Immense controversy has arisen about this conference, but the West got everything it wanted. As the Roosevelt biographer Ted Morgan has pointed out, “If Yalta was a sell-out, why did [Stalin] go to such lengths to violate the agreement?”
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Roosevelt was not well at Yalta, but his mental powers were unaffected, as all who worked with him, especially Bohlen and Stettinius, attest. His plan was to await the development of atomic weapons and then hold Stalin’s feet to the fire: the West would guarantee the permanent defanging of Germany (if not Morgenthau’s mad “pastoralization” plan), a large economic aid package for Russia, and entire respectability for Stalin and his regime as one of the world’s very greatest leaders of a co-equal superpower with the United States. And if that were not adequate incentive, Germany would be rearmed under Western tutelage, there would not be a cent of assistance, Stalin and his murderous regime could continue as the civilized world’s pariah, and, as Roosevelt had discussed with Stimson in August 1944, the United States would consider the potential for its status as holder of a nuclear monopoly, to accomplish “the necessity of bringing Russia ... into the fold of Christian civilization.”
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Roosevelt and Stalin parted on the cheerful agreement that they would “meet again soon, in Berlin.” They were not to meet again.
2. THE FINAL OFFENSIVES
Eisenhower’s armies launched their offensive to end the war in the west starting on February 8, with the British and Canadian invasion of Germany from Holland, followed by Patton’s attack across the Saar River on February 22. The American Central Army Group prorupted into the Ruhr Valley on February 23, and took Cologne and Dusseldorf on the Rhine, and the bridge across the Rhine at Remagen, all on March 7. A full Allied offensive across the Rhine, by boat and by air, was successfully carried out starting March 23, and Eisenhower’s grand double envelopment of the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany, was executed from March 24 to April 18, culminating in the surrender of 325,000 German soldiers.
The only Central European country that had not been mentioned, at Tehran, at Yalta, in Churchill’s meeting with Stalin in October 1944, or otherwise, was Czechoslovakia. The Russians were soon in control of most of Slovakia, but Bohemia and Moravia, including Prague, which was undamaged by the war, were unclaimed, and it has never been explained, including in the memoirs of the principal figures in the drama, why the Western Allies did not occupy Prague.
In the Pacific, Nimitz invaded Iwo Jima, a volcanic island about 700 miles from Japan, which, when captured, would make Japan much more accessible to air attack from American B-29s. There were 18,000 Japanese defenders, in a heavily fortified and camouflaged network of bunkers and artillery and heavy machine gun emplacements, connected by 18 kilometers of tunnels. The Americans arrived in an armada of 450 ships, attacked the entire periphery of the island for three days with the full continuous broadsides of 20 battleships at point-blank range, supplemented by heavy aerial bombing throughout that time, starting on February 19. A total of 70,000 marines were landed. Given the correlation of forces, the Japanese had no chance of repulsing the attack, but they held out until March 17. The Americans took about 4,500 dead and 15,300 wounded. The 18,000 Japanese defenders, who had, as at Saipan, to be incinerated or suffocated in their caves and bunkers with sustained assault from flame-throwers, all died, except for 216 taken prisoner, most of them while unconscious from wounds. It could be reasonably inferred that the defense of Japan itself would be a matter of suicidal tenacity to the last woman and ambulatory child, if atomic weapons did not obviate a conventional assault and occupation.
This apprehension was reinforced with the battle for Okinawa, just 360 miles from Japan, which began on April 1. The United States had 23 battleships, counting the British Pacific Fleet, which had been beefed up, as the German navy was now almost extinct. The Allies had scores of fleet and escort carriers and again opened with a carpet bombardment of several days. The Japanese attacked the Allied fleet with 1,500 kamikaze (suicide) planes, and damaged several aircraft carriers and sank several destroyer escorts. An effort to attack with surface ships, led by the world’s largest battleship, the 73,000-ton
Yamato
, was foiled by American carrier forces, which attacked the
Yamato
with over 300 planes and sank it with 15 torpedo hits, all on the same side to prevent counter-flooding, and 21 heavy bomb hits. They sank almost all the escorting vessels too, and the Japanese lost 3,700 sailors, to only 12 American airmen, on April 7.
