent of Labour, 4 per cent of Conservatives) shows that the ploy worked in Britain. Whether it would work in India was more to the point, as Wavell was well aware; and he set to work at once. ‘Met Council in evening and disclosed the proposals; they met with a very cold reception, and no one except Archie Rowlands fully supported them, and hardly any Member had a good word to say for them,’ he noted. ‘What it really amounts to is that, as at home, nobody really wants to move at all.’25 The discouraging beginning was compounded by an immediate press leak of this discussion from within the Council, with the minor consolation that some nationalists concluded that the proposals could not be all bad if the oligarchic Council opposed them.
Wavell’s next big step was to appeal more widely for support. In a broadcast that drew favourable press comment he announced the release of the members of the Congress Working Committee, imprisoned since the ‘Quit India’ protests of 1942. Their crime, of course, had been to undermine morale and security at home through political agitation while the Allied forces they ought to have been supporting were engaged in a desperate conflict at the front: much like the dissident Poles, though the comparison did not apparently occur to Churchill. However, at just the moment when the sixteen Poles were being locked up, the Viceroy was (as Hopkins might have put it) doing everything under heaven to get the Congress leaders out of jug. After a thousand days in a British gaol, Jawaharlal Nehru emerged into the political spotlight, uncertain of his next steps. Meanwhile, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, which had obviously benefited from Congress’s withdrawal from active politics, entered into public exchanges with Wavell, as did Gandhi, who made an early plea for the word ‘independence’ to be used.
A key issue was the Viceroy’s proposal that there should be an equal number of Hindus and Muslims on the new Council. This was a lot for Congress to swallow. It was not just that the Muslims were obviously a minority of the population – that is exactly why they felt vulnerable – but Congress prided itself on its secular appeal and its own ability to attract Muslims. Indeed its president, Maulana A. K. Azad, was a prominent Muslim, albeit a mere ‘poster boy’ in the eyes of the Muslim League, which now claimed to be the sole channel for Muslim representation. Congress tended to dismiss these communal difficulties as the product of a divide-and-rule strategy on the part of the British Raj and likely to disappear with it. But whether the League’s claim for a ‘Pakistan’ as a safe haven for Muslims could be countered by an offer of security for Muslim fellow citizens within a united India was now the pivotal issue. Thus Congress and the League each claimed nationalist credentials and both identified British imperialism as their enemy; but whether they could agree between themselves about post-imperial India still had to be put to the test. Deadlock in Delhi already seemed likely.
In San Francisco, meanwhile, another set of apparently intractable negotiations were belatedly moving towards resolution. Stettinius had felt a mounting sense of frustration and urgency. ‘Here we've been in San Francisco a month,’ he told the US delegates, ‘and we haven't begun to swing our weight around yet.’26 From the perspective of the delegation as a whole, including independent-minded Republican politicians like Arthur Vandenberg and Harold Stassen, the main problems were caused by the irrepressible assertiveness of the forty-five smaller countries and, above all, by the protean obduracy of a single great power: not Great Britain this time but the Soviet Union. Thankfully for the British, this meant that the Americans needed a reliable ally among the Big Five, and there was only one available.
The debates on colonialism and the former mandated territories were conducted in this context. Hence a new American readiness to abandon an outright commitment to ‘independence’ for all, in favour of simply asking for ‘self-government’. Surely, Stassen now argued with colleagues, he and his fellow US delegates ‘did not wish to find ourselves committed to breaking up the British empire’.27 Whether this San Francisco logic would more generally work in Britain’s favour depended as much on American perceptions of the Soviet Union as on anything the British themselves did.
The conference had again ground to a standstill at the beginning of June. The problem was whether an international organization of equals ought to admit that a few great powers should exert a veto over any of its business. At any rate, this demonstrated the fallaciousness of the assumption that the British Empire had six votes locked up, since the Australian and New Zealand delegations, championing the rights of smaller countries, took a principled stand against the veto. But the pragmatic reality was that, without some sort of veto, the Soviet Union would never have signed up; and the other so-called great powers (China and France as well as Great Britain and the United States) had an obvious self-interest too. The American position (supported by the British) was that the Yalta agreement granted each of these five permanent members of the security council a veto over its actions – but not over whether an issue could be brought before the council in the first place, which was the Russian position. Given that each move here had to be referred to Moscow, progress was glacial.
Stettinius, conscious that the President needed results, found himself stymied, the more so when a leak to the New York Times made the story public and thus raised the stakes. Picking up a suggestion from Lord Halifax, Stettinius suggested to Truman that Hopkins, still in Moscow, be asked to raise the issue. It was in this situation that Hopkins scored his great coup on 6 June, at his final meeting that day with Stalin, who coolly accepted the American reading of Yalta, leaving his own ambassador, Gromyko, to scramble for cover in San Francisco. ‘America Wins!’ Vandenberg exclaimed, though luckily only in his diary on 7 June, prudently telling himself the next day: ‘We did not gloat over a victory.’28
The Secretary of State, even more determined not to gloat, at last had his moment. He found his own infectious affability sufficient to disarm Gromyko’s last diplomatic reservations over the necessary documents. ‘But, Andrei, that’s awfully small,’ Stettinius enjoined at one point, ‘you can't find fault with that.’29 And so it turned out, despite the familiar last-minute drafting crises. The US delegates felt that they had indeed won essential points. Vandenberg delighted at working closely with Halifax – ‘Hi, Ed!’ – now that he was on first-name terms with the austere and aristocratic British ambassador.30 The other Ed, Edward J. Stettinius, was able to vindicate his tenure at the State Department by steering the conference to unanimous acceptance of the United Nations Charter. President Truman, one of his pre-Potsdam objectives achieved, went to San Francisco himself for the occasion on Monday, 25 June.
On this same day that the San Francisco conference concluded, Lord Wavell opened the first session of the conference he had summoned at Simla. His big success lay in simply getting all the Indian parties to attend it. Simla was a very good place to escape the stinging heat in Delhi, often 40°C in June, which is why the Viceroy’s summer residence was sited there, amid the foothills of the Himalayas. The Viceregal Lodge, in all its imposing incongruity with its setting, housed the conference sessions, with well-appointed chalets nearby to accommodate the different delegations, in a manner reminiscent of Yalta and foreshadowing Potsdam.
Like Yalta and Potsdam, the final results proved disappointing. Admittedly, Wavell had his first face-to-face meeting with Gandhi, who was in his prolix and anecdotal mood: benign enough, but refusing to participate officially on the grounds that (officially again) he was not a member of the Congress Party. Jinnah, flexing his muscles as master of the Muslim League, lent little credence to the Mahatma’s protestations, saying: ‘it was another trick of Gandhi’s, he pretended not to belong to the Congress when it suited his book, but when necessary appeared as the Dictator of Congress which everyone knew he was.’31 This was pejorative but not inaccurate. It was a relief that Jinnah put the same point more politely in talking to the press. So Gandhi remained at Simla only for consultation, yet with a charismatic presence rivalled only by Nehru, who attended later and likewise on a non-official basis.
It became apparent within days that Congress and the League could not agree in direct talks. Nor could they when they negotiated indirectly by sending Wavell lists of names for possible inclusion. The crunch was that Congress insisted on including some Muslim names on its list while Jinnah was equally insistent that only he could nominate Muslims, asserting his role as their sole spokesman. ‘I ask you not to wreck the League,’ he pleaded with Wavell, who suspected that his main motivation by this stage was a well-founded fear of being made the scapegoat for failure.32 Eager to protect himself in American eyes, Jinnah decided that he could no longer refrain from provocative public comment. He gave a statement on 11 July to the United Press accusing Congress of ‘a flank movement’, designed to ‘reduce Muslim effectiveness by securing Congress and Muslim quislings’.33
By this point, Wavell faced impasse and had to report the conference’s breakdown to London. ‘I am sorry to say the Cabinet mostly seemed pleased,’ Amery recorded on 12 July. The Prime Minister was absent from this cabinet meeting, on holiday before going to Potsdam. But when Amery re-read his diary more than two years later he added a retrospective note: ‘The immediate wrecker was Jinnah, but the real wrecker perhaps the long delay before Archie was allowed to try, and so Winston.’34
Churchill, much to his doctor’s relief, was taking a much-needed rest from his electoral exertions on the Basque coast of France. Even before leaving, he had been reading few government papers. ‘I am worried about this damned election,’ he told Moran. ‘I have no message for them now.’35 The main issues in which voters were interested, as he had come to realize, concerned domestic policy: housing far the most important, followed by full employment and social security. Labour was identified with a series of proposals that seemed all the more credible because many of them had been worked out under the Coalition Government, notably the Beveridge Plan for a welfare state, published at the end of 1942, and the commitment to Keynesian policies to sustain a high and stable level of employment, declared in 1944. Here Churchill indeed had little to say. Instead he had reverted to the sort of partisan knock-about that he had abjured since the 1930s. In the process he not only cheapened his appeal as a national figure but also identified himself more closely with the Conservative Party, which was still associated not only with pre-war unemployment but with pre-war appeasement of Hitler – a policy that virtually everyone condemned in hindsight.
