Britain and the Cold War, 1941-1947 9780224014786, 0224014781

Citation preview

"alsm Academy and College ■Gramley Library Winston-Salem, N.C. 27108

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

By the same author BRITISH WAR AIMS AND PEACE DIPLOMACY

1914-1918

VICTOR ROTHWELL h i

y

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

JONATHAN CAPE THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON

First published 1982 Copyright © Victor Rothwell 1982 Jonathan Cape Ltd, 30 Bedford Square, London WC1 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rothwell, Victor Britain and the cold war, 1941-1947. 1. Great Britain - Foreign relations - Russia 2. Russia - Foreign relations - Great Britain I. Title 327.4L047 da47.65 isbn

0-224-01478-1

Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis & Son Ltd The Trinity Press, Worcester, and London

J

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

1

The German Problem

21

2

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

74

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe During the War

151

4

Bevin and Foreign Policy

222

5

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

236

6

Germany: The Main Battleground

291

7

Eastern Europe After the War

358

8

Britain, the United States and Western Europe 1944-7

406

Appendix: The Foreign Office Staff

457

Sources and References

465

Index

528

3

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/britaincoldwar190000roth

Acknowledgments

For financial help I have to thank the Carnegie Trust for the Universities in Scotland, the British Academy and the University of Edinburgh. For access to their collections and for permission to quote from documents, in so far as it is within their power to grant such permission, I have to thank the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, University of London; the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford; and the authorities at the Archives, Churchill College, Cambridge. The archives of the Foreign Office form the basis of this study, and I thank the staff of the Public Record Office in Central London and later at Kew for their assistance. I extend a particularly warm word of thanks to Mr Piers Dixon for allowing me to consult his father’s diaries and other papers at his house in London. They were an invalu¬ able supplement to the main material in the public records. For constant moral support I am deeply indebted to my wife.

Edinburgh, 1981

V.R.

Introduction y

This book examines the British role in the origins of the conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western powers, which rapidly came to be known as the Cold War, from the vantage-point, primarily, of records in the Foreign Office. This stress on the opinions and actions of officials clearly requires a word of justification.* At the beginning of 1943, R.A. Butler, who had been Foreign Office junior minister at the relevant time, was asked to comment on preliminary drafts of an official account by Professor E.L. Woodward of the origins of the war then going on. He found it good except ‘that it struck him as being very much written from the standpoint of a Foreign Office official. That is to say extracts from minutes written by members of the Central Depart¬ ment seemed to bulk much more largely than references to Ministers, the Cabinet or Parliament.’1 The same charge might be levelled against the present book. Part of the answer to this charge is contained in a well-known passage by the late Sir Herbert Butterfield, written in 1949: The importance of the higher permanent officials of the Foreign Office is now accepted as a matter of common knowledge; and it has often been noted to what a degree a Foreign Secretary is in their hands. It has even been said that if the permanent officials cannot force their policy on a Foreign Secretary, at any rate they are strong enough to prevent him from carrying out any other policy of his own ... These sub-governmental, *For biographical notes on officials, see below, Appendix: The Foreign Office Staff, pp. 457-64. 1

Introduction

sub-ministerial actors in the drama are bound to be the real objective of a genuine enquiry into British foreign policy; and the real secrets and the real problems are situated in the very pature of things at this level.2 At the very least, to study British foreign policy from the standpoint of Foreign Office officials can scarcely be an invalid exercise. The Foreign Office records, being for internal use, show the frustrations felt by officials and the limitations on their power and influence, as well as their successes. They also shed much light on relations with other Government departments (during the war most notably with the Chiefs of Staff heading the Service ministries) and with outside politicians, especially the Prime Minister. Copies of Cabinet decisions and discussions affecting foreign policy were included in the Foreign Office records as a matter of course. When all this is said, the book makes no claim to be a comprehensive history of its subject. Concerning the war period in particular, limited attention has been paid to episodes which have already been fully treated in many excellent studies. That is why the great conferences at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam receive such short treatment, and not because of any conviction that they were less important than most historians suppose. The justification, likewise, for treating Churchill’s second visit to Moscow in 1944 in detail is simply that there is something new to be said. The treatment of the post-war period (1945 to the end of 1947) is more comprehensive in some ways, but far from exhaustive. For instance, British policy in Eastern Europe is traced in relation to only some, not all, of the countries of that region. One country not discussed is Poland - an arbitrary exclusion but one which derives some justification from the fact that it had almost completely lost the impor¬ tance in British foreign policy which it had had during the war. In 1942 Gladwyn Jebb contrasted ‘the three really great world powers’ (the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain) with all the other countries of the world which had to be made to accept the leadership of the Big Three even though many of them would not wish to do so.3 This 2

Introduction

assumption of British Great Power status was shared not only by all or almost all Foreign Office officials and by the leading British politicians of the time concerned with foreign policy (Churchill, Attlee, Eden arrd Bevin), but also by the left-wing opponents of the post-war Labour Government who advocated a foreign policy very different from the one pursued.4 Yet even during the war there was an uneasy realisation that Britain’s manpower and economic resources were barely adequate for a world role. This nagging doubt increased after the war but it resulted only in a determina¬ tion to reconstruct solid foundations for permanent Great Power status. One means to that end was the decision to produce a wholly British-built atomic bomb, recognised as the new superpower status symbol. Another, which is treated in the last chapter of this book, was the wish to cultivate closer relations with the democratic countries of Western Europe under British leadership, though that was complicated by the danger that some of those, including France, might fall under Communist regimes owing to the electoral strength and capacity for trickery and intimidation of their Communist Parties. However, the governments of the time acted, despite their private doubts, as though Britain was a full Great Power. The main theme of this book is British relations with the Soviet Union, both directly and in areas where British and Soviet interests clashed - Germany and Eastern Europe. Indirectly, that was also true of Western Europe since the reason for British interest in a ‘Western group’ of demo¬ cratic states was the need for economic and military strength against renewed aggression. The psychological impulse to be a Great Power was very deep and might have found a different rationalisation if there had been manifestly no threat to the security of Western Europe. Officials and their masters had no doubt that there was a threat, but were not unanimous about where it came from. Germany was an object of intense fear to British foreign policy-makers during the war. If that sounds like a truism, it can only be said that some historians have taken it so much for granted as almost to ignore it, while others, the ‘revisionists’, have seen British policy as unambiguously anti-Soviet and anti-Communist

3

Introduction

and as ready to make the fullest use of Germany against the Soviet Union and Communism as soon as Hitler and the other leading Nazis, too embarrassing to make use of, had been removed. An argument of this book is that British foreign policy during the war was based on fears of a resurgence of German aggression within a foreseeable period after Hitler’s defeat, and that for that reason alone, though there were others as well, long-term co-operation with the Soviet Union was regarded as both possible and desirable, the Soviet rulers being assumed to share these fears. Soviet conduct during the war often provided cause to doubt whether that hope was justified. After the war the evidence for such doubt became overwhelming to most Foreign Office officials, but policy was only slowly reversed. The reversal might have been even slower than it was but for the evidence that, in terms of national psychology, the German people were ‘turning a new leaf and wished to practise liberal democracy. This proved eventually to be a massive change of direction - unique in the history of any major country in the twentieth century, except possibly China since 1949 — which was undreamt of in the wartime Foreign Office and, inevitably, of which many people, including Ernest Bevin, were slow to be convinced. During the war the Foreign Office were sardonic about those in Britain and the United States ‘who profoundly believe in a good Germany, like a sleeping beauty only waiting to have the Nazi spell broken by the rescuer from the West’.5 ^^5. this attitude started to make an impact on British relations with Russia at a very early date after the end of hostilities. The book tries to show how the German menace of the Nazi era became the German political battleground of the post-war years, with the German people appearing almost as innocent bystanders. Before attempting a preliminary discussion of BritishSoviet relations, two other topics must be considered: histor¬ ical revisionism and relations with the other and strongest superpower, the United States. Most revisionists were, or are, Americans, writing about American foreign policy. Their hey-day was the 1960s. Heavily influenced by current 4

Introduction

and very recent events (especially the war in Vietnam), they denounced as farcical the idea that altruism or liberal objectives played a real part in United States foreign policy of the 1940s. They used frames of'reference concerning the influence of ‘capitalism’ or Big Business on foreign policy as being overwhelmingly important and open to denial only by the myopic, unable to see the capitalist wood for the trees of diplomatic documents. Sadly, some of them were ready to accuse their ‘opponents’ of being dishonest, rather than merely blind. They themselves were usually myopic and parochial in refusing even to attempt to understand the nature of the Soviet system under Stalin, which was pre¬ sented in the more extreme revisionist literature as a peaceloving Marxist lamb defending itself against a rapacious American capitalist wolf. No doubt they produced some useful insights, but the present writer finds the rebuttal of their school in a brilliant essay by an American historian wholly convincing,6 and their treatment (or non-treatment) of Soviet motives as particularly lamentable. In the works of the American revisionists Britain usually occupies a subsidiary place (reasonable in itself, of course, when the aim is to deal with United States foreign policy), inspired by much the same political and economic system as the one producing American policy; Britain and America are depicted as having been constantly ready to betray one another, while inevitably finding some (and growing) com¬ mon cause in their hostility to the Soviet Union. Britain has failed to produce a school of revisionist historians of its own. One can only point to books of British authorship endorsing the American revisionists’ interpretation of the history of American foreign policy,7 and to scattered statements indi¬ cating a readiness to accept its validity for Britain, at least in terms of gross Western ill-treatment of Stalin’s Russia. In that connection must spring to mind the name of A.J.P. Taylor, who, over many years, has made a long series of pronouncements on this subject, from castigating another historian for referring to Stalin himself in a disrespectful manner, to describing the Soviet claim to Tripolitania (western Libya) in 1945 as natural and justified.8 Britain’s role in the origins of the Cold War has remained something 5

Introduction

of a historical void, despite often excellent studies of particu¬ lar themes. This applies above all to British relations with the Soviet Union which are, accordingly, the main concern of this book. However, a survey of British-American rela¬ tions from the Foreign Office vantage-point is a necessary preliminary to that main task.