Okinawa was defended by 120,000 Japanese, and the invaders landed 183,000 experienced and heavily armed shock troops. The battle continued to June 21, though it was generally a mopping-up operation for the last month. The Allies (95 percent Americans) suffered over 12,000 dead and 38,000 wounded. Japan achieved a 100 percent casualty rate, 113,000 dead and 7,000 wounded. No able-bodied Japanese were captured. There were more than 100,000 civilians killed, as the Japanese forces dispersed among the native (mainly Japanese) population. This bloody campaign confirmed that only atomic weapons, which would be tested in New Mexico a month after the end of the Okinawa campaign, could prevent a horrible bloodbath in the main islands of Japan.
In Germany, the U.S. Ninth Army, part of Bradley’s Central Army Group, reached the Elbe on April 12. The Russians launched a drive on Berlin on April 13, and arrived in the eastern outskirts of the shattered German capital on April 24. The end of the Third Reich was at hand.
3. THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT; PRESIDENT TRUMAN AND THE POTSDAM CONFERENCE
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his winter home at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12. He was only 63. Vice President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as president several hours later. Winston Churchill spoke nothing but the truth when he said in his parliamentary eulogy on April 17: “In the days of peace, he had broadened the foundation of American life and union. In war he had raised the strength, might, and glory of the Great Republic to a height never attained by any nation in history. . . . All this was no more than worldly power and grandeur had it not been that the causes of human freedom and social justice, to which so much of his life had been given, added a luster [to him and his achievements] which will long be discernible among men.... In Franklin Roosevelt there has died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.”
Roosevelt had infused an economically and psychologically depressed nation with his own vitality, had led it with consummate talent and astuteness, step by step, to overwhelming economic, military, moral, and popular cultural preeminence in the world, and to the brink of victory over every foreign and domestic enemy. He was exhausted in his fourth term, and was thinking of retiring just before he died, but President Roosevelt had made it America’s world to lead, a world largely safe for democracy, at last, as long as the United States was involved in it. He would have been proud that he headed the official list of America’s war dead on April 13, as commander-in-chief of the mighty and everywhere victorious armed forces of the United States.
For some days, Churchill had been bombarding Roosevelt with messages urging him to send the U.S. Ninth Army on to Berlin, blissfully oblivious of the European Advisory Commission agreement on occupation zones in Germany, which his government had proposed. He continued this campaign with Truman, who had never been informed by Roosevelt about anything, and had to make decisions of historic and global importance in haste. Fortunately, the new president was a man of courage, sound judgment, and a decisive temperament. He referred Churchill’s importuning to Marshall, who consulted Eisenhower, although it was a strategic decision of national foreign and security policy, not a properly military matter. Eisenhower said that he would of course carry out any orders he received, but that he understood the United States was bound by the EAC zones, and did not personally see why he should sacrifice the lives of American, British, Canadian, and French soldiers to take territory that would then be handed back to the Russians.
It is possible that had Eisenhower known that Stalin was already violating the Yalta agreements and his spheres-of-influence agreement with Churchill, and snuffing out any independence in the territories occupied by the Red Army, and had he known of the imminent testing of atomic weapons, he might have given a different opinion. But the opinion he did give was the view of the Joint Chiefs (Marshall, King, Arnold of the Army Air Force, and Leahy), as they didn’t want to alienate the Russians unless they knew the atomic bomb would work and that they would not need the Russians to take up to half of the million casualties anticipated in subduing Japan. Taking Berlin and holding it would have been an act of brinkmanship, and Stalin had three times as big an army as Eisenhower. American and British domestic opinion would not have accepted a show-down confrontation with Stalin, whom they had been conditioned by the successes of the Red Army and the apparently satisfactory meetings at Tehran and Yalta to regard positively, if warily. Roosevelt needed the United Nations established and the United States firmly installed in it, while Allied unity was intact, so that he could complete the rout of the isolationists and sell his argument to his countrymen that the world was no longer as sinister a place as it had been, and that American involvement in the world was necessary to keep it so.