It is not the case that Labour was uninterested in foreign policy, which was mentioned by 84 per cent of its candidates in their election addresses, compared with 71 per cent of Conservatives. Nor, as newspapers as different as the Daily Telegraph and the Manchester Guardian both acknowledged, were there sharp partisan differences in outlook on the world. True, whereas 16 per cent of Labour candidates stressed working closely with Russia, only 2 per cent of Conservatives said the same. But 49 per cent of Conservative and 28 per cent of Labour candidates talked of working closely with both Russians and Americans alike. Simple arithmetic tells us that more Conservative candidates (51 per cent) than Labour candidates (44 per cent) said that they wanted to work closely with the Soviet Union. And only 2 per cent of Conservatives (and no Labour candidates) said the same of the United States alone. The real point is surely that, even in late June 1945, such invidious choices between wartime allies seemed unnecessary to most people. Hence too the fact that 60 per cent of Labour candidates, and 27 per cent of Conservatives, mentioned the world organization for peace, made topical by the San Francisco conference.36 Continuity of foreign policy (Laski notwithstanding) was a widespread assumption; and if it was, it did not depend upon electing Churchill when the votes were cast on 5 July.
Still Prime Minister until the votes were counted – a delay of three weeks was necessary to collect the forces’ ballots – Churchill took his French holiday. Then he would put in an appearance at Postdam and conclude the Big Three’s business before going home. ‘I shall be only half a man until the result of the poll,’ he intimated to Moran. ‘I shall keep in the background at the conference.’ In that case, there was little point in wasting time on prior homework. Instead, the paints were called for. ‘Where is the cobalt?’ Churchill demanded of the admirable Sawyers.37
Leisured days unfolded, at the table as at the easel. Plainly this was a deeply fatigued man, long overworked in the service of his country, and craving a few days of complete relaxation. The briefs that the Foreign Office had compiled remained an unopened book. On 12 July, the breakdown at Simla evoked no response – not even the favourable news that the New York Times and other American papers blamed Jinnah rather than the Viceroy (just like the British papers and indeed most Indian observers). There was little talk of the Big Three meeting, though Churchill perked up at the thought that Attlee would be there, saying mischievously: ‘We don't know whether we are on speaking terms until we meet at Berlin.’38 He had, however, shown his concern that the leader of the Labour Party should properly represent his country by providing him with a valet.
President Truman, still fresh to the job, still learning the ropes, still reorganizing his own team, prepared for Potsdam differently. With the success of the San Francisco conference, he had felt free to reward his Secretary of State appropriately. On 21 June Stettinius was clumsily informed through an intermediary that the President now had other plans for him. He was to be left in charge of United Nations business but Truman’s long-rumoured, long-denied intention to appoint Byrnes as Secretary of State was at last confirmed. Stettinius saw at once that ‘there was no use taking me to Berlin.’ Inevitably the news leaked out before Truman’s arrival in San Francisco for the final ceremonies. ‘Mr President,’ Stettinius asked him when they eventually met, ‘do you really believe that you can do this thing and put Byrnes in without its appearing publicly like a kick in the pants for me?’ Truman replied: ‘I sincerely believe it can be done that way.’39
Truman’s sincerity, of course, was hardly the point in an act he found personally distasteful but politically necessary. ‘I think it was grossly unfair,’ Vandenberg commented privately. ‘It must have startled the foreign ministers of the other forty-nine nations who saw Stettinius make a spectacular success of his job at San Francisco only to be “shot at sunrise” as his reward.’40 The overriding factor was Truman’s decision to have Byrnes at his side: a self-made Irish-American Democratic politician of proven loyalty and public standing. ‘It would be his object to return home with a reputation for having found a lasting via media for such divergent trends as may there seem likely to divide Great Britain and the Soviet Union,’ Isaiah Berlin commented, adding: ‘He tells excellent Southern stories.’41
The new president was growing into his job and, with poll ratings even higher than Roosevelt had achieved, plainly wished to begin remodelling the administration in his own image. Several cabinet changes had already been made. Morgenthau, whose relations with Truman were never close, had a declared antipathy to Byrnes; so it was logical that Byrnes’s appointment to the State Department should prompt a further change at the Treasury.
It had long been apparent, at least to those not oblivious to the signals, that Lend-Lease was in trouble. In particular, the Quebec offer on Stage II, which Churchill had once thought ‘beyond the dreams of justice’, seemed to be a dead letter in Washington – as dead as the President who had once volunteered it. By definition, it was only since the beginning of Stage II on VE-Day that the issue had acute practical importance. Throughout late May, all of June and early July, Churchill found that his appeals to Truman over this agreement were simply brushed aside. Morgenthau, nursing his own hurt feelings over the praise given to Keynes for negotiating the terms, refused to carry the can for these lapses, as he had in the past. ‘I'm not going to take it,’ he complained at one point. ‘I was willing to take it from Roosevelt because I was his friend, but I want a little more now.’42
Morgenthau and Stettinius, when given the responsibility for implementing the Quebec offer, had found it hard enough trying to remind the previous president of his own promises to Churchill. Whether the new president could be expected to honour the undertakings of his late predecessor was another matter – it was like Yalta, only worse. Nobody in Washington seemed to be working from the same documents. Each agency involved had its own interpretation, supported, like biblical disputes, with texts that were themselves of uncertain provenance or meaning. Morgenthau alone had been there at every crucial step. With unique credentials but declining authority, he maintained that Truman’s belated response should say to Churchill: ‘what you and Mr Roosevelt agreed on, bingo, I carry out.’ But the drafts in circulation did no such thing, refusing the British without any justification and thus putting the President in an invidious position. Or so Morgenthau believed – ‘He gives no reason why he’s welching.’43
There was to be no official answer to the British before Potsdam. This was hardly a promising basis on which to launch Anglo-American discussions on Stage III. When it dawned on Morgenthau that the President would not back him, that Lend-Lease had been taken out of his hands, that the State Department was taking control of Stage III planning, and that the famous (or infamous) Morgenthau Plan was now a dead letter, he virtually threw in his hand. He told his staff that he did not now want ‘to be part [sic] in helping to finance England’.44 Morgenthau’s outburst to this effect came on 3 July, the same day that Byrnes was sworn in as Secretary of State. The previous day, Hopkins, now mortally ill, had sent his own letter of resignation. He was to receive ungrudging thanks for his services from Truman. Nonetheless, the Roosevelt old guard was palpably on the way out.
Morgenthau had initially hoped to go to Potsdam himself. Truman ruled this out, ostensibly because, with the President and Secretary of State abroad, the Secretary of the Treasury, as next in line, should stay in Washington, with power to convene the cabinet. After all, this was not unflattering, and the same arrangement that the great Roosevelt had made when he went to Yalta. A conversation on 5 July, however, put all this in a new light. ‘Oh, I am going to say that you are the man in charge while I am gone,’ said the President, while Morgenthau persisted in inquiring about his own tenure, asking: ‘Well, I would like to know whether you want me to stay until V-J Day.’ That was conventionally supposed to be more than a year away, of course. ‘Well, I don't know,’ was Truman’s only response. ‘I may want a new Secretary of the Treasury.’45
Morgenthau drafted his letter of resignation that same day. As with Stettinius, dignity was outwardly maintained, though everyone in Washington could sense how things really stood. As with Hopkins, a long-serving intimate of FDR departed with mutual felicitations. But with these changes, Great Britain lost three powerful and sympathetic voices in Washington. The spirit of Quebec finally evaporated on the eve of Potsdam.
Hopkins said that he was writing his memoirs. He died before he finished – indeed before he really started, but some fragments from the summer of 1945 were rescued by his friend Robert Sherwood. ‘I believe that the British have saved our skins twice – once in 1914 and again in 1940,’ Hopkins wrote, adding about the second occasion: ‘This time it was Britain alone that held the fort and they held that fort for us just as much as for themselves, because we would not have had a chance to have licked Hitler had Britain fallen.’ But he well realized why so many of his compatriots took another view. ‘When the Prime Minister said that he was not selected to be the King’s Minister to liquidate the Empire,’ Hopkins wrote, ‘every isolationist in America cheered him.’46 Two men whom he had learned to respect or even revere, Roosevelt and then Churchill, had given the necessary leadership in a broadly successful war against fascism; but there remained an unresolved tension between its rationale and that of the generally unsuccessful imperialist war that Churchill was still intent on waging.