British relations with the United States To depict British-American relations from Pearl Harbor onwards as a story of continuous friendship, mutual respect and monolithic solidarity would be as erroneous as anything in revisionist literature. Relations at the highest level will be touched on from time to time in the course of this book. What follows is a short survey of the views of Foreign Office officials most concerned with Anglo-American relations. In 1941 the Office’s North America Department was small, with only four members (John Balfour, F.E. Evans, Profes¬ sor T. North Whitehead and C.E. King). Personnel naturally changed. Balfour left that year and was succeeded by Nevile Butler who had himself just returned from the Washington embassy. Many other officials inevitably had some involve¬ ment in relations with the United States. Generally, by the beginning of 1941 there was a quiet confidence that the United States would eventually enter the war. A draft minute by P.N. Loxley in July for Churchill’s attention spoke of preliminary planning to be put into effect ‘when’ (not ‘if’) the United States became a belligerent.9 Officials saw endless difficulties both before and after that happy event. On the one hand, they had to restrain the feelings of those on the British side who felt great moral indignation that America had not yet joined the conflict, leading to an unwillingness to trust the Americans fully even if they did ultimately join in. The normally suave R.A. Butler, nearing the end of his time as a Foreign Office minister, wrote in April 1941 a stinging denunciation of American policy, past and present: It is to be remembered, however, that our delinquen6

Introduction

cies over the debt are as nothing compared to the American betrayal over the League of Nations. We were landed alone with a European system fashioned by an academic American legallist [marginal comment, sic: ‘the writer is now President of the Board of Education - 1943’]. Many here have an uneasy feeling that, if we study America, she may in her turn yet rat on us. This does not mean that we should despair. At present it appears that the Anglo-Saxon (Rhodes) ideal is the finest before us. I feel this deeply yet I intend to approach this ideal realising that my country is for the second time doing America’s fighting for her and that my country has more right than wrong on her side. Butler was perhaps nearer the mark when he disagreed with an official who had written that Americans were ‘incapable of thinking imperially’. Butler’s rejoinder was that he was ‘certain she will be so thinking within a decade’.10 Officials, particularly Whitehead and, later, Nevile Butler, found it necessary to argue constantly that Americans were human beings who often did not know what they really wanted and who were capable of being swayed in directions favourable to Britain, rather than being irreconcilably divided from Britain by conflicting preconceptions and clashes of interest as well as, in R.A. Butler’s unfortunate phrase, a propensity to ‘rat’. At the same time, they did not deny that there was ‘suspicion and even dislike’ for Britain in many American quarters, attributable more than anything else to the existence of the British Empire: ‘We are widely believed to have acquired our Empire by discreditable means and to administer it harshly for our own ends’, wrote Whitehead, who added that it was inadvisable to respond to such criticism by finding fault with America: ‘They are capital people, with great virtues, but they are not good sports.’ Victor Perowne brought the discussion down to even more basic considerations; whatever America’s faults, ‘we are in fact dependent on them for our victory and survival’. He and Balfour attached supreme importance to building personal contacts. The latter wrote: ‘In this connexion I 7

Introduction

should like, for example, to see Messrs Winant, Harriman and Cohen on terms of Maynard, Sigi and Henry with Messrs Keynes and Waley and Lord Drogheda.’11 After Pearl Harbor-Whitehead made a wise and charac¬ teristic plea for Britain not to be patronising to Americans: ‘In fact, we should not tell the Americans that at long last we have every reason to hope and believe that they will behave like Englishmen.’ Perhaps taking this too much to heart, they agonised deeply about whether the Americans would feel offended to be referred to as allies. Woodrow Wilson’s phrase of 1917-18, ‘associated power’, was rejected; ‘co¬ belligerent’ found some favour but was vetoed by Churchill. Eventually the embassy in Washington advised against making a formal inquiry, and said that, in practice, nobody in the United States seemed to mind being called an ally.12 That, to say the very least, did not solve all problems. Nevile Butler became steadily more pessimistic about the way the Foreign Office was handling relations with the United States as the months after Pearl Harbor went by. In May 1942 he wrote: ‘It is disastrous to take the line that Americans are either too stupid, too insignificant or too selfish to be worth putting our case to.’ In June he com¬ plained to the junior minister, Richard Law, that it had become normal within the Office to discuss ‘America almost as an enemy’ and added: ‘When the Prime Minister and other Departments are treating the United States as friends, it is absurd for us to approach them more or less as enemies. A month later he urged his colleagues to adopt the approach of the Prime Minister: ‘that this war will have been largely fought in vain if at the end of it the relations between the British Commonwealth and the USA are not something quite different and much more intimate than they were up till 1939.’ He clearly felt that his pleas were falling on deaf ears, and in December protested against a tendency to regard the State Department as a collection of errand boys whose task was to help the Foreign Office prevent President Roosevelt from making disastrous mistakes: ‘On various matters we are almost getting into the position vis-a-vis the President of telling the State Department to go and see what baby s doing and tell him not to.’ In fairness, it should be 8

Introduction

added that Butler was almost certainly somewhat over¬ stating his case. King, for instance, wrote in June 1942 about ‘that participation of the United States in world affairs without which few in this country, I suppose, can imagine a tolerable postwar world’. Butler could hardly have found any fault with that. A little earlier Law had written about the forbearance which Britain (personified as Smith) should exercise towards the United States (personified as Jones): If Jones thinks (however absurdly) that Smith is always trying to get the better of him, then Jones’s motto will be ‘Screw Smith’. Smith, if he is wise, will not retaliate by saying ‘Screw Jones’. He will try to remove Jones’s suspicions. But why should the onus be on Smith? Because Smith is a wiser and more experienced man.13 Butler also had to concede that it was staggering how little, judging by opinion polls, much of the American public knew of the British war effort, and not indicative of American maturity that most of them thought that China was making a much greater contribution to the war than Britain, despite a massive British propaganda effort in the United States and despite the excellent foreign-news service of the major American newspapers.14 A view arose and was to persist that among Americans who had got beyond the stage of pure ignorance about relations with Britain, the economic and political structures of the Commonwealth and the colonial Empire would pose formidable obstacles to long-term co-operation. Butler wrote in May 1942 that the United States simply would not be able to do without Britain in the post-war world: ‘The United States will soon find that they cannot run the show without us, and that we understand a lot more than they about the running.’ He would still have been the first to accept that some agreement over Empire problems was an essential precondition. An anonymous memorandum argued that the concessions did not need to be all on one side if, for instance, the United States would assume permanent joint responsibility with Britain for the defence of British colonies in the Far East and also Australia and New Zealand, now that ‘the United Kingdom alone has not the strength to 9

Introduction

defend them under modern conditions’. In the case of the latter two, it was, in any case, ‘in the highest degree unlikely that they will consent for long to be held within the narrow limits of an Empire trading and political system’.15 King thought that American ‘anti-imperialist’ attitudes were ‘all states of mind or emotional attitudes rather than reasoned beliefs’. Usually they were not accompanied by any ideas about what was to take the place of British imperialism, but among American businessmen and in the Republican Party there did seem to be fairly clear ideas about a system of informal empire by which the United States would control economic resources without formal annexation. He suggested that Malaya with its tin and rubber (and also the Netherlands East Indies) might be primary targets for such treatment.16 In a long and witty minute written on Boxing Day 1942 Angus Malcolm warned that if the Americans were harshly unsentimental already in negotiating aid and other economic arrangements with Britain, that was as nothing compared with what could be expected from a Republican administra¬ tion such as might result from the next presidential election. Proclaiming that it was not going to play the part of ‘Uncle Sucker’, it would withhold aid except perhaps ‘on condition that the United States controls the distribution and sees that it gets the bottles back’. Only ‘a vigorous “progressiveness” in the material well-being of the Colonial Empire and in the social structure of the United Kingdom’ could soften American hearts and open purse-strings under those circum¬ stances, or indeed if the Democrats remained in control. All this would have to be combined with an un-British readiness to shout the changes from the roof-tops: ‘We never seem to have gone as far as we have, owing to our stodgy habit of preserving outward forms and proclaiming revolutions in Anglo-Norman French.’ By the end of that year an inter¬ departmental committee on American Opinion and the British Empire had been set up, and there was a busy correspondence with the Washington embassy about how best to ‘educate’ American opinion as to the beneficial nature of the British Empire.17 As expounded by Jebb in November 1942 Britain was

10

Introduction

trying to secure a joint declaration of principles with the United States and preferably also with the other colonial powers, France, Portugal and Spain - he did not mention Belgium — in which the Americans* would acknowledge an ‘unrestricted right' of the colonial powers to go on adminis¬ tering their colonies in return for ... some crystallisation in a form not unfavourable to ourselves of the existing vague but widely held theories regarding colonies as a whole, which tend to postulate that all colonies should be regarded as a kind of trusteeship and run in the interests not only of the local populations but of all the United Nations. There were dismaying signs that the Treasury would oppose this and would seek even closer Imperial economic ties in a narrow quest to improve the balance of payments. The Foreign Secretary promised to be no help at all. In January 1943 he confessed that ‘being stupid at these financial and commercial problems, [I] find it all horribly difficult’. As for the American side, whatever Eden’s difficulties, his officials were well aware that behind such high-sounding formulas as that enunciated by Jebb, ‘American business must be able to expect profits’, as Butler put it in July 1943.18 Butler was indeed no longer such a vigorous spokesman for American virtues as he had been earlier. In January 1944 he noted with dismay that the war seemed to have made little difference to ‘the prickliness and suspicions of the ordi¬ nary American towards ourselves’, though his department continued to ‘supply ammunition’ to its friends in the United States who were ‘intensely ashamed of their national attitude and who do their best to counteract it’. Law and Sir David Scott, a Deputy Under-Secretary, wrote that what the former called ‘the emotional flame’ was best left out of Anglo-American relations. The evidence that some United States officials were grimly determined to wrest economic advantages for their country out of the war, which was so much less of a national agony for them than for the other main participants, also had a bad effect. In March 1944 Alan Dudley wrote: ‘The commercial rivalries which are likely to arise will be stimulated by the fact that the United States is