Roosevelt had already put on hold the $6.5 billion economic aid package he had dangled before Stalin, pending Soviet compliance with the Yalta Declarations on Poland and on Liberated Europe. And the permanent demilitarization of Germany, which even without Berlin would be 75 percent in the hands of the West, thus could be easily reversed and Germany put back on its feet and tied in with de Gaulle’s France, Churchill’s Britain, a post-Fascist, non-communist Italy, even Franco’s Spain, and the always Russophobic Turks as, with American assistance, a counterweight to Russia—an American-led and infinitely more powerful revival of the German and Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact.
As the Reich was overrun, death camps were liberated and the proportions of Nazi infamies—12 million people murdered in the camps, half of them Jews—horrified the world. Eisenhower ordered that all the camps liberated in the West be filmed, that the world not be inherited by Holocaust-deniers. He wrote that the most moving experience of his life was when he visited the Buchenwald death camp and human skeletons, seeing his five-star insignia as supreme commander of the Allied armies, bravely saluted him. (He came to attention and crisply returned the salute.)
Trying to escape Italy in a German army truck, wearing a German army uniform, Mussolini, whom the Roman crowds had cheered with adulation for nearly 20 year, was apprehended by partisans and shot with his companion, Clara Petacci on April 28. Their corpses were hoisted, upside down, in a Milan square, and mutilated and desecrated by a mob. Hitler, taking note of the Duce’s inelegant end, remained in his bunker in Berlin until the Russians were almost overhead, and having ordered that his corpse and that of his just-married wife, Eva Braun, be burned, committed suicide with a handgun on April 30. Most of the rest of the Nazi leadership committed suicide, except for Ribbentrop, who was executed for war crimes, along with a number of others after the Nuremberg trials, which had been envisioned at the Potsdam Conference. Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz was designated by Hitler in his will as his heir, and set up a government in Flensburg, near the Danish border. They held cabinet meetings for a few days, in which the ministers for policy areas that were now completely esoteric, such as agriculture, spoke as if there were still anything left to govern. Doenitz’s only interest was to permit as many as possible of his fellow German servicemen to surrender to the Western Allies, and he ordered all units to surrender on May 8. The European war was over.
If it was going to be necessary to turn American opinion against Russia, it would take a little while for comprehensive demonization of the Kremlin and its chief occupant, and a grievance more worrisome to Americans than the treatment of former pro-fascist dictatorships like Romania and Hungary, or the formerly corrupt and anti-Semitic dictatorship of Poland. Most of the criticism of the Yalta agreements is a chorus of otherwise discordant anti-American elements, echoed by anti-Roosevelt Americans. This frequently grotesque canard suited disgruntled British imperialists, anti-Anglo-Saxon Gaullists, liberal Western appeasers of Russia of the Brandt-Trudeau variety, Eastern Europeans claiming an American obligation to risk war for them, as the British and French had for Poland, and in the United States the oft-defeated Republicans and those who made a career in the fifties of peddling one version or another of the Red Scare.
It is generally reckoned, by Bohlen and others, that Roosevelt, because of his immense prestige in the world, and his unfaltering leadership of American opinion, would have succeeded more quickly than Truman did in stirring American opinion to resist and contain Russia. But Truman and his successors—initially the strategic team recruited by Roosevelt, including Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Acheson, Kennan, Bohlen, and others—did adopt and execute the containment strategy, which secured the ultimate completion of the World War II: victory in the Cold War and the defeat of international communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
It must be recorded that Stalin’s decision to initiate the Cold War by violating almost every clause of the Yalta agreements was, next to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (Chapter 11) and Wilhelm II’s recourse to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 (Chapter 9), the most catastrophic strategic error of the twentieth century. If he had finessed the occupation of Eastern Europe, at least until American forces had departed Europe and he had the American aid package, and the Soviet Union, too, had atomic weapons; and if his successors had had the intelligence of the Chinese Communists, to abandon economic communism but retain authoritarianism, Russia could have been a durable rival to the United States, though certainly an underdog.