‘Nothing will be decided at the conference at Potsdam,’ Churchill had predicted privately.47 At the time, this is how it seemed. All the big questions on the agenda, notably the interlocked fate of Germany and Poland, had been on the agenda at Yalta. It was never likely that Potsdam would provide new answers.
Churchill arrived on Sunday, 15 July, having flown from Bordeaux. ‘I followed him,’ wrote Moran, ‘through two bleak rooms with great chandeliers to the opposite side of the empty house, where french windows that had not been cleaned for a long time, opened upon a balcony, and there, without removing his hat, Winston flopped into a garden chair, flanked by two great tubs of hydrangeas, blue, pink and white.’ He was clearly weary and in need of refreshment. ‘Where is Sawyers?’ he demanded.48 A whisky was procured. It was all very familiar.
The British occupied a series of lakeside villas in Babelsberg. It was an oasis of peace, its air of make-believe enhanced by the fact that this had been the German Hollywood. ‘I spent the afternoon settling in and in the evening tried for pike in the lake,’ wrote Brooke, housed with the chiefs of staff, three doors away from the Prime Minister.49 In between was ‘a drab and dreary little building destined to house Attlee!’ noted Cadogan, who could not resist adding: ‘Very suitable – it’s just like Attlee himself!’50 The rival party leaders had ten hot sticky days ahead of them before the votes were counted at home. Yalta had taken eight days. The initial expectation was that Potsdam would be over before they had to depart.
There was bound to be a different style in the absence of the inimitable FDR, the man who had taken the United States into the war and who alone knew his own exit strategy. Moran brooded about the effect on Churchill – ‘now Roosevelt was dead he found himself at Potsdam without any policy, except the vague idea of smashing Germany and Japan into unconditional surrender.’51 If there was a post-Roosevelt vacuum, it was on the British rather than the American side.
The approach of the Big Three at Yalta had been to reach agreements on virtually everything, often couched in ambiguous terms to which everyone could assent. This suited Churchill on a tactical level, since he relished his ability to hit upon sonorous phrases and much admired his own literary handiwork. It suited Roosevelt on a strategic level, since he relied in all his political dealings upon exploiting ambiguity to achieve his own ulterior ends. And it suited Stalin on a pragmatic level, since he got what he wanted by genially nodding at those abstractions about democracy by which his Anglo-American allies seemed to set such great store. Yalta thus looked good at the time but the results did not prove lasting.
Potsdam was the opposite. The differences between the Big Three were not so determinedly concealed and there was less effort to paper over the cracks. Instead, the formula was to defer contentious matters ‘until the full peace conference’, thus agreeing to disagree. Especially after the experience of San Francisco, where the ‘forty-five’ had proved so tedious, none of the Big Three wanted to convene a full-scale, Paris-type conference until they had themselves reached agreement on how to run it. Moreover, once Truman knew that both San Francisco and Bretton Woods would be ratified by the Senate, he had most of what he wanted – and what Roosevelt had wanted, of course.
There was never any chance that, simply through seniority within the Big Three, Churchill would exert as much influence as the new President, who knew his own limitations but also, by now, the strength of his political position. Truman, so the Washington embassy reported, ‘has the sympathetic backing of almost all sections of the country – far more than President Roosevelt could have commanded were he now at Potsdam’.52 During the Potsdam conference, the Senate approved the Bretton Woods legislation by 61–16; and its approval of the United Nations Charter – supported by two-thirds of Americans according to Gallup – was by now a formality. The final vote was to be 89–2. Though by now a foregone conclusion, this was still a striking contrast with the Senate’s repudiation of the League of Nations after Versailles.
Rather against expectations, Truman commanded the stage at Potsdam with an authority that Wilson lacked at Paris in 1919. Despite his modest manner, Truman was determined to exert this leverage to the full. He was the new factor in the Big Three, necessarily destabilizing the personal dynamics established through long sessions at Teheran and Yalta. He was nonetheless nominated to preside over the Big Three sessions, like his predecessor. It soon became clear that Truman’s preference for an early night clashed with the nocturnal habits of both Churchill and Stalin, and the presidential parties ended more abruptly than in the bad old days of Yalta, though there was no avoiding the inevitable three formal dinners, with dozens of toasts in the Russian style. In the Potsdam photographs, Generalissimo Stalin (a recent promotion but no surprise) usually appears in his new white-jacketed uniform and the late lieutenant of Hussars in the ancient uniforms into which Sawyers squeezed him. But the American commander-in-chief looks more comfortable than either in the July heat, wearing his well-pressed, double-breasted, summer-weight suits – a touch of Washington, DC, rather than Ruritania.
Churchill wanted to meet Truman as soon as possible. He did so after his first night in Babelsberg, on the morning of Monday, 16 July, and told everyone how delighted he was. ‘He takes no notice of delicate ground, he just plants his foot down firmly on it,’ Churchill explained to Moran while changing for dinner that night; and in case his physician was baffled by these anatomical references, he jumped and brought down his bare feet to demonstrate.53 This early impression of Truman was reinforced as the conference proceedings developed and was widely shared on the British side. ‘On the whole I liked him,’ Brooke commented later, ‘not the same personality as his predecessor, but a quick brain, a feeling of honesty, a good business man, and a pleasant personality.’54
Businesslike is the word that almost everyone used about Truman. Efficient and businesslike, quick and businesslike, affable and businesslike: but always focused on mastering and settling the business in hand. In this he had an able lieutenant in James Byrnes, on his first outing as Secretary of State, short on political rhetoric but long on negotiating skills. Like the President, he was a pianist who could make a decent stab at Chopin. Significantly, Byrnes was the bearer of the American memory of what had happened at Yalta. The preparations this time pleased him better, the voyage out aboard USS Augusta having been used for systematic briefing sessions. In support, ‘Chip’ Bohlen and ‘Doc’ Matthews, also veterans of Yalta, were joined this time not by Alger Hiss but by another State Department colleague, Ben Cohen. A bachelor in his fifties, slouching in posture, careless in his dress and table manners, this new boy at Potsdam lacked both Hiss’s panache and his finesse in espionage. But Cohen had a renowned facility on paper which makes the notes he took the most faithful record of the words actually spoken around the table at the Cecilienhof Palace.
Potsdam was news. In particular, a large American press corps was camped outside the gates. ‘BIG 3 PARLEY BEGINS TODAY’ was the banner headline in the Chicago Tribune on 16 July. Yet there was actually little hard news to sustain all the large type. The next day’s papers reported equally prominently that the start of the conference was delayed because of Stalin’s mysterious absence; but beyond that, the efforts of the press met with frustration. ‘When we were at Teheran, there were no journalists. At Yalta there were few,’ Churchill happily reminisced before proposing a helpful solution at the second Big Three plenary. ‘If my colleagues are willing,’ he suggested, ‘I am willing to have a talk with them and explain as a newspaperman the need for secrecy.’ Truman did not see any need to subject his elderly colleague to the unwelcome glare of publicity by making him their sole spokesman before the world’s journalists. ‘Most of them are Americans,’ he said. ‘Your election is over and so is mine.’55
So the tight security around Potsdam and Babelsberg was paralleled by a press embargo as effective as that at Yalta. In Britain, where city lights had gone on that week for the first time, this new blackout in the media met with impatience. ‘I think the lack of news is very annoying, I must say,’ one woman told Mass-Observation. ‘I suppose it’s the Russian influence.’56 The newspapers lost interest accordingly and focused on other stories. The Japanese war, where the British and US Navies mounted their first combined operation, now received comparable attention in the press of both countries, with rare unanimity in the news columns of both the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Mail; and both papers likewise offered frequent reminders that Lend-Lease was a simmering issue, albeit temporarily on the back burner.