11

ulem Academy and College Gramley Library IVincInn-Spipm

M f! 971 HR

Introduction

no longer so much the land of opportunity as a land looking for opportunity; and to an increasing extent Americans will seek it outside their own borders.’ He thought, however, that episodes like the -recent American interest in Middle East oil concessions were ‘determined more by the form and method of American politics than by any sinister and integrated scheme’. Britain, he concluded, would almost certainly have to make concessions to the United States over Imperial preferential tariffs and Middle East oil.19 In the autumn of 1943 the Foreign Office and the State Department agreed to embark on a joint research pro¬ gramme whose first item was a study of options for the future of the various Italian colonies. Much data was exchanged during 1944 when there were also discussions about oil rights and spheres of influence in the Middle East, with Britain agreeing virtually to bow out of Saudi Arabia.20 Yet in many ways the atmosphere between foreign-policy officials of the two countries was becoming more strained as the time for the great joint military operation on the Normandy beaches drew close. In May 1944, in his new, rather chastened mood towards the United States, Butler warned against any assumption of permanent Anglo-American friendship. It would be very unsafe ‘to make the assumption ... that the United States would associate herself in helping us form a nucleus in Western Europe of resistance to a Russian attempt to dominate the Continent.’ He continued: There are powerful forces in the United States that dislike and mistrust Russia, notably the Roman Catholic Church; but there are also forces of attraction between the United States and the Soviet Union, and they, coupled with the traditional sentiment of isola¬ tionism, would almost certainly make it impossible for a U.S. administration to entangle itself in anything like the Crimean War, or to bring their country, as did Lord Beaconsfield at the Congress of Berlin, to the ‘dizzy brink’ of hostilities. His choice of words is ironic with hindsight in the light of American ‘brinkmanship’ foreign policy of the 1950s. Jebb 12

Introduction

took comfort in the thought that the narrowest con¬ siderations of self-interest might lead the United States not to wish to ‘weaken us beyond a certain point’ in Western Europe and the Middle East, as thaf ‘might actually encour¬ age the Russians to do things which neither we nor the Americans would like’ in those areas. Nigel Ronald con¬ sidered it much more likely that the United States would revert to isolationism than that the Soviet Union would threaten British interests. It was left to the two most senior and, in this matter, assuredly the wisest men in the Office, Cadogan and Sargent, to condemn such speculations as otiose. Cadogan, in a brilliant assault on the concept of long-term planning (which he appeared to define as anything more than six months distant) in foreign policy, concluded that such gazing into the crystal ball was likely to lead only to ‘bedlam’.21 Some of the threads of British-American relations at the end of the war and in the early post-war period will be taken up in later chapters of this book. The behind-the-scenes attitude to the United States in the Foreign Office certainly became less adverse. A new figure, J.C. Donnelly, a former British Consul-General in Chicago, despite the fact that he had served in a city not noted for its Anglophile sentiments, expounded the same line as Nevile Butler in 1941-2: the American people were capable of great generosity and of taking a broad-minded view of their national interests, and had mixed feelings towards Britain which could be turned into largely favourable ones if only the British could succeed ‘in making them feel that they are liked and appreciated’.22 The abrupt cessation of Lend-Lease aid by Truman in August 1945 - a move directed wholly against the Soviet Union, though that was cold comfort to the British - and the ordeal of the late 1945 negotiations in Washington, with the British team led by Keynes, for a loan from the United States did not have a crippling effect on relations between the two countries. In the case of the latter, there was even an acknowledgment that after the high wartime level of taxation it was not incomprehensibly wicked of the American public to desire a lessening of the fiscal burden imposed upon them by the state. The loan negotiations were successfully 13

Introduction

concluded, though the British had to agree to make sterling a convertible currency by 1947. They had misgivings about that which were to prove all too justified when the time for the change came. In 1945 they felt that they had to yield in view of the strength of American feeling on the subject, exemplified, as the British embassy reported, by ‘seminars for clergymen who were to expound the virtues of multi¬ lateral convertibility from the pulpit’.23 Officials were still very conscious that the steady increase in American goodwill towards Britain in 1946 and 1947 and the growing readiness to share the British view on many international problems were in inverse ratio to the decline in Soviet-American relations. Until the end of the period covered in this study (December 1947), Sir David Scott’s comment during the war - ‘It is a sense of kinship warring with a sense of rivalry which makes America an uncomfortable bedfellow’ remained valid.24

British relations with the Soviet Union Uneasy relations with the United States, fear of Germany and certain other considerations, such as, after the war, what was thought to be a real risk of France becoming Commun¬ ist, help to explain the existence of the British alliance with the Soviet Union during the war and why the post-war Labour Government, with Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secre¬ tary, was unwilling to abandon it as simply having served its purpose. The fact that Britain had no hostile designs against the Soviet Union provides an even more basic explanation. Bevin and his policies are discussed more fully in chapter 4. Here two matters will be considered: perceptions of the Soviet Union by British officials between 1941 and 1947, and the vexed issue of the forcible repatriation of Soviet prisoners-of-war from 1944 to 1947. There is, of course, great controversy about the nature of the Soviet regime during the Second World War and immediately afterwards or at any other time. In the West there is more disagreement about its foreign than about its domestic policies. It is no longer possible to deny the

14

Introduction

oppressive nature of the regime in its treatment of its own population, and its apologists are reduced to silence or, like the irrepressible A.J.P. Taylor, to arguing that Western dislike for the Soviet Union has aKvays been based on the abolition of capitalism there and not on the denial of human rights.25 That, in a sense, brings the argument back to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which has suffered from no lack of supporters. Those tend implicitly to deny that the internal policies of the regime can shed any light on its conduct externally. Yet it was a regime which had reshaped Russian society by relying primarily on force, most spectacu¬ larly in the collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 and the annihilation of the old guard of the Communist Party (and much of its newer blood as well) in the Great Purge of 1936-9. It might surely be asked whether a regime so brutal against its own population and with an ideology with universalist pretensions was ever likely to settle down to practise normal relations, based on equality, with countries with a different social system - the theory on which the AngloSoviet alliance of the war years rested. The idea becomes even more chimerical in the light of all that is known of the personality and political outlook of Joseph Stalin, the dic¬ tator of the Soviet Union. In his war memoirs, Churchill was to write: ‘I felt acutely the need to see Stalin, with whom I always considered one could talk as one human being to another.’ One wonders how he would have felt had he been aware of the definition of diplomacy given in 1913 by Stalin, then a fairly young revolutionary, expressing sentiments which he almost certainly never abandoned during his life: ‘A diplomat’s words have no relation to action - otherwise what kind of diplomat is it? Words are one thing, actions another ... Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than dry water or iron wood.’26 At the time of the German invasion of Russia officials concerned with that country in the Foreign Office had a good understanding of the quality of life which the Soviet regime accorded to the Soviet people. In November 1941, comparing Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, William Strang wrote: ‘Ideologically, we are as far removed from the Soviet as from the Nazi regime: they are both hideous tyrannies.’

15

Introduction

He hastened to add that just as the national interests of Germany and Russia had driven them into conflict, so the national interests of Britain and Russia had brought them together. The circumstances of war gradually produced a blurring of this clear conception. The Soviet authorities certainly at times tried to create an atmosphere of goodwill, as with the spectacular banquets for important Western visitors at a time when much of the Soviet population was on starvation rations. Averell Harriman, American Ambassador in Moscow during part of the war, found this phenomenon ‘disgusting’, but, sad to relate, it had the desired effect of pleasing many of those who gorged at the Kremlin’s tables and making them more favourably inclined to the govern¬ ment which could treat them with such largesse.27 Perhaps it will never be known whether the Soviet embassy in London contained soundproof torture-chambers and laboratory-type furnaces for the disposal of bodies like the Soviet missions in Paris and Berlin which the Germans broke into in 1941.28 Few British people came face-to-face with the incredible harshness and injustice with which the Soviet dictatorship treated its own subjects. One who did was a British minister who had to fly to Moscow on official business during the war. Long after passing into Soviet-held territory his RAF plane was shot at by a Russian anti-aircraft battery. He complained about the incident in Moscow, despite the entreaties of his Russian liaison officer not to do so. The next day a Kremlin official called to tell him that all eleven men in the offending battery had just been executed. His feelings of horror were magnified by the knowledge that the Soviet bureaucratic machine had almost certainly failed to pass on the information about the flight, which had been cleared with the Soviet Air Force Mission in London, and that the men liquidated had simply been doing their duty.29 During the war some officials, including Christopher Warner, head of the Foreign Office Northern Department which dealt with the Soviet Union, came to feel real cordiality towards Stalin’s state and to think that true Anglo-Soviet friendship was possible. A job in the Northern Department was given to a man who took an extremely

16

Introduction

optimistic view of Soviet intentions and who was listened to with evident respect or at least tolerance. This clearly goes some way towards explaining the policy, primarily inspired by the British Foreign Office, of forcibly repatriating Soviet prisoners of the Germans, some of whom had performed various forms of service for their captors, usually as a means of escaping starvation and the extremes of ill-treatment. It was known that the Soviet authorities regarded these prisoners as criminals simply for having let themselves be captured, and that they faced punishment, meaning for some the death penalty. The subject has been extensively examined in two books.30 Particular controversy has raged around the repatriation of some thousands of Cossacks who surrendered to the British in Austria in 1945. The handing over of these prisoners to the Russians was of very dubious legal validity since it was doubtful whether they could be regarded as citizens of the pre-1939 Soviet Union, the only ones scheduled for forcible repatriation under the British-Soviet agreement on the subject signed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The Soviet authorities themselves were aware of the shaky legal basis of their demand for the repatriation of this particular group, and a Soviet source has suggested that the British yielded up these ‘almost archae¬ ological antiquities’ (i.e. the Cossacks) simply because they could not be bothered to do anything else with them.31* Reasons for the policy appear to have been twofold, but two other explanations have been offered recently which are almost certainly totally lacking in substance. The first of these latter, completely demolished by Nikolai Tolstoy, is that the Foreign Office were afraid of Soviet reprisals against British prisoners of the Germans whose camps were likely to be liberated by the Red Army. In fact, while the war still went on, they were more worried about German retaliation on Allied prisoners for the repatriation of Russians who had joined the German army, something at which the Germans actually hinted in late 1944. Repatriation continued long *There is much new material on the episode of the Cossacks in Nikolai Tolstoy’s book, Stalin’s Secret War (1981).