Stalin’s absence until the first plenary on Tuesday, 17 July, apparently on health grounds, had given Churchill and Truman a free day on Monday. After their cordial meeting that morning, they later went their separate ways to see the sights, which for once justify the word awesome. Moran, after a morning visit, had already tried to convey this to an initially unresponsive Prime Minister, who suddenly decided in late afternoon to see for himself. ‘As we drove to Berlin,’ Moran noted, ‘no one on the road seemed to recognize him, until we came to the centre of the city, where a workman looked hard at us and pointed after the car.’ It was one of the few places in Europe where Winston Churchill could have travelled incognito. He saw the ruins of the Chancellery, the ruins of the bunker. ‘Hitler,’ he reflected, ‘must have come out here to get some air, and heard the guns getting nearer and nearer.’ They drove back in silence, Churchill’s thoughts evidently elsewhere. As he was undressing for bed he said to Moran: ‘The Socialists say I shall have a majority over all other parties of thirty-two.’57
The next day the leader of the British Labour Party had an amicable lunch with the leader of the Conservative Party. It was obviously prudent that Churchill and Attlee should mend their fences in private before appearing together that day at the first plenary. With his remarkable capacity for underplaying his hand, Attlee reverted to type after his recent self-assertion in the election campaign. It quickly became apparent to all that he could be relied upon to support Churchill whenever necessary in the conference proceedings, and likewise relied upon to say little; he was to speak on only a handful of occasions during the nine plenary sessions held before the British General Election results. What really signals their mutual confidence on major issues is the fact that Attlee was immediately made party to the extraordinary news brought by their American guest for lunch that day, Henry Stimson, the Secretary for War.
On the previous day an atomic bomb had successfully been exploded in New Mexico. The impact was at the very highest end of expectations, of the order of 20,000 tons of TNT. Two further bombs were operational. British consent to their use against Japan had already been given, in accordance with prior understandings. The question at Potsdam was what use President Truman should make of the new weapon. It offered a means of finishing off Japan without delay – how much it would shorten the war depended on differing estimates of how near the Japanese were to surrender (and whether that surrender had to be unconditional). It offered, too, a means of finishing off Japan without the Russians. It offered, in short, much food for thought as the conference opened.
Churchill himself, on his French sojourn, had disclosed his low-profile strategy for keeping in the background at Potsdam. This was abandoned shortly after 5 p.m. on 17 July, as soon as the first plenary opened. Truman chaired it and did so in his own brisk style, even forgetting the opening civilities of welcome in his evident desire to get down to business. As topics were raised in an effort to establish an agenda, Churchill was irrepressibly stimulated to speak on each item, but found himself treated less indulgently than in the past. It was happily agreed that future meetings should begin at 4 p.m. Churchill was happy at the prospect of an extra hour of his own oratory. Truman’s idea was to wrap up the business sooner and was pleased to bring the next day’s session to a close by 6 o’clock, while Churchill clearly thought it extraordinary to curtail these fine, free-wheeling, unscripted, unrehearsed opportunities for talk at large, simply because that day’s agenda had been concluded. What the Foreign Office feared, since the Prime Minister had read none of the briefs, was that he would give away their case inadvertently, rather than leave matters in the experienced hands of Eden and Cadogan.
The three foreign ministers were to play a bigger role at Potsdam than they had at Yalta. Molotov was an old hand; Byrnes a new one but more of a heavyweight than Stettinius. Eden laboured bravely under the shadow of the loss in action of his son (whose death was confirmed during the conference). When matters kept being referred to this Little Three, Stalin commented: ‘As all the questions are to be discussed by the foreign ministers, we shall have nothing to do.’ Ben Cohen recorded the laughter at this point, and then the exchanges about how to proceed next. ‘The secretaries should give us three or four points – enough to keep us busy,’ said Churchill, confident that he would find enough to say. ‘I don't want just to discuss, I want to decide,’ Truman rebuked him. ‘You want something in the bag each day,’ Churchill blandly agreed, with unaccustomed docility.58
Churchill was well aware that at Potsdam he needed to nobble the President on unfinished business of his own. A private lunch on Wednesday, 18 July, with nobody else present at the table, provided the ideal opportunity for Churchill to prepare the ground for the talks on Stage III of Lend-Lease, covering the period after victory over Japan. Time was suddenly pressing, now that he knew about the atom bomb test. Instead of being more than twelve months away, VJ-Day might well be upon them in only a few weeks. So Keynes’s proposals for renegotiating a sort of retrospective Lend-Lease, which the cabinet had stalled until after the General Election, assumed a new urgency. It was necessary to impress on this new president, so impressively quick on the uptake, that not all debts could be measured simply in dollars.
‘I spoke of the melancholy position of Great Britain,’ Churchill recorded immediately afterwards, ‘who had spent more than one-half her foreign investments in the time when we were all alone for the common cause, and now emerged from the War the only nation with a great external debt of £3,000 millions.’ (He meant the sterling balances, totalling $12 billion at current exchange rates.) What Britain needed was time to get on its feet. ‘The President then spoke of the immense debt owed by the United States to Great Britain for having held the fort at the beginning.’ The President’s response was almost too good to be true. ‘If you had gone down like France,’ said Truman, ‘we might well be fighting the Germans on the American coast at the present time.’ Churchill paraphrased the President’s conclusion: ‘This justified the United States in regarding these matters as above the purely financial plane.’59
Did Truman really say this? Did he really mean it? Churchill dictated this aide mémoire the same afternoon, intended for the cabinet, and Moran transcribed much of it as it stood, so its provenance as an accurate record is good. The mutual appreciation fostered at Potsdam between Churchill and Truman is obvious. But this exchange, so reminiscent of the spirit of Quebec, was more significant for Churchill, desperately conscious of the forthcoming British plea for Justice, than for Truman, anxious to be polite.
Above all, it should be remembered that the President was a long way from home. Suppose he had called for a copy of the Chicago Tribune after lunch that day; it might well have been two days old; and if so, he could have benefited from its pertinent editorial, ‘A Poorer Country’ – a title that did not refer to Britain’s plight. If the American people seemed to have more money to spend, the Tribune cautioned, this was only because of government spending, mainly in Europe. ‘Our government officials and others who look only at the statistics of our liquid assets and conclude that we can give unlimited help to others are blind and foolish,’ it admonished. ‘If there are nations which have gotten rich out of the war, the United States is not one of them.’60
Similar warnings can be found, virtually every day of the week, in the Tribune's files. One front-page cartoon shows Uncle Sam doing the real work in the Pacific, with Britain and Russia making token efforts only. Blood and treasure are explicitly linked. ‘I want Russia in the war against Japan,’ one Senator demands. ‘I want England as fully in the war against Japan as we were in the war against Germany. Money’s the only thing we've got left that they need!’ In the editorial columns, ‘the New Deal theory that it is America’s duty to put all its assets into a global basket and permit all comers to pick out what they need and desire’ is duly exposed. A couple of days later, in case any reader still cannot see the connection to ‘Our Bedfellows’ at Potsdam, the cartoon shows the Big Three sitting down to a lavish meal with dishes labelled ‘Lend-Lease’.61
Here was an issue with a special ambiguity at Potsdam. The British and American chiefs of staff began their talks before Stalin’s arrival. ‘An easy meeting with no controversial points!’ wrote a relieved Brooke.62 Japan was the obvious focus. Whatever was said in the press or in Congress, behind closed doors there was no suggestion of the Americans making pleas for more extensive participation in the Japanese war, still less of the British resisting them: almost the reverse. Thus Field Marshal Brooke was pleased that General Marshall was so ready to accept the British offer to provide as much as a quarter of the projected invasion force. One complication was the proprietorial attitude of Admiral King about US Navy operations. ‘His war is in the Pacific,’ Moran observed, ‘and the conflict with Germany has been to him only a tiresome distraction.’63 King’s longstanding reluctance to allow the intrusion of the Royal Navy into his ocean was well known. In fact, all these arguments were to be eclipsed by a new factor: the atomic bomb.
As more information from New Mexico became available via Stimson, the implications of the new weapons of mass destruction were debated by the small number of Americans privy to the secret, and the even smaller number of Britons. The initial question was whether to tell Stalin, and if so, what and when and how. That he should be told, but only at a late stage in the conference, was agreed between Churchill and Truman. Meanwhile, they had to meet him day by day with the great unspoken matter hanging in the air. There is little doubt that Churchill’s imagination was increasingly fired by what he heard, especially after receiving a detailed briefing on the results of the test on 22 July. ‘Stimson, what was gunpowder? Trivial,’ he declared. ‘What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath.’64
‘The Marshal was very amiable,’ the British Prime Minister told his doctor, using the adjective three times, after a long dinner at the Russian headquarters on 18 July. They had exchanged gifts of cigars and had sat smoking and talking for five hours at the table. Churchill heard what he wanted to hear: ‘I think Stalin wants me to win the election.’ Evidently well briefed from Communist sources in Britain, Stalin pontificated that Labour would win 220 or 230 seats, that the soldiers would support strong government – no red army in Britain – and hence Churchill’s majority might be about 80. Moreover, this sudden enthusiasm for the democratic process seemed infectious. ‘Stalin gave me his word there will be free elections in the countries set free by his armies,’ Churchill reported, apparently impressed. ‘We must listen to these Russians,’ he told a sceptical Moran. ‘They mobilized twelve million men, and nearly half of them were killed or are missing.’ For his part, Churchill was more than ready to talk about opening access more freely to the Black Sea. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that Stalin is trying to be as helpful as it is in him to be.’65
Churchill had been wooed by Stalin before. If he was susceptible, he was also ready to use any personal rapport as licence for plain speaking. He had already signalled his interest in Poland. ‘The burden of this matter rests on Britain,’ Churchill maintained. ‘We received the Poles when they were driven out by the Germans.’66 He continued in this vein the day after his amiable dinner, telling Moran afterwards: ‘I don't think Stalin was offended at what I said. He doesn't mind straight speaking.’67 They had just tangled on whether intervention in Franco’s Spain was justifiable, then on whether Tito’s Yugoslavia was carrying out the Yalta agreements – a contentious issue. ‘Let us drop it,’ Truman suggested. ‘It is very important,’ Churchill rejoined. ‘We are dropping it,’ Truman explained from the chair, ‘only for the day as we did with Franco.’ Churchill grumbled: ‘I had hoped that we could discuss these matters frankly.’68 But he blandly took the credit later, telling Moran: ‘When you come to a stony place, you adjourn. You have a conversation, carry it a certain distance, and then drop it.’69
The one thing on which it was easy to agree at Potsdam was to set up a permanent council of foreign ministers, meeting quarterly. They were charged with preparing for a peace conference that would not take place unless the great powers could meanwhile agree among themselves. ‘I think the meeting place should be London,’ Churchill had maintained. ‘London is the capital city most under fire of the enemy and the longest in the war.’70 Attlee was symbolically wheeled out in support. Proximity rather than sentiment prevailed in getting London agreed.
Fed by the foreign ministers, who met earlier each day, the plenary sessions proceeded on this principle: looking difficulties boldly in the face and then deferring awkward decisions, sometimes to another day and sometimes to a full peace conference. ‘The feelings of revenge and retribution are poor guides in politics’ was one of the uplifting maxims that Stalin introduced. ‘Democracy is Democracy the world over’ was another.71 Everyone could agree with such sentiments but they did not lead to concrete conclusions. Time and again the outstanding problems of Germany and Poland resurfaced, especially the border between them and reparations; time and again they were stalled.
‘I shall be glad when this election business is over,’ Churchill told Moran. ‘It hovers over me like a vulture of uncertainty in the sky.’72 His own inner misgivings began to sap his confidence, both in Stalin’s amiability and in Truman’s capacity – and both were necessary to clinch the business in hand. By Saturday, 21 July, after six full days at Potsdam and five plenaries, the lack of progress was evident. ‘It looks as if we may not finish on Wednesday,’ wrote Cadogan. ‘If we don't, Winston and Anthony will fly back on that day and be back here on Friday.’73 No mention of Attlee, of course.
That afternoon’s plenary had revealed increasingly open conflict about Germany and Poland, with Truman no longer prepared to defer the awkward issues. At Yalta, Poland’s eastern border had been settled as the Curzon line, thus ceding a large slice of Polish territory to the Soviet Union, with the promise of compensation for Poland in the west. The Oder–Neisse line, though often mentioned at Yalta, had not been agreed as the new border between Germany and Poland; but the Red Army subsequently treated it as such, driving out the German population in the course of its advance and allowing the Lublin Poles to take over government of this territory. Yet when the occupation zones of Germany had been decided at Yalta, the 1937 frontiers had been used; so part of the eastern zone assigned to the Russians had meanwhile unilaterally been handed over by them to the Poles. This was what Truman objected to. ‘I wanted the administrations in the four zones to be as we have agreed,’ he said. ‘We can not agree on reparations if parts of Germany are given away.’ This link was crucial. The point was not so much the irregularity of creating a de facto fifth zone under Polish occupation as the effect on Germany’s resources (which were thereby diminished) and its population (thereby displaced).
‘On paper it is formerly German territory but in fact it is Polish territory,’ Stalin countered. ‘There are no Germans left.’ Truman asked: ‘Where are the nine million Germans?’ ‘They have fled,’ was the laconic answer. ‘How can they be fed?’ Churchill asked, turning to the problem that the displaced Germans, evicted from the arable east, would pose for the industrial west – ‘It is apparent that a disproportionate part of the population will be cast on the rest of Germany with its food supplies alienated.’ The British zone, of course, was centred on the Ruhr. Would it simultaneously be asked to provide reparations (for the Russians) while having to feed the refugees displaced from the east (by the Russians)? ‘If the Germans have run out they should be encouraged to return,’ Churchill continued. ‘The Poles have no right to create a catastrophe in the feeding of Germany.’ He put the issue bluntly to Stalin: ‘We do not wish to be left with a vast German population on our hands deprived of its food supply.’74
At Yalta, Churchill had tried, half-heartedly, to support the Poles in resisting encroachment on their borders in the east. At Potsdam he changed sides, this time ranged against Polish claims. Admittedly, even at Yalta he had warned against stuffing the Polish goose with too much German food; at Potsdam he realized that he himself needed this food for the Ruhr. And Poland, of course, was now hardly ‘mistress in her own house and captain of her soul’, as Churchill had hoped at Yalta. The whole situation was a product of the way the Red Army had conducted its advance, sweeping out the Germans like dust before a broom; and the Russians were calling the shots. But at least the Americans were now roused to the dangers, much to Churchill’s relief. ‘I had a most fruitful hour with the President,’ he told Moran on 22 July. ‘We not only talk the same language, we think the same thoughts.’ What he did not tell his doctor (until the next morning) was what he had also learned from the Americans about the atom bomb.
That afternoon’s plenary saw battle resumed. In private Churchill was already counting the days before ‘this bloody election’ was determined.75 In public he said: ‘We must hope that the Polish question will become ripe for discussion before we leave.’ He claimed that the present Polish territorial proposal was not to Poland’s own advantage. ‘I have grave moral scruples regarding great movements and transfers of populations,’ he said. ‘Nine million people are involved.’ No, Stalin countered: ‘There are neither eight nor six nor three million Germans in this area.’ How many, of course, depended partly on how the area was defined. When the Russians talked of the Oder–Neisse line, they meant the area up to the western Neisse. But the river that the British had in mind was the eastern Neisse, and between the two had lived some 3 million people. If this became Polish territory, this population was likely to be added to the Germans already displaced. When Churchill talked up the numbers, and when Stalin talked them down, the dispute was rather unreal. The smaller the number of Germans who remained in the east, the larger the number already heading west as displaced persons.
The Big Three all came out with their well-rehearsed lines at this juncture. ‘We must not be accused of settling the frontier without hearing the Poles,’ Stalin piously insisted. ‘I cannot see the urgency,’ Truman responded from the chair. ‘The question can be settled only by the peace conference.’ But Churchill’s immediate rejoinder – ‘There is urgency, Mr President’ – pointed to the danger of simply letting the Poles dig themselves in, adding to their own territory while diminishing what ought to be a German zone. ‘The burden falls on us, the British in particular,’ he argued. ‘Our zone has the smallest supply of food and the greatest density of population.’76 It was agreed to consult the Poles, which obviously entailed further delay.
Meanwhile Churchill was ready to digress on some favourite themes, like imperial possessions. After San Francisco, existing British mandates were protected, as Truman reminded him. ‘Eden said Italy lost her colonies,’ Stalin interjected. ‘Who gets them?’ Churchill supplied an answer of sorts: ‘The British alone conquered the Italian armies.’ ‘Alone?’ queried Truman, no doubt mindful of the American role in the Italian campaign. ‘But Berlin was taken by the Red Army,’ Stalin then reminded them. ‘I meant the Italian colonies, Mr President, were taken by us,’ Churchill explained, triggered by these remarks to expound the purity of his country’s motives. ‘We do not seek territorial aggrandizement,’ he claimed. ‘We have suffered grievous losses, though not so great in human life as has Russia. We come out of the war a great debtor.’ Britain, in its ‘rectitude and complete disinterestedness’, made no claim for these North African colonies.
‘Who wants them?’ he asked, only to be quickly assured that Truman did not – ‘We have enough “poor Italians” to feed in the United States.’ Churchill ruminated on the options. ‘We considered them for Jewish settlement, but the Jews are not attracted to them,’ he said. ‘Of course, we have great interest in the Mediterranean.’