17

Introduction

after the last British prisoners liberated by the Russians had been sent home. The second false argument is that the pro-Soviet sentiments of the British public and of American opinion, both popular and official, would have been out¬ raged by any different policy. That hardly explains why such elaborate steps were taken to keep the policy secret. Nor does it explain why the Foreign Office periodically exerted pressure on the Americans when they detected backsliding about implementing the repatriation policy with maximum rigour. It is simply unconvincing.32 To deal first with a subsidiary reason for the policy, officials and their ministers - certainly Eden, if not also Bevin - were perplexed about what to do with these men if they were not sent back; over 2.2 million Soviet citizens were repatriated under the Yalta Agreement and, if most of them had chosen not to return under a system of free choice, a big resettlement problem would certainly have existed.33 The main reason for the policy was undoubtedly, however, that of showing Britain’s sincere goodwill towards the Soviet Union in a matter to which the Soviet Government was known to attach considerable importance, but in which no British interest of any consequence was held to be at stake. If that appears to ignore, and surely does ignore, all con¬ siderations of humanity, those inevitably suffered under war conditions. As Leonard Schapiro has written, reviewing Tolstoy’s Victims of Yalta: It is very difficult for those who did not live through those years and were not involved in the prosecution of the war to recapture that mood of determination and singleness of purpose which drove all else from one’s mind. I well recall, for example, my own reaction to the news of the discovery of the murdered Polish officers in Katyn forest and to the information which at the time remained secret that the murder was the work of the Russians. It was not what it would be now — indignation and revulsion. As a serving officer the paramount anxiety I recall was that nothing should be allowed to interfere with the smooth cooperation with the Soviet Union which was essential for winning the war.34

18

Introduction

The experience of war produced a mood of tough realism among Foreign Office officials which could, and in this case did, cross the line into callousness. That must apply particu¬ larly to the continuation of the policy after the war when such sincere warmth for the Soviet Union as there had been among leading officials rapidly declined, as will be traced in detail in this book. Yet British policy, as laid down by Bevin, was to seek to revive the wartime alliance with Russia. In a lecture written early in 1947 for officers at the Staff College at Camberley, Thomas Brimelow, probably the official most ardent about enforcing the policy of compulsory repatri¬ ation, remarked that the Soviet Government ... is doing its utmost to secure the return to the USSR of all Soviet citizens now living as Displaced Persons or Surrendered Enemy Personnel abroad. It remembers how easily the Germans obtained the services of such dissident Soviet citizens during the Second World War, and it is determined not to allow them to be used against the Soviet Union a second time. He concluded that British policy was one of determination to avoid both appeasement and unnecessary provocation in dealings with the Soviet Union. He clearly regarded aban¬ donment of the repatriation policy as an unnecessary provo¬ cation of a kind which might bring Russia and the West significantly nearer war. Nor should his view be lightly dismissed. When Sir Maurice Peterson, British Ambassador in Moscow from 1946, pleaded with Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, for the Soviet wives of some former members of staff at his embassy to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union, the answer he got was that that would be an extremely dangerous step, posing a threat like that of the emigres against revolutionary France. Molotov was talking about a maximum of fifteen women.35 When the policy of seeking to revive co-operation with the Soviet Union, particularly in Germany, was abandoned in late 1947, Brimelow lost little time in urging the closing down of the Soviet repatriation mission in the British zone of Germany, on the grounds that it might be a source of ‘mischief in a future West German state. His arguments

19

Introduction

were notably cold-blooded and are worth reproducing in full: The justification for treating the Soviet Repatriation Mission separately is that its status is governed by the Yalta Repatriation Agreement. Its future is an AngloSoviet question, not a German-Soviet one. If we do not get rid of it before some form of West German government is established, we may find it established on a long-term basis by agreement between the West German government and the Russians. This would presumably mean a perpetuation of the disputes over the repatriation of Soviet citizens. We have not enough information to judge whether the continued presence of the Soviet Repatriation Mission would be accompanied by serious clandestine activities. On the whole I think it would be better to get rid of the Mission while we have the power to do so. It is no longer serving any useful function. It is causing a certain amount of mischief. And the only reason we have not taken action against it earlier is that we did not wish to cause trouble before the latest meeting of the Conference of Foreign Ministers.36 By that time the Foreign Office also wanted to terminate the existence of the Soviet repatriation mission in the British zone of Austria.37 The mission in Germany lingered on until March 1949. The repatriation policy was coming to an end without a hint of remorse or regret from its exponents. It is doubtful whether the officials most closely associated with it regarded it as of supreme importance in their conduct of relations with the Soviet Union. For that reason and its understandable notoriety, it has been examined as a sepa¬ rate issue at the outset.

20

The German Problem

Victory in the Battle of Britain and the consequent lessening of the threat of a German invasion left the British Govern¬ ment and the Foreign Office with time to re-examine the country’s foreign-policy objectives. The result was a bold determination to continue the war until the Nazi regime was eliminated. The line adopted during the ‘phoney war’ of the previous winter and maintained by influential members of the Cabinet during the early months of Churchill’s premier¬ ship had been that if Germany made peace proposals which genuinely guaranteed Britain’s continued independence, peace could be negotiated. While ruling out himself as the man to make such a peace, Churchill did not exclude his stepping down in favour of some other British statesman if the war went badly, or, virtually the same thing, if Britain remained isolated.1 While a peace agreement with Hitler always seemed a doubtful proposition, for a year or more after the outbreak of war the same was not thought to apply to a Nazi regime under a more amenable leader - the ‘Goering solution’ - probably heavily dependent on con¬ servative generals.2 By the beginning of 1941 even a compromise so favour¬ able to Britain was beginning to look unacceptable. As P.F. Grey of the Foreign Office noted on 16 January: The idea of a compromise German Government under Goering is often tried out on well-meaning Englishmen. Sometimes those who make the suggestion are well-

21

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

meaning themselves, for Goering managed for a long time to keep the reputation for being less unreasonable and more respectable than Hitler. But I do not see how even well-meaning .foreigners can really expect England now to make a compromise peace on a basis of presumably mutual respect or at least confidence with a man who has conducted the bombing of London and other English cities.3 A report that Goering himself was trying to establish contact through his Swedish connections prompted a minute from the Prime Minister a few days later to Eden: I presume you are keeping your eye upon all this. Your predecessor was entirely misled in December 1939. Our attitude towards all such inquiries or suggestions should be absolute silence. It may well be that a new peace offensive will open upon us as an alternative to threats of invasion and poison gas.4 Appropriate instructions were sent to the embassies in Berne and Madrid, the places where it was thought that peace feelers were most likely to be received. The Foreign Office were happier about Churchill’s directive on this subject than about many which he was to send them. Frank Roberts noted in February: ‘After all the Germans would be ready to end the war tomorrow on their own terms which would probably look not inacceptable [vie] to Spain and Portugal. It is we who are for excellent reasons, responsible for the continuation of the war.’ The mild-mannered William Strang contemptuously dismissed in advance any German peace offensive ‘on the basis of the status quo or something like it’. Any anti-Nazi conspirators in Germany would have to prove themselves by overthrowing Hitler before Britain would even talk to them. The officials were conscious of a considerable hardening of policy.5 Incon¬ veniently, there seemed to be a risk of a mediation offer by the Japanese Foreign Minister, Matsuoka, whom it was impossible to snub with the sort of ‘absolute silence’ to which Swedish and Austrian aristocrats could safely be subjected. A message was accordingly sent to the embassy in

22

The German Problem

Tokyo, in which Churchill personally asked Matsuoka not to offer mediation because ‘in a cause of this kind, not in any way concerned with territory, trade or material gains, but affecting the whole future of humanity, there can be no question of compromise or parley’.6 A few months later Germany invaded the Soviet Union. From the first the British were to be worried that Stalin might be harbouring the same thoughts as some of them¬ selves during Britain’s most desperate hours in 1940. Soviet propaganda spoke consistently of the need to eliminate ‘Hitlerism’, not ‘Nazism’. Besides being politically ominous this was also seen as poor psychological warfare, since it was thought that Hitler was a hero to most Germans whereas the Nazi Party, with its privileged and overbearing local officials, was believed to be unpopular.7 Yet Hitler’s invasion of Russia provided the British with a source of hope as long as Soviet resistance continued. Before that, there was an inescapable incompatibility between the sweeping nature of British war aims and the means at the country’s disposal to achieve them, a disparity so great as to be paradoxical if not quixotic. Despite his brave words to Matsuoka, Churchill had at virtually the same time been very pessimistic to Roosevelt’s special envoy, Averell Harriman, when he visited Britain in March 1941: the Prime Minister could feel little hope unless the United States entered the war.8 Free from military responsibility, the officials of the Foreign Office were more genuinely relaxed and were already speculating in some detail about the future of Europe in general in a way which the Prime Minister would have considered futile. A long memorandum on war aims from the Polish exile Government in London in November 1940 prompted a debate in the Foreign Office. Partly this reflected Poland’s importance at the time as Britain’s major ally, the Domin¬ ions being seen as extensions of the home country for purposes of the war effort. However, the Foreign Office were probably ready in any case to express some opinions within the citadel of confidentiality afforded by the Office walls. The Polish proposals for the future of Germany were mild when set against the savagery of German policy in 23

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Poland. Germany would lose East Prussia, Pomerania and part of German Silesia to Poland; Austria would be sepa¬ rated from the Reich whether it wished to be or not; Germany itself would be disarmed and subjected to a prolonged occupation with foreign air-bases permanently round its borders to bomb the country if it again made trouble; reparations would be exacted; and foreign invest¬ ment in Germany would not be allowed. Although some points in this, such as the last, were clearly an attempt to learn from the events of the inter-war years when Weimar Germany had received huge American investments without becoming more wedded to democracy in consequence, the Polish programme looked like another Versailles: Germany was to be weakened and humiliated rather than truly crippled, and holding it down would depend on the fickle will of governments and public opinion in its victorious enemies. This recipe received full endorsement only from the former Permanent Under-Secretary, Vansittart, now on the very periphery of the Foreign Office. Others saw it as falling unhappily between a Carthaginian solution to the German problem and one based on a cautious reconcilia¬ tion, and preferred a settlement which was more clearly the latter. Frank Roberts did favour the Polish proposal for RAF bases in Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland to keep a vigilant watch over German disarma¬ ment. He could see merit in reparations only ‘provided there is no question of continuous cash payments over a period of years. We do not wish to repeat the mistake of Versailles.’ He opposed an enforced separation of Germany and Austria and still more any attempt to induce the secession of any parts of Germany proper. Poland would need compensation for its huge losses in the east to Russia, but he could only feel happy about acquisitions in Silesia, presumably because of the Polish minority there. Polish pressure to annex East Prussia might be irresistible, but it provoked mixed feelings: Such a move might conceivably be welcomed by the USSR as turning Polish ambitions away from them and 24

The German Problem

it would at least have the merit of striking at the heart of Junkerdom and the Prussian military system. On the other hand, given the immense historical importance of East Prussia to Germany, we copld never expect the latter to acquiesce in such a solution. Nigel Ronald thought that the Polish claim to East Prussia was so dangerous that it would have to be denied: ‘Our settlement must aim at removing the root causes and the inducements to crime. The maintenance by force of an essentially unstable equilibrium is not peace.’ The transfer of East Prussia would be ‘merely affording a new, instead of removing an old, inducement to crime’. Llewellyn Wood¬ ward, historical adviser to the Foreign Office, argued along similar lines. The essential task was to wean German youth away from the ‘reactionaries with the mentality of border raiders’ who had been in continuous spiritual control of Germany since the disastrous failure of liberalism in 1848 and in political control for most of that time. Such ideas as the exacting of reparations, the separation of a purely German area like East Prussia and the restoration of an Austrian state against the wishes of its inhabitants would be no way to convince German youth of the merits of liberal democracy. Poland should demand no more than German disarmament. Undoubtedly reflecting the influence of J.M. Keynes’s denunciation of the economic clauses of the treaty of Versailles, Woodward opposed the Polish proposals to restrict the growth of the German economy as unsound in themselves as well as incompatible with changing the views of young Germans: ‘It will need a curiously complicated and lop-sided form of organisation to secure that the rest of Europe becomes richer and more prosperous, while Germany remains too poor to be a danger to anyone.’9 In terms of ideal aims there was in fact no great difference between most of the Foreign Office and the ‘Peace Aims’ group in the Labour Party who vociferously advocated a wholly non-punitive peace with Germany. It was the refusal of the Peace Aimers to accept that Nazi Germany’s victims would put forward claims which Britain might be unable to resist that caused Roger Makins to write in February 1941:

25

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

‘The pertinacity of this small group of members of Parlia¬ ment on the subject of peace aims is worthy of a better cause.’ They noted with satisfaction the refusal of Attlee to make any promises to appease the group. Churchill’s attitude of indifference’ to post-war questions in his dealings with the Foreign Office was later to cause them much anxiety, but at this time they were probably pleased by his insistence on the dissolution of a Cabinet committee on war aims which met in the later months of 1940.10 Besides the susceptibilities of allies, particularly Poland, and of sections of the British public, and the distaste of Churchill and Attlee for the entire subject, there was yet a further reason for not discussing publicly what was to be done with Germany after victory. The prospect that under no circumstances was his nation to suffer punishment might make even the most anti-Nazi German wonder whether he should risk his neck by opposing the regime. As Roberts was to note in September 1941, echoing a complaint from the Polish Government, even as matters were, British propa¬ ganda to the Germans was so mellifluous that ‘At present the Germans apparently stand to win “heads or tails” and there is no propaganda inducement to them to lift a finger against their rulers.’11 The feeling started to take hold that propaganda would have to become more menacing to serve any useful purpose, even if it meant making threats which in many cases would not be carried out. A speech by Eden in late July, culled from Keynes with its assertion that a prosperous Germany was essential ‘because a starving and bankrupt Germany in the midst of Europe would poison all of us who are her neighbours’, was virtually a final utterance of sweet reasonableness towards the Germans.12 Pessimism about the Germans was increasing. The Foreign Office took stock of the small numbers, political unimportance and, in many cases, Jewish race of the refugees who had fled from Germany to Britain. Almost all ethnic Germans had apparently found it possible to reconcile themselves to life under Hitler, though it was conceded that the German refugees in the United States were a rather more impressive band than those in the United Kingdom. Roberts thought that it was ‘most unlikely that the 26

The German Problem

German nation will swing round to pro-Semitism’ even if the Nazis were defeated. It might be possible to hope for a future regime in Germany not determined on external aggression but to hope for a democratic Germany would be Utopian: ‘Such a regime showed itself obviously unsuited to the German temperament before the Nazi rise to power.’13 P.F. Grey wrote in August that for the German people to turn their backs on militarism would require ‘a revolution in the German character’ rather than merely ‘fair treatment’ from the Allies, and that as gangsterism seeped down from the top of German society with more and more Germans becoming implicated in Nazi crimes, the prospects for reformation grew steadily bleaker. In November, G.W. Harrison, perhaps influenced by Rohan O’Butler’s recent book, The Roots of National Socialism, saw Nazism as the culmination of ideas enunciated by Herder, Fichte and others one hundred and fifty years earlier, though he went on to add a note of hope: Hitler has collated all these ideas (of Volk, etc.) and called them Nazism. But the ideas are inherent in German thought and the word Nazism is merely a label for a certain stage of the development of that thought. To that extent Nazism is indestructible. That does not mean, however, that the majority of the less pleasant applications of the Nazi doctrine cannot be eliminated with the liquidation of Hitler and his gang.14 The passage of time was to make these gloomy views seem steadily more irrefutable. The German armed forces and civil population resisted stubbornly and evidence accumu¬ lated that some Germans were committing monstrous crimes in occupied Europe. The result was a readiness to accept more draconian peace terms than had been favoured in the first eighteen months or two years of the war, and a determination to make the wartime Anglo-Soviet alliance a permanent reality. Early in 1942 Eden reiterated his personal preference for propaganda which emphasised the economic-security side of the Atlantic Charter, ‘and repeated declarations by myself and others that we do not want a starving Germany for our

27

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

own sakes'. The caveat at the end was clearly intended to make such propaganda more convincing. Cadogan strongly agreed: the Germans had suffered so much during the years following their defeat in 1918 that the threat of a repetition following another defeat, already a major theme in Goebbels’s propaganda, was likely to be highly counter¬ productive if adopted by the Allies.15 However, British propaganda was already warning that the longer the war was drawn out, the less prospect could there be of a secure future for the aggressor. With Japanese successes in the Far East and German victories in Russia and North Africa, the British could scarcely claim that the war was approaching a victorious end, and the Foreign Office turned more and more to threats as the main item in propaganda. Towards the end of the year Eden was writing that the Germans should be urged simply to throw them¬ selves on the mercy of the Allies and hope for the best. Apart from German fighting tenacity, it occurred to him that they would be unlikely to believe lavish promises ‘after what they have been told for twenty-five years about the Fourteen Points’ of President Woodrow Wilson in 1918. There was even more exasperation with the Peace Aimers, the Bishop of Chichester being a particular bete noire. Although Jebb wrote early in 1943 that the need was to steer ‘between the Scylla of Lord Vansittart and the Charybdis of the Bishop of Chichester’, the British dip¬ lomats were preparing themselves, almost as if by telepathy, for the Unconditional Surrender formula which Roosevelt was about to announce.16 The prevailing scorn became even more dismissive of purported German peace feelers and of the thesis that many Germans were ‘good’. One can imagine the laughter ringing through the Foreign Office when Sir Samuel Hoare, the Ambassador in Madrid, reported a conversation between his military attache and Prince Max Hohenlohe in which German industrialists were reported as being ready to oust Hitler in favour of Himmler. Harrison wrote: ‘The indus¬ trialists thought once that they could “use” Hitler; it is not therefore impressive to hear that they now think that they can “use” Himmler.’ The War Cabinet had just ordained 28

The German Problem

that all peace rumours were to be totally ignored, partly so as not to arouse the suspicions of ‘our Russian allies’.17 On the ‘good’ Germans, the gentle Strang had written in late 1941 with unusual acerbity: ‘I do not think that we care very much what some Germans do to other Germans, but we do care a good deal what Germans do outside their own frontiers.’ By contrast, the Bishop of Chichester’s good Germans had so far shown signs of caring only about what happened to themselves and to their fellow-countrymen who opposed Hitler, and not about his foreign victims. The theme was taken up again six months later by Harrison: he did think that there were anti-Nazi Germans, but that they were hopelessly inferior to anti-Nazi Belgians, Dutch, Nor¬ wegians and Frenchmen because they had done nothing to resist. Cadogan reminded his colleagues of the doctrine that any German resistance movement would have to seize power and carry out a convincing anti-Nazi purge before Britain would even negotiate with it. Sir Stafford Cripps, returned from the embassy in Moscow, had by this time made himself a thorn in the flesh of the Foreign Office by urging on them the merits of Adam von Trott as the possible leader of a reformed Germany. Trott, who was later generally to be recognised as a figure of nobility and who was to be executed after the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, was suspected by Harrison of ‘political dishonesty’. He added that it would not be a matter for regret if the regime ‘got’ Trott, ‘since his value to us as a “martyr” is likely to exceed his value to us in post-war Germany’.18 The Foreign Office combined their consistent refusal to encourage any German resistance elements with continued moderation on most of the possible consequences which Germany would have to face after defeat. In so far as there was a hardening of attitudes its prospective victims were the inhabitants of East Prussia. The officials largely swallowed their earlier doubts and concluded that since Poland was almost certain not to regain much of its eastern half, since Stalin had informed Eden that Poland must be compensated in the west, and since the Soviet leader had also announced his wish to annex Memelland, the northern extension of East Prussia which Hitler had taken in 1939 from Lithuania,