That at least would have come as no surprise to American critics of British imperialism, who had long suspected no less. What surprised Churchill – not having read the relevant papers of course – was to sense Russian interest: ‘I am frank to say I have not considered the possibility of Russia claiming territory in the Mediterranean.’77 But for Stalin, the grand master, all the pieces on the board were in play. Thus Churchill’s move to talk about Soviet troop concentrations in Bulgaria was to be countered the next day by Stalin’s assertion: ‘Russia has very few troops in Bulgaria, but the British have more in Greece.’78 The ‘naughty document’ they had agreed nine months previously had, of course, played off British preponderance in Greece against Russian preponderance in Bulgaria. On Stalin’s theory, rights of conquest should be mutually respected.
The spoils of war seemed rather inequitably apportioned: for the British, an option on former Italian territory which even Churchill did not want; for the Russians, former Polish territory which Stalin really did want; and for the Poles, gains and losses engineered alike by their Soviet masters.
Churchill sometimes spoke as though the news of the atomic test transformed everything: explaining Truman’s new-found confidence, animating Anglo-American solidarity, and tipping the balance of power. Yet Churchill’s own mood fluctuated almost by the hour. At dinner on the very day that he learned of the Second Coming in Wrath he nonetheless seemed reconciled to Soviet supremacy in Europe. ‘The idea of Germany as a single unit has vanished,’ he concluded. ‘Instead, we have Russian Germany divided from British Germany by a line drawn by God knows whom, on no economic or historic grounds.’ Yet the Russians still demanded reparations from the whole of Germany. ‘They will grind their zone, there will be unimaginable cruelties,’ Churchill concluded. ‘It is indefensible, except on one ground: that there is no alternative.’ Yet at the next night’s formal dinner, a revived Prime Minister was to propose a toast to Stalin the Great. To his doctor, the sad reality was that of an exhausted man, too tired to prepare, improvising on the spot, and resigned to cutting his losses: ‘In fact – he makes no bones about it – he intends to shelve the really big decisions until he knows what has happened in the poll.’79
As breakfast was slowly cleared away on Monday, 23 July, Moran found the Prime Minister impatient for a confidential talk – ‘That will do, Sawyers; you can do that later’ – and heard his first of the atomic secret. ‘We put the Americans on the bomb,’ Churchill declared. ‘We fired them by suggesting that it could be used in this war. We have an agreement with them.’ He was referring to the informal understanding over the atom bomb reached with Roosevelt at the first Quebec conference in 1943. ‘We thought it would be indecent to use it in Japan without telling the Russians, so they are to be told today,’ Churchill continued. ‘It has come just in time to save the world.’80
Not everyone agreed, especially about the effect on the Russians. When the chiefs of staff were told at lunch that same day, Brooke thought the Prime Minister’s reaction much exaggerated. ‘Now we had a new value which redressed our position (pushing his chin out and scowling), now we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow,’ said Churchill, and responded angrily to any criticism. ‘I was trying to dispel his dreams and as usual he did not like it,’ Brooke recorded. ‘But I shudder to feel that he is allowing the half baked results of one experiment to warp the whole of his diplomatic perspective!’81
Yet the news of the bomb left little mark on the proceedings of the conference. The final plan was for Truman to tell Stalin about it after the eighth plenary on 24 July. It was the last full day before Churchill’s departure and one that caught him on very mixed form. It was a bad decision – had Sawyers slipped up? – to choose a tropical Air Force uniform for a morning visit to the President, since the weather suddenly turned cold, but the successive effect of two stiff whiskies, a brandy, a restorative lunch, and an afternoon sleep did the trick. ‘I feel quite different,’ said Churchill as he awoke, though Sawyers, aware of the 5 o’clock meeting, kept chivvying: ‘You're going to be late, sir.’82 Instead, Churchill hit top form in a demob-happy display.
There was certainly plain speaking but within conventions that were now established. All the Big Three played in character, with Truman sometimes like a patient schoolteacher, trying to find procedural dodges to rescue the business from the jocular banter of the bad boys who were showing off in front of the class. One issue was whether it was right for Italy to be recognized when the Soviet-friendly governments of Bulgaria, Rumania, Finland and Hungary were not. Churchill pointed to difficulties in gaining access and information about the latter, citing the restrictions placed on diplomats in Rumania and Bulgaria. ‘An iron curtain has been rung down,’ he claimed.83 ‘They are all fairy tales,’ said Stalin. ‘Statesmen may call one another’s statements fairy tales, if they wish,’ Churchill responded. ‘The same condition prevails in Italy,’ Stalin countered. ‘That is not accurate,’ Churchill riposted. ‘You can go where you like in Italy.’
It still remained unclear, however, whether peace treaties could be prepared, still less concluded, if these countries were not recognized. ‘May I suggest that we again refer the matter to the Foreign Ministers?’ Truman suggested. ‘Mr Churchill is not right,’ said Stalin. ‘Peace treaties can be prepared even though governments are not recognized.’ ‘Then we should provide for the conclusion of treaties for not with these countries,’ Churchill responded and had the satisfaction of acknowledging Stalin’s approval for this adroit verbal distinction. ‘Thank you, Marshal.’ ‘Don't mention it.’84
As the session broke up, Truman cornered Stalin for an informal exchange with only their interpreters. The President was deliberately pitching his recital of the development of unspecified new weapons in the key of a Chopin nocturne rather than a Wagnerian overture. In Triumph and Tragedy there is a vivid cameo of the scene, as Churchill watched from a distance to gauge Stalin’s reaction: ‘He seemed to be delighted. A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the whole Japanese war! What a bit of luck!’85 Churchill clung to the idea that this showed that Stalin had little sense of the significance of what he was now being told. The fact is that Stalin had already been told most of this by Soviet agents.
And then everyone went on pretending that nothing had happened. The Americans pretended that they still needed their Allies’ help in finishing the Japanese war (whereas covertly this was now the last thing they wanted). The British pretended that they could make a contribution in the Pacific on a scale that they would have found crippling (and made this empty offer patently in order to reassert their imperial power and prestige in Asia). The Russians pretended that they had similarly disinterested motives for accelerating their long-promised declaration of war against Japan (and did so manifestly in order to claim a share of the spoils).
Churchill had summoned the Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to Potsdam. Just ahead of Stalin, Mountbatten was told (by Marshall) about the plan to use the new atomic weapon against Japan and dined with Churchill on 24 July. ‘It was a mournful and eerie feeling,’ Mountbatten wrote in his diary, ‘to sit there talking plans with a man who seemed so confident that they would come off, and I felt equally confident that he would be out of office within 24 hours.’86 Two days later, release of news of his visit made a rare breach in the wall of secrecy. The Daily Mail's banner headline was ‘LORD LOUIS TALKS WITH STALIN’, fuelling speculation that the Soviet Union was near to war with Japan.
A Polish delegation had duly arrived in Potsdam, led by the Communist Bierut, and including the long-suffering Mikolajczyk in a subordinate position. Churchill was reluctant to be drawn in to what he saw as another pantomime. ‘I'm sick of the bloody Poles,’ he told Moran. ‘I don't want to see them.’87 Nonetheless he had two sessions with them. Each side rehearsed its points. Churchill told the familiar story of how Britain had gone to war for Poland and still wished to protect its interests so long as no threat was posed to Russia. Bierut, supported by Mikolajczyk, asserted the Polish claim to all territory up to the line of the western Neisse, from which only 1.5 million Germans remained to be displaced. Churchill warned that this was too much and too many, and pressed for free elections, as in Britain. Theirs would be even more democratic, replied Bierut (a claim about which Mikolajczyk privately expressed scepticism). The Polish leaders did not make a good impression – ‘dreadful people all of them, except Mikolajczyk’, according to Cadogan.88
Churchill had had to get up at an unaccustomed hour in order to see Bierut for the second time at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, 25 July, his own last day at Potsdam and the eve of the election results in Britain. The morning had not begun well. ‘I dreamed that life was over,’ he told Moran. ‘I saw – it was very vivid – my dead body under a white sheet on a table in an empty room.’89 Churchill then saw Bierut for the best part of an hour – or the worst part perhaps – before attending the plenary at 11 o’clock.