29

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Poland could not be denied the rest of the province, though any public announcement should be ruled out, as, in the words of Makins, ‘it would completely wreck our propa¬ ganda policy to Germany and do more than anything to unite the German people behind Hitler and fortify German resistance’. Even this ‘secret’ loss to the Reich only found grudging acceptance because of East Prussia’s geographical separation from the rest of the country. There was still great reluctance about depriving Germany of any of its ‘main¬ land’. Just before Christmas 1942, Roberts dismissed the idea of advancing the Polish frontier to the Oder as ‘gro¬ tesque’.19 (On the other hand, there was a sign that the Foreign Office might be prepared to consider outright partition. At an internal meeting in April 1942 to discuss Soviet war aims, in which it was noted that Stalin had told Eden that he would favour independent states in the Rhine¬ land, Bavaria and Austria, Sargent, Strang, Warner, Makins and Howard agreed that separate states in south Germany — including Austria - or a part of industrial west Germany were a possibility to be considered. The latter might include not only the Saar and part of the Rhineland but also French Lorraine: an indication of how low France stood in the eyes of British officials in 1942.)20 Finally, in relation to territory, there was full agreement within the Office that as long as the war went badly, it would be premature to discuss with the United States and Russia the division of Germany into spheres or zones of occupation.21 Territorial losses promised to be a nightmare. A relatively more congenial subject was that of disarming Germany and keeping it disarmed, where the sole questions concerned the means and not the end. A committee under the chairman¬ ship of Law was set up in late 1942. A debate within the Foreign Office commenced. To punish a disarmed Germany which showed any signs of re-arming, it was suggested that, although one or two strong points such as the Kiel Canal might be permanently held, the main deterrent should be bombing if Germany broke the obligations to be imposed on it. More puzzling was what was to be done about those German industries, not directly military, which could be put to military use. There was not much support for imposing 30

The German Problem

many curbs in that area. Roberts wrote that restrictions on German production should be clear-cut and an end in themselves: tanks and military aircraft could not be allowed but synthetic rubber should be. Nor should the disastrous mistake in the Treaty of Versailles, with its statement that German disarmament was to be the forerunner of general disarmament, be repeated: ‘The Germans understand the droit du plus fort and react well to it. They only put to their own propaganda uses anything smacking of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy.’ Even more favourable to the Germans were the views of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, finding support in the Foreign Office, that every effort should be made to maximise German exports and imports. That would deny them the relative self-sufficiency without which aggressive wars could hardly be launched. It would also increase German prosperity and reduce unemployment. Jebb mixed his approval with a note of sarcasm: ‘I am all for keeping Germans fully employed. If any are unemployed they should at once be put in a concentration camp and told to dig a canal and fill one in.’22 Planning for the future of Germany was greatly stepped up from the summer of 1943 as the prospect of victory became a certainty and the possibility arose that German collapse might come very rapidly and unexpectedly. In August a Cabinet committee under Attlee began sitting to draw up plans for the post-war settlement. At the same time, Con O’Neill was seconded from the War Office to the Foreign Office to work exclusively on German problems, and in October a German section was set up, with J.M. Troutbeck in charge as Adviser on Germany and O’Neill as his assistant.23 Even before these moves, active interest in the future of Germany had been growing in official London, and for the Foreign Office that created a problem of competition with other departments about the control of German policy, quite apart from the fact that the Cabinet might adopt what its expert advisers saw as dangerously misguided directives which would have to be obeyed unless the ministers could be persuaded that they were unwise. To the Foreign Office, by far the biggest menace was Churchill himself. While never

31

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

doubting that he was an indispensable war leader with immense flair in many areas, his ideas on foreign policy and post-war planning were almost always ‘as dangerous as they were outdated and even sometimes puerile’, as Lord Gladwyn (the former Gladwyn Jebb) was to write in 1978.24 The fact that the passage of over thirty years was not to cause Lord Gladwyn to feel more charitably about Churchill’s activities is striking testimony to the depths of his disdain for the Prime Minister in this area of policy. Few of his colleagues were any more respectful of Churchill than Jebb was, though he was unusually ready to write down for others to read exactly what he thought of the Prime Minister’s abilities as a planner of foreign policy.25 He wrote a devastating memorandum in February 1943, ana¬ lysing a paper by Churchill on ‘Post-War Security’. Infuri¬ ated by the vagueness and contradictory nature of Churchill’s ramblings, Jebb asked what he meant by calling for a ‘European government... which will embody the spirit but not be subject to the weakness of the former League of Nations’. This was meaningless without any word on how Germany and Italy were to be fitted in. Churchill was also taken to task for saying that there should be a peace conference ‘in Europe’ at which terms would be dictated to the defeated enemies, but without saying how much voice the Big Three Allies should allow their lesser partners. He condemned reparations at one point, but at another said that it might be desirable for Germany to be made to pay them. Like the Foreign Office, he favoured federations or con¬ federations in Europe for post-war security, but there the similarity ceased; the Foreign Office wanted federations of Poland and Czechoslovakia and of Greece and Yugoslavia, which could not be reconciled with Churchill’s grandiose and impractical proposals for federations in Scandinavia, the Danube basin and the Balkans, including apparently Tur¬ key, which would mean extending the frontiers of the Balkans to the borders of Iraq. ‘The mere formation of such a bloc would more than anything else encourage Soviet suspicions.’ ‘Horror quickly follows horror’: Churchill favoured a ‘similar instrument’ in the Far East. Did he really think that 32

The German Problem

a confederation could be set up there, presumably under Chinese leadership? If any attempt was made to implement Churchill’s schemes, or if they merely became known to the Allies, ‘major disasters’ would erfsue.26 Except for the Danubian federation idea, which in Churchill’s ideal scheme would have included much of south Germany, the heresies castigated by Jebb did not deal directly with the future of Germany. However, he had ideas about that, and, towards the end of 1943, the Foreign Office were alarmed when the Prime Minister, presumably sensing their lack of appreciation, tried to involve another depart¬ ment in planning for Germany, the Special Operations Executive, whom he asked to consider ways of encouraging separatist tendencies: ‘He attaches very great importance to this’.27 Yet it was always clear that more formidable oppo¬ nents than the SOE, which presumably would be abolished as soon as the war ended, would be the military authorities which inevitably would administer the British role in occupied Germany, even if they could be denied the major voice in policy. In March, J.G. Ward, an official who was to play a major role in German policy, doubted whether they would be capable of more than ‘elementary ad hoc adminis¬ tration’. As far as policy was concerned, a quarrel was already brewing in late 1943 over the Chiefs of Staffs’ wish for maximum freedom of action for each of the three occupying powers in its own zone, leaving, as Jebb said, the Russians with the freedom either to set up a Communist government in their zone or to exterminate the population, as they saw fit.28 Enforced separatism and the partition of Germany were the most important of the ‘amateur’ ideas which the Foreign Office had to consider. Before turning to these, it is worth briefly mentioning two other notions - half-truths at best which the specialists encountered frequently. One was the idea, inherited from the First World War, that the military class in the old Kingdom of Prussia was at the root of all evil in Germany. It might have been thought that any reasonably observant newspaper reader would be aware that Nazism was in origin a south German movement, and had never had its power base in Prussia. The Nazis had indeed, as the

33

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Foreign Office sometimes despairingly tried to explain, actually abolished Prussia as an administrative unit — perhaps their sole benign act. Also, the Prussian aristocracy no longer dominated thfe German army, just as the army did not dominate the state. Churchill and many others refused to face these facts.29 Less easy to refute was the theory that the Nazi regime was the outward and visible expression of what at a later date and in the United States would be called a ‘militaryindustrial complex’, composed of army officers and indus¬ trialists, especially armaments manufacturers. Attlee was an adherent of this view, though he had a more open mind on such questions than Churchill. In July 1943 he pointed out that if one accepted that interpretation, as he was inclined to do, the disarmament of Germany would not be enough: German industry as a whole would have to be put under permanent Allied control, which would also enable much of its output to be used to compensate Germany’s victims ‘poetic justice’, he thought.30 Attlee’s analysis would have encountered criticism but not scorn in the Foreign Office. They were inclined to think that the problem lay in the minds of the bulk of the German people, rather than in the machinations of generals and industrialists. When one of his colleagues had the bright idea of forcing a right-wing German government to sign the eventual and, inevitably, to Germans onerous peace treaty, and so discrediting them, just as the Social Democrats had been discredited by their association with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Harrison feared that right-wing senti¬ ment in Germany was so strong that a right government would be able to sign the most humiliating peace and still retain its popularity, whereas it would be fatal for a demo¬ cratic government to do the same. (The Foreign Office were worried by signs that right-wing opinion in the United States was already rallying to the idea of an alliance with conservative-military elements in post-Hitler Germany.) When the Attlee committee on post-war arrangements began its meetings in August 1943 the view was expressed that if Germany was kept dismembered and disarmed for fifty years, some re-education of the German people 34

The German Problem

might be possible’.31 It is against this background of what was seen as an exceptionally daunting task that British planning for the future of Germany must be examined. Hindsight must not be allowed to obscure the fact that Germany and Russia were both seen as possible sources of danger to British security after the war and that Britain was building hopes of partnership on the latter, not the former. The dismemberment of the German Reich was clearly the most fundamental of these issues to be decided until Henry Morgenthau in the United States raised total de¬ industrialisation as an issue. The idea found little favour in the Foreign Office. A memorandum of February 1943 favoured initial decentralisation of administration in Germany after unconditional surrender to facilitate ‘denazification’, but after that did not propose more than a federal system. Shortly afterwards, Eden visited Roosevelt in Washington and found the President and one of his closest advisers, Sumner Welles, to be in favour of dismemberment. Eden himself would not rule out the idea. Since Churchill vacillated but was usually favourable to it also, and since Stalin was believed to be favourable, the Foreign Office could hardly continue virtually to ignore it.32 Nigel Ronald, who specialised in offering idiosyncratic ideas which were perhaps intended to do no more than stimulate debate, suggested early in May that Britain and Germany’s wronged neighbours (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czecho¬ slovakia and possibly Poland) should each assume responsi¬ bility for some peripheral part of Germany which would eventually be guided to limited self-government like some of the less primitive British colonies, while retaining permanent links with the country which had adopted them. ‘These pupillary parts would be like backward boys threatened with Borstal but taken in as outboarders by humanitarian phy¬ sicians.’ The rest of Germany would be the ‘reformatory proper’.33 This idea attracted little support. By the spring of 1943 the Foreign Office were embarked on a long campaign against dismemberment. They had three main arguments and one conjecture. The former were that the German

35

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

people not only wanted national unity but were obsessed by it like no other people on earth, and would never resign themselves to its loss; that Germany had developed since the early-nineteenth century as a single economic unit, which it would be extremely difficult to break up; and that the public in democratic countries, including Britain, would lose the will after a few years to uphold by force a partition of the country which could not be maintained in any other way. The speculative argument was mentioned with characteristic frankness by Jebb; less than extreme severity towards the Germans would be wise ‘for the reason that if Russia should break with us and America after the war we should then not altogether have burnt our boats so far as the Germans were concerned’.34 This possibility remained in the background not only because of the obvious danger that it might reach Soviet ears, but also because it was profoundly unpleasant to British officials. On 5 October the War Cabinet discussed the future of Germany in preparation for the forthcoming Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Moscow. The conclusions reached were a considerable triumph for Foreign Office views. Dismemberment was not to be forced on the Germans, partly because of the danger of a future clash with Russia: ‘One view advanced in discussion was that the increasing power of Russia might make it inexpedient to carry too far a policy of breaking up the unity of Germany.’ The country was, however, to be totally disarmed and its economic life subjected to permanent international supervision to prevent covert rearmament. East Prussia, Danzig and part of Silesia were to be annexed by Poland and their inhabitants expel¬ led. The Kiel Canal might be placed under the future United Nations. There was nothing in this to which the Foreign Office would have strongly objected.35 The Cabinet decisions of 5 October were certainly a victory for the Foreign Office in its struggle against dis¬ memberment. The issue was still certain to arise again, if only from the Russians or the Americans. It was therefore necessary to continue to show that it was erroneous. In doing so, it was the supposed incapacity of the British people to feel more than momentary vindictiveness which officials 36

The German Problem

used as their strongest argument. The foolish people on either extreme - those like Vansittart who thought that the Germans were devils in human form, and those like ‘the New Statesman and other Left-Wing organs and circles’ (Frank Roberts) who thought that all but a tiny minority of Germans were kind-hearted, philo-Semitic liberals or social democrats - were seen as minorities who had the fortunate effect of cancelling one another out. It does indeed seem that even as the war wore on many British people had a balanced view of the German problem, lacking in hatred while realising that something had gone drastically wrong in Germany’s historical development. To take perhaps an extreme example, the author and Times journalist Derek Hudson responded to German bombing raids on London by composing a poem praising German cultural achievements of the past and equating the true Germany with Britain as fellow-sufferers at the hands of the Nazis. The Foreign Office also noted that the various exile governments in London all favoured relative mildness towards Germany, including even the Polish except in relation to transfers of population and territory. The cause of German unity bene¬ fited yet again from an argument which, in a minor way, helped to seal the fate of the small Baltic republics: that small states were an anachronism. At the first meeting of Attlee’s committee in August, it was said - it is not recorded by whom - that ‘the breaking up of a large country into small units was a retrograde step which ran counter to modern ideas’. But, above all, if total repression were tried it would soon have to be abandoned, and the Germans would regard its abandonment as a sign of Western weakness.36 If the officials were right about the British public’s attitude to the Germans, then the officials themselves were rather more anti-German than the people. The prevalent feeling was that the more Germans died during the war, or disappeared to inaccessible places, the better. In December, E.L. Woodward quoted with apparent approval a remark by his fellow historian, Lewis Namier: ‘Split every German you can and so make one less - but do not split Germany.’ Churchill, Eden and Cadogan all at times expressed deep antipathy to the Germans as a people. Sargent responded

37

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 with enthusiasm to the idea that Germans who were to lose their homes in territory to be ceded to Poland should be sent to Siberia, not to rump Germany. He thought that that would ‘please’ the Russians: ‘Moreover the future of these people is much less likely to attract attention and give rise to political agitation if they disappear into Siberia, instead of forming themselves into a compact and indigestible mass in Germany.’ O’Neill reported sadly on 21 December that it was unlikely that Russia would wish to send these Germans to Siberia. Nor was there any sign of moral indignation when the possibility was mentioned that the Soviet Union might take away millions of German males to work as slaves in Russia as part of any reparations programme. On the contrary, that would be good if it meant a great reduction in the German birth-rate, ‘whatever they may do to the Russian birthrate’, remarked O’Neill. (In the summer Churchill had told some of his colleagues that he favoured the segregation of large numbers of Germans from their womenfolk for a number of years as a way of reducing the German birth-rate. They had approved of this as being in accordance with ‘natural justice’, but had suggested leaving any such measures to the Russians. O’Neill was perhaps taking up this suggestion.)37 Fewer Germans in the more distant future as the result of a low birth-rate as well as fewer in the short-term owing to desired massive war casualties were Foreign Office hopes. Towards the end of 1943 the new German section in the Office decided that a low level of fertility should be encour¬ aged by every possible means. Troutbeck wrote: ‘I should like to see any ideas ... for assisting the decline of the German birth-rate. At first sight I feel it is a kind of thing the Russians might tackle more effectively than ourselves.’ O’Neill nevertheless made a list of suggestions for British action: family allowances should be abolished; what would later be called women’s liberation propaganda should be put about, that the chief function of women was not to stay at home and produce children; and the Germans should be supplied with all the contraceptives that they could possibly use. However, the reason for these measures should be concealed as far as possible because otherwise the Germans 38

The German Problem ‘will probably breed all the more to spite us’. For that reason also, the legalisation of abortion might have to be ruled out. Roberts suggested that Poland should not be forgotten when discussing the demographic aspects of peace-making: ‘After all the German hatred of Poland is largely based upon fear of the ultimate results of Polish fertility.’38 After all this, it comes as something of a relief to find Roberts writing that the principal difficulty about involving the Russians in the forthcoming population transfers was that experience showed that they did such things ‘without worrying about humanitarian considerations’.39 Perhaps Roberts, like the British public whose level-headedness he so admired, had less rancour than some of his colleagues. But there was near-unanimity in the Foreign Office that when the last German war casualty had fallen, when the last slave-labourer or expellee had been deported to the Soviet Union, and while mountains of contraceptives were being distributed, most of the German nation would still be alive and in Germany. They would have to be treated with a degree of human decency which their existing government was denying to so many other Europeans. Their political wishes, as well as human rights, would have to be taken into account. And it was supposed that there was nothing they would want more than national unity. The dismemberment question overshadowed some other aspects of Germany’s future. Planning for the degree of economic back-up to disarmament to be imposed, and its enforcement, continued slowly.40 As far as territorial changes were concerned, East Prussia’s fate was already sealed. It and the adjacent Free City of Danzig, with its almost wholly German population, would be incorporated into Poland. An eloquent plea which a British publicist was about to make against such an outcome was doomed to futility.41 During 1943 the Foreign Office gave their secret blessing also to Poland’s annexation of Upper Silesia east of the river Oder (‘Oppeln Silesia’) and raised no objection when the Post-Hostilities Planning Committee of the War Cabinet recommended that on strategic grounds Poland should receive certain parts of Pomerania and Brandenburg, areas described as thinly-populated, though they had 39

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

750,000 inhabitants. There was a good deal of discussion on the ‘transfer’, as it was rather euphemistically called, of the German population out of east-central Europe. The United States Government appeared to be in favour of such trans¬ fers, while Soviet support was only too clear. Indeed, the British were more unwilling to discuss this with Russia than almost any other topic because, as Roberts put it in Sep¬ tember, if Britain raised the subject ‘this might encourage the Russians to propose sweeping transfers on a scale far beyond anything we might ourselves consider necessary or desirable’. (Three months later, it was noted with dismay that Pravda had begun recalling that in the early Middle Ages there were no Germans east of the Elbe, and had begun referring to that river and to the Oder by their Slav names.)42 In December Harrison estimated that Poland alone would wish to dispose of between 3 and 6.4 million Germans from its new lands, depending on how much territory it finally received, the maximum figure being based on the annexa¬ tion of all territory east of the Oder, to which the Foreign Office were by no means resigned; to those would be added another 1.8 million Germans from old Poland, though half those were Lebensraum settlers, planted by Himmler, who, if they were wise, would flee with the retreating German army. As the year ended, the officials began to go beyond such grim and unrealistic ideas as deportation to Siberia. An inter-departmental committee on transfers of German popu¬ lation was set up and O’Neill told its first meeting on 21 December that he felt Britain and the United States could not avoid responsibility for the supervision of transfers from 1937 German territory, though they had no obligations towards the Germans of old Poland. Only Sargent remained wedded to the Siberian notion. On 30 May 1944 he was to write that the de-Germanisation of the lands to be ceded to Poland could only be accomplished ‘if the Germans are removed to Siberia where they will be forgotten’.43

I The last phase of the war 1944-5 At the beginning of 1944 the Foreign Office were still 40

The German Problem

digesting the results of the Teheran Conference, including an unwelcome pronouncement by Churchill that the three governments at the conference had agreed that Germany was to be divided up into a numberof small states. Happily, the second man in the Cabinet, Attlee, had lodged a protest on the grounds that the conference had not really taken such a decision so far as he knew, and that ‘for myself, while desiring the decentralisation of Germany and the severance of certain areas, I am sceptical as to the efficacy of a partition enforced by the victors’. Churchill replied defen¬ sively that he had truly stated the views of Roosevelt and Stalin. ‘I did not commit H.M.G. beyond the isolation of Prussia’ - presumably a reference to his wish for the division of Germany along north-south lines.44 The Foreign Office would not rest content with this. Officials urged that the Russians and Americans should be positively informed that Britain opposed dismemberment, so that British silence might not be taken as approval for the idea. Roberts urged a widening of the debate on this question which had ‘hitherto been restricted to a small circle of about ten persons’ so that the awesome difficulties involved in dismemberment might become more widely known. Troutbeck did not like the idea of the Foreign Office in effect openly criticising the Prime Minister, who, in a message to Roosevelt on 22 October 1944, was to refer to ‘the future partition of Germany’ without qualification - a typical expression. However, they were certainly paying little enough attention to him behind his back. An unsigned minute at the beginning of February proclaimed: ‘At present all planning, military, political and economic, is based on a unified Germany.’ They were even defying the Foreign Secretary, who had just written: ‘Per¬ sonally I am far from convinced against dismemberment.’45 To do the Foreign Office justice in their treatment of the Prime Minister, they could point to his absolute refusal to listen to reasoned advice on Germany. In November, one of Churchill’s aides, Major Morton, told O’Neill that the Prime Minister ‘was aware that he did not know much about Germany and was casting about in his mind for scraps of information to work on’, but was unwilling to seek such scraps from the Foreign Office. Some weeks later O’Neill