The first business in this ninth plenary was to hear Churchill report back on the Poles. ‘They all agree that there are about one and a half million Germans in this area,’ he said. ‘The issue is all mixed up with the reparation issue, and the four power zones of occupation.’ If no agreement were reached on either the Polish border or the impact on the occupation zones, he warned, ‘it would mark the breakdown of the conference.’ The usual inconclusive, point-scoring wrangle with Stalin then developed. ‘We were only exchanging views,’ said Churchill. ‘I am finished.’ ‘What a pity,’ said Stalin. ‘We shall adjourn until Friday at five p.m.,’ Truman intervened, seeking to close the proceedings within the allotted hour. ‘I hope to be back,’ Churchill rejoined. This gave Stalin his opportunity: ‘Judging from the expression on Mr Attlee’s face, I do not think he looks forward avidly to taking over your authority.’90
The British party leaders then flew home. So did Field Marshal Brooke, whose business was over, having attended a joint chiefs of staff meeting the previous day (which gave discouraging news about Lend-Lease supplies). To put him in the picture, he had been given access to the official British record of the Big Three’s plenary sessions to date – ‘and they are very interesting reading, the one fact that stands out more clearly than any other is that nothing is ever settled!!’91 Cadogan, left minding the shop in Potsdam, attended a foreign ministers’ meeting (‘at which I impersonated A.') and later reflected on the virtue of having a mid-conference break like this, to take stock, while the shape of the British Government hung in the balance. ‘Personally, I have an instinctive feeling that there may be some shocks for the Conservatives,’ he wrote, ‘but that’s based on nothing.’92 The election forecasts that Churchill had been fed by Beaverbrook, however, continued to predict a Conservative majority of up to a hundred. Lord Moran had sometimes provoked irritation by querying such confidence; but actions speak louder than words. ‘I was so sure that we should return to Berlin,’ he later wrote in his diary, ‘that I left my baggage there.’93
*
The results of the 1945 General Election blew nearly all the forecasts sky high. Yet the opinion polls were within about 1 per cent of the actual result. For two years Gallup had found Labour invariably leading the Conservatives in voting intentions; its final poll, taken between 24 and 27 June, a week before votes were cast, showed the Conservatives at 41 per cent and Labour at 47 per cent. Apart from the fact that most commentators did not trust the science of such findings, they faced a real problem in predicting the relationship between votes cast and seats won; and this was complicated by the fact that the emergence of a new two-party system made maxims derived from the pre-war period misleading. On 4 July the News Chronicle, which published the final Gallup Poll, offered an extrapolation from the 1929 General Election which suggested that Labour’s 47 per cent vote might produce as many as 370 seats – but hedged this with an alternative extrapolation from 1935 showing that it could produce as few as 200.94 In fact Labour won 393 seats, the Conservatives 210, the Liberals 12 and others 25. It was one of the biggest landslides in British electoral history, giving Labour a majority for the first time, and a large one at that.
The results flooded in on the morning of Thursday, 26 July. A landmark was reached at 10.25 a.m. with the defeat of the first cabinet minister: Harold Macmillan at Stockton. Brendan Bracken’s defeat came within half an hour, as did Leo Amery’s. Churchill himself was returned at Woodford, Essex, where neither the Labour nor Liberal parties had put up a candidate against the Prime Minister. It was not really a personal rebuff, though it obviously felt like it at lunch that day at 10 Downing Street. But at least there was the consolation of a vintage aphorism, later to adorn the pages of Triumph and Tragedy. ‘It may well be a blessing in disguise,’ Clementine Churchill had ventured, stimulating the reply: ‘At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.’95
In theory, the Prime Minister could have carried on until he met the new House of Commons, returning to the unfinished business of the Big Three as a lame duck. Instead he decided immediately to resign. As the results reached Potsdam, Sir Alec Cadogan pondered the outcome: ‘It certainly is a display of base ingratitude, and rather humiliating for our country.’96 When Lord Moran called at Downing Street late the same afternoon, Churchill greeted him: ‘Well, you know what has happened?’ Moran knew well enough and mumbled likewise about the ingratitude of the people. ‘Oh no,’ Churchill answered, ‘I wouldn't call it that. They have had a very hard time.’97 The following day there were farewells at Downing Street to the wartime chiefs of staff, led by the CIGS (who had written a little over a week previously: ‘Abusive minutes from PM based on false facts and bearing no relation to realities'). Now Brooke shifted, as he had done so often, to another perspective: ‘It was a very sad and very moving little meeting at which I found myself unable to say much for fear of breaking down. He was standing the blow wonderfully well.’98 Churchill’s hour of greatness as war leader was over and it would be for others to meet the costs of victory.
In theory, too, Attlee could have put the Labour Party through its formal procedure for a leadership election. This is what his old rival Herbert Morrison, backed by Laski, thought should happen, for obviously self-interested motives. Instead, as soon as the King asked him, Attlee moved promptly to form a new government. In this the position of Ernest Bevin was critical. His immediate support for Attlee was decisive – and predictable given his strong antipathy towards Morrison. This also exacerbated Attlee’s problem in cabinet-making. Morrison was to be denied not only the premiership but the consolation prize of the Foreign Office, for which Hugh Dalton was the favourite. But if Morrison was to be given a major role in domestic policy it meant that Bevin ought not to be, and therefore could not have the Treasury, as had been generally expected. The solution was to switch Dalton to the Treasury and Bevin to the Foreign Office.
These key cabinet appointments were announced on the morning of Saturday, 28 July. Though Attlee was working quickly, he had already put off his departure for Potsdam until that afternoon and told Stalin and Truman that he ‘and a colleague’ would be ready for a Big Three meeting after dinner.99 Otherwise, the British delegation of thirty-five was kept intact, to the surprise of Americans as well as Russians. The appointment of Bevin as Foreign Secretary was neither untoward nor unwelcome in the Foreign Office. Cadogan, who had thought this likely from the moment the election result was known, wrote: ‘I think he’s broadminded and sensible, honest and courageous’ and added the obvious departmental consideration: ‘He’s the heavyweight of the Cabinet and will get his own way with them, so if he can be put on the right line, that may be all right.’100 It must be a possibility that Attlee, after confronting Stalin across the table for nine days, saw the point of installing at his side a figure of Churchillian presence and pugnacity (not to mention physical bulk).
Attlee and Bevin duly arrived at Potsdam on Saturday evening. They talked first with the American President and Secretary of State, who explained the Soviet claim to make the Oder–Neisse line the German border. ‘Mr Bevin immediately and forcefully presented his strong opposition to these boundaries,’ Byrnes recalled. ‘His manner was so aggressive that both the President and I wondered how we would get along with this new Foreign Minister.’101 This was before the mandarins of the Foreign Office had had any time to ensure that Bevin was ‘put on the right line'; he clearly had his own line and his own longstanding suspicions of Soviet policy. At 10 p.m. the Russian Generalissimo received the representatives of the British proletariat and immediately resumed his electoral research, demanding explanations of such an unexpected result, and suggesting that the voters were no longer interested in a faraway American war on Japan. ‘We would not let down the Americans,’ Attlee responded and Bevin underlined the British commitment in Asia by observing that ‘Britain had become a debtor to India to the extent of one thousand million pounds.’102
It was a long Saturday for Attlee and Bevin. At 10.30 p.m. that evening the deferred tenth plenary opened after a break of two clear days, with Attlee in Churchill’s place, Bevin in Eden’s, and everyone else as they were. ‘I regret our domestic situation has caused delay in the Conference,’ Attlee apologized. ‘We are willing to sit as long as necessary.’ They picked up where they had left off. Byrnes reported on his efforts to secure agreement on the admission of Italy and others to the United Nations. ‘Unfortunately, we find when we agree with the Soviets the British disagree and when we agree with the British the Soviets disagree,’ he explained. ‘If the British and the Soviets can get together it is satisfactory to us.’ Cadogan was asked by Attlee to state the British position, as laid down by Churchill. Stalin then reiterated his claim that there was no difference between Italy and the countries of eastern Europe. Bevin spoke for the first time: ‘We know about the Italian government, but we don't know about the others.’103 It was as though Churchill had never left.
What had changed, however, was the Americans’ determination to wrap up this conference by summarily striking the best deal possible with the Russians. The President, anxious to leave before the atom bomb was used in Japan, put the business in the hands of Byrnes, who had already begun bilateral meetings with Molotov before Churchill’s departure. The temporary British absence simply facilitated moves towards resolving outstanding issues between the Big Two.
Byrnes’s strategy was simple. If the major issues on which the conference was deadlocked could not be solved separately, perhaps they could be solved together. Stalin was in a position to get his own way on the Polish border, even if this had adverse effects on the other zones of Germany. But he could not simultaneously succeed in exacting Soviet reparations from the whole of Germany (which he had thereby disrupted) unless the Western occupying powers co-operated. Here lay a possible trade-off: concessions by the Americans on the Oder–Neisse line in return for restriction of the Russians’ reparations claim. As a side issue, Italy and its admission to the United Nations was to be made part of the package.