41

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

sent a paper on policy towards Germany to 10 Downing Street, and received back an unpromising response that the Prime Minister would read it ‘when he can’.46 The attitude of treating dismemberment as unthinkable became more and more difficult to maintain. For instance, in August the important Armistice and Post-War Committee of the Cabinet provisionally agreed that the break-up of Germany was ‘not unlikely’. The officials could only stay in their backrooms on this, to them, all-important question. The Dominions were not consulted, and an effort in March by the American diplomat George Kennan to start informal British-American talks on the question had to be rebuffed. This was all the more lamentable in that Kennan had given the Foreign Office a batch of official State Department papers on dismemberment, all of which were critical of the notion.47 They were reduced to preaching to the un¬ converted within Whitehall itself: successful dismember¬ ment would require perfect harmony among the three Great Powers, and an unusual readiness among the British public to use force indefinitely and in peace times, since the Germans would be certain to resist partition bitterly. Even then, wrote Roberts, it would be necessary to recognise that dismemberment of a great country which is a racial, economic, geographical and, with certain reservations, a historic unity is a step completely out of keeping with the general line of historical progress. We shall be imposing on Germany something contrary to the general trend in the rest of the world. Sargent agreed, though he vacillated curiously on the lesser question of whether an enforced federal system would go some way to ‘weaken Germany as an aggressive military state’; it would do so in July, but in September it would not.48 The brief era of intensive consultations between the leaders of East and West began with Churchill’s visit to Moscow in October 1944. That and the Yalta Conference the next year were to provide the Foreign Office with new reasons for gloom in their struggle against dismemberment. In Moscow, Churchill was, to begin with, content to tell

42

The German Problem

Stalin vaguely that he was ‘all for hard terms’. ‘The problem was how to prevent Germany getting on her feet in the lifetime of our grandchildren.’ He was only forthright in reiterating the opposition which he had vehemently express¬ ed at Teheran in 1943 against mass executions of German officers ‘because one day British public opinion would cry out. But it was necessary to kill as many as possible in the field. The others should be made to work to repair the damage done to other countries.’ However, a week later, in a discussion which was interesting for Stalin’s reference to Morgenthau as ‘a second Vansittart’, an example of his wide, if scarcely profound, knowledge of international affairs, Churchill brushed aside Eden’s suggestion that the imposi¬ tion of a permanent system of international control on the Ruhr-Saar area would make the wholesale dismemberment of Germany unnecessary. He accepted the need for such a regime, partly to facilitate the extraction of reparations from the Ruhr, some of them for Russia. But that would not be enough. Germany had to be divided into three: the RuhrSaar, a southern state (including Austria) which would receive ‘soft treatment’, and a northern one for which ‘hard treatment’ would be the order of the day. While Churchill held forth in this way, Stalin restricted himself to the comment that Hungary should not form part of any south German state. What would not the Foreign Office have given for a like reticence in their head of government.49 Returned from Moscow, Eden urged his officials to remain calm over this issue and not to resort to special pleading in their zeal against dismemberment; the case against it was strong enough without that. Privately, he was deeply worried that no matter how the Foreign Office couched its advice on Germany, Churchill simply would not listen to it.50 The outcome of the Yalta Conference reflected this. It pronounced favourably on the dismemberment of Germany and only stopped short of saying that Germany had to be dismembered. The Foreign Office grimly set to work on preparing for partition while occasionally thinking of ingenious ways of preventing it in practice while still paying lip service to it. A three-power committee - in effect an extension of the European Advisory Commission - was 43

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

set up in London with Lord Cranborne as chairman in place of Eden. The Foreign Office drew up a paper for the Cabinet with alternative schemes for division into three, four or possibly five states, while working hard for French member¬ ship of the committee.51 Yet it did not take long for insubordination to creep in. In the middle of March Troutbeck suggested: ‘If we wish to get out of dismemberment, our only possible line seems to be to suggest that cessions of territory in the east, plus some form of special arrangement in Rhenania are in fact dismember¬ ment.’ Then a miracle happened. Towards the end of the month Gusev, the Soviet Ambassador, told Strang that there had been an unfortunate misunderstanding of the Soviet position on the break-up of Germany, which, in truth, was that it was to be seen as a last resort, to be imposed only if everything else failed to curb German aggression. Eden, Cadogan and, eventually, Churchill all expressed astonish¬ ment, and, in the case of Cadogan, incredulity.52 Even so, the Foreign Office withdrew its dismemberment scheme, and, after the war ended, the ‘complex and probably useless’ work on dismemberment was suspended altogether, despite a characteristic expression by Eden of his fear of the wrath of Churchill, ‘who has in the past always favoured dis¬ memberment’. Statements by Stalin and Molotov at Pots¬ dam and after were so emphatic in rejecting the partition of Germany that the entire idea could, with a sigh of relief, be finally put aside 53 By 1944 it might be thought that the question of very large territorial losses by Germany to Poland and the expulsion of the population of the areas concerned was very much a chose jugee. Churchill, at the same time as alarming the Foreign Office by saying that Germany was to be dismembered, noted that Germany ‘east of the Oder’, as well as East Prussia was to be ‘alienated for ever and the population shifted’.54 Essentially all was indeed decided, and British officials became, if anything, more indifferent to the hard¬ ships which this process would entail, both for the people supplanted and for the host population in the rest of Germany which would have to receive them. (Investigation 44

The German Problem

was made of transferring some of the displaced Germans to the British Dominions, to South America, or - Sargent’s favourite idea - to Siberia. It was concluded that the Dominion and Soviet Governments would be offended by the very mention of such an idea, though it was expected that Russia would of its own accord deport to Siberia the inhabitants of the northern part of East Prussia, which Stalin had announced at the Teheran Conference his intention of annexing to the Soviet Union. On reflection, it was also felt that it would not be sensible to have large numbers of hostile and embittered German colonists in South America. Only the Reich itself remained.) The new and ‘principal’ problem was that ‘liberal opinion’ in Britain, as expressed in newspaper editorials, parliament¬ ary debates and so on, was showing itself even more strongly opposed to the loss to Germany of much, if not of any, of its 1937 territory. This agitation cut no ice at all with members of the Foreign Office. They thought that the Germans, whose mentality was light years away from that of British and American liberals, would cynically use these sentiments for their own ends. Most of them would have agreed with Lord Reay when he wrote in February: ‘The German nation deserves far severer punishment than by the widest stretch of the imagination they will ever be allowed to receive.’ If any German inhabitants were not expelled from areas which passed from German sovereignty, they were, he added, likely to be ‘killed to the last man’. Troutbeck rejoined: ‘I think Lord Reay misses the point. If we are too ruthless we run the danger of evoking a wave of sentimental proGermanism in this country and America precisely as hap¬ pened last time.’ The problem was that even the smallest possible programme of territorial cessions to Poland ‘will not fail to stimulate anti-Polish and pro-German feeling in this country and the United States’, with Russia also incurring some odium in view of its claim to northern East Prussia, as Oliver Harvey noted.55 The Foreign Office response to the twin problems of ‘liberal opinion’ in Britain and actually resettling the ‘trans¬ ferred’ Germans was to make such plans as could be made for resettlement, and to hope that territorial losses could be

45

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

limited in extent. On the latter they preserved an open mind except for East Prussia and Danzig. They had washed their hands entirely of those eastern outposts of the German world. The Soviet Union and Poland could not possibly be induced to have second thoughts about the total destruction of their German character, and even British liberals prob¬ ably could be reconciled to the removal of such a ‘symbol of German military might’ as East Prussia, though they were irreconcilably opposed to ‘bites out of the real and indisput¬ able Germany’. In March Roberts argued against even a token British presence in the dismantling of the doomed province, for an ‘unquotable’ reason: ‘The Russians may want to transfer the East Prussians straightaway to Siberia. The presence of British troops witnessing such a transfer would I fear make for Anglo-Soviet friction.’56 For the rest, the Foreign Office could only hope that the Poles would show restraint in pushing their frontier west¬ wards. Harvey in May did not think that they would be ‘so foolish’ as to seek the Oder as their frontier, and that, taking into account the huge war casualties among the German population, the resettlement of the Germans of East Prussia and perhaps Upper Silesia would be manageable. However, by the end of the year, reports, which proved highly authen¬ tic, had been received that the Polish Communists and their Soviet masters had agreed to fix the new frontier at either the Oder-Eastern Neisse rivers or the Oder-Western Neisse (the difference involved the fate of about two million people), and also Polish annexation of the city of Stettin, which was on the west bank of the Oder at its mouth (300,000 people). Though the Foreign Office could regard this prospect only with horror, it was not easy to suggest what could be done to prevent it. They could but note that an Oder-Neisse frontier between Poland and Germany meant that ‘any plans for an east German State would obviously require reconsideration’; in other words, such enormous losses made the supreme Foreign Office night¬ mare of an attempt to partition Germany less likely to be attempted. Indeed, although this ultimately proved a false conclusion, it seems likely that Stalin thought that he was ruling out the chance of a Communist state in east Germany 46

The German Problem

when he decided to give Poland such a gigantic extension to the west.57 Russia handed German territojy east of the OderWestern Neisse rivers to the Polish Communist regime even before the German surrender, so that by the time of the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 the new frontier was a fact which was to be challenged by little more than spasmodic propaganda outbursts. Churchill was to claim in his war memoirs that he would have walked out of the Potsdam Conference if the Soviet Union and Poland had refused to return much of the Oder-Neisse lands to the Germans, albeit to the Soviet zone, so that the food and coal which they produced could supply the Germans of the west. Attlee also lamented the ‘excessive’ Polish gains, both at Potsdam and afterwards; while Bevin adopted what his American counterpart, Byrnes, thought an ‘aggressive’ attitude over the Polish-German frontier