Reparations had been central to the Versailles treaty. Potsdam produced no peace treaty but neither did it produce a retributive settlement – at least, not for the western zones of Germany since both Britain and the United States were more concerned with restoring economic viability. That left reparations for the Soviet Union, which had been agreed in principle at Yalta and set at half of a notional total of 20 billion dollars. The Potsdam twist was that if the Soviet Union could extract reparations in kind worth up to 10 billion dollars from its own zone, the sums would add up. Admittedly, a sweetener would have to be thrown in, specifying some extra contribution from the rest of Germany. This would have to be provided in practice from the production of the Ruhr, where Britain’s interest as the occupying power made it reluctant to mortgage more than a small percentage of the resources available.
Such was the thinking behind Byrnes’s deal, of which the British were informed, on which they were consulted, but over which they had marginal influence. Was it worth having? Was it better than nothing? The Morgenthau Plan was plainly dead; western Germany at least could be rehabilitated rather than ravaged; there would be no general, Versailles-style ongoing reparations to sour the post-war world. The division of Europe, in short, would be recognized as a fact of life, politically and economically. Failing to agree on an amicable peace, as they had still hoped at Yalta, the Big Three could at least agree to leave Potsdam without sowing the seeds of a new war.
On his first morning back, Sunday, 30 July, Attlee held a staff conference for the British delegation: a typically businesslike innovation. He chaired it and, as in the plenaries, left the Foreign Secretary to make the running. ‘He effaces Attlee,’ Cadogan noted, ‘and at Big 3 meetings he does all the talking while Attlee nods his head convulsively and smokes his pipe.’104 Bevin now outlined his own ideas for seeking a bargain that included reparations, withdrawal of Soviet troops from the Polish zone, early elections in Greece and, of course, some agreement on the Oder–Neisse line. When the British ambassador to Moscow said that territory up to the western Neisse was likely to be taken willy-nilly, Attlee intervened to say that ‘there was a difference between our accepting a fait accompli and becoming accessories before the fact.’105 Over the next couple of days such nice distinctions and moral scruples were steadily eroded.
There was no plenary on either Sunday or Monday – Stalin pleaded a cold – so Byrnes was left unimpeded to market his three-part bumper bundle. The British staff conferences continued each morning. On Tuesday, Bevin summarized the progress made by the foreign ministers. Molotov seemed ready to buy the offer on reparations, Byrnes to offer concession on the western Neisse in return, with only Bevin holding out. At a subsequent meeting that morning with Mikolajczyk, Bevin suggested that he might become more accommodating towards Poland over the border in return for satisfactory assurances about internal conditions and elections; but the obvious difficulty was not whether Mikolajczyk agreed but whether he could deliver. Bevin finished a busy morning with a working lunch given by Molotov, who was assured of the continuity of British foreign policy – in substance if not in style. When he asked when the conference would end, Bevin replied that ‘it would end as soon as M. Molotov had agreed to all his proposals.’106
All the strands at Postdam came together in the eleventh plenary at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 31 July. Byrnes presented his three-part proposal. ‘The questions are not connected,’ said Stalin but he implicitly acknowledged that they now were. There was a lot of bargaining across the table about what percentage of western German resources could be earmarked for reparations to Russia. Bevin, the old trade-union negotiator, haggled away – ‘Take out paragraph 4 and I will give you 12½ and 10 per cent’ – before clinching with Stalin. Then, inevitably, borders. ‘I have been instructed to hold out for the eastern Neisse,’ said Bevin. But again he was negotiating, and from weakness, and without American support. The best he could do was to concede the western Neisse as a provisional boundary for administrative purposes, subject to a peace conference, with the proviso that Soviet troops would be withdrawn accordingly. ‘I will do all I can,’ said Stalin. ‘That settles the Polish question,’ said Truman.107
There were thirteen plenaries in all at Potsdam, four more than at Yalta. The last two had little substantive business, focused chiefly on drafting issues, with a final communiqué approved at the final session on 1 August, finishing half an hour after midnight. When it came to signing, there was a dry joke from Attlee. ‘I favour alphabetical order,’ he said; ‘that is where I would score over Marshal Zhukov.’108 He wrote a friendly letter to Churchill that night, bringing him up to date on Uncle Joe and his changeable moods: ‘We have, of course, been building on the foundation laid by you, and there has been no change of policy.’ He commended Bevin’s performance and reached for a well-worn – but irresistibly apt – metaphor: ‘I think that the results achieved are not unsatisfactory having regard to the way the course of the war had dealt the cards.’109
In Triumph and Tragedy Churchill later wrote that ‘neither I nor Mr Eden would ever have agreed to the Western Neisse being the frontier line.’110 He did not, however, explain how he would have stopped this happening. ‘Joe has got most of what he wants, but then the cards were mostly in his hands,’ Cadogan wrote. As for playing the hand, he thought Bevin was doing well, ready to read all his briefs, take them in, and then make up his own mind. ‘I think he’s the best we could have had.’111 Bevin now held the post of British Foreign Secretary; but the Red Army held Warsaw, Berlin, Prague and Vienna. Facts on the ground militated for the status quo. This was decision by default.
Potsdam never had the glamour or notoriety of Yalta and even at the time this final Big Three meeting was seen as rather an anti-climax. ‘I must admit I take no interest in it whatsoever now that Churchill isn't in it,’ one woman told Mass-Observation.112 If the very term Big Three seemed less appropriate than in the Churchill–Roosevelt era, it was still given its last airing. ‘BIG THREE SPEAK’ was how the Daily Mail reported the communiqué on 3 August, seizing on the point: ‘The spirit of this Declaration is preventive not punitive.’ Most of the American press was polite, even hopeful, and perhaps with better reason than after Yalta.
In the long run Potsdam turned out to mark a success of sorts. After the downfall of Napoleon in 1815, the victorious powers, initially in the guise of a Holy Alliance, succeeded in keeping the peace in Europe for forty years, until the Crimean War. After the downfall of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1918, the victorious powers maintained the Versailles peace for only twenty years. After the downfall of Hitler in 1945, the victorious powers settled into a far more permanent European peace (albeit under the umbrella of a ‘cold war’ until 1989). What Potsdam produced was not agreement between the great powers but agreement to disagree: much less than had been hoped, obviously, but better than the hot war that had just ended in Europe or the war in Japan that was about to generate heat on a scale never before imagined in human history.
What Potsdam obviously failed to do, however, was to ensure that the life of the world would move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. This was to disappoint American as much as British hopes. ‘Nobody won but Russia at Potsdam,’ concluded an unimpressed Chicago Tribune on 4 August. The judgement was predictable, the line of reasoning familiar. ‘It was a mistake for President Truman to go to Potsdam,’ it said. ‘The greater mistake was for America to have gone into Europe’s war.’ As usual, the implications of refusing to do so were not spelled out.
Such judgements, and from such a quarter, have easily been scorned as the last gasp of isolationism and kneejerk Anglophobia. Yet not everything that the choleric Colonel McCormick and his newspaper said was nonsense. After all, he was not so much an Anglophobe as a hater of American Anglophiles. The Tribune showed mixed feelings about Britain’s position, internally and externally alike. It did not gloat over Churchill’s electoral downfall but took a sober view of the Labour Government’s inheritance in its mission to ameliorate the lot of the working man: ‘This task will be undertaken at a moment when there is a shortage of houses, food, clothing, and almost everything else that enters into the standard of living; when Britain’s industrial plant is in need of immense capital investment; when her domestic debt is greater than ever; and when Britain owes more money abroad and has less coming in from foreign debtors than at any time in her modern history.’113 In 1945 others nurtured greater illusions than this, especially in Britain.
Hollow victories, in some ways, for Churchill and Attlee alike (albeit obviously preferable to defeat in either case). Germany had been thwarted in 1940 by a single undefeated enemy, the British Empire, which had gone to war to protect Poland (and with guilty feelings about Czechoslovakia). Churchill had truly expressed national unity at this juncture. But by 1945 the British role in finally defeating Germany was minor – about one in ten of the troops on the ground. One result was that British concerns about Poland ultimately counted for little (and those about Czechoslovakia for even less). Whatever was settled at Potsdam depended on the two superpowers: the United States with its unexampled capacity to wage war simultaneously in both Europe and the Pacific, and the Soviet Union, manifestly in control of the contested territory in Europe, as was apparent to anyone at the Potsdam conference who ventured outside its heavily armed security ring. ‘From now on Britain lives among the faded glories of the past,’ the Chicago Tribune commented. ‘She fought to prevent the unification of Europe under Germany, only to see the same objective accomplished under Russian leadership.’114 The greatest illusion, however, would surely be to suppose that a better alternative had been available in 1940 and that victory at all costs could have been achieved in any other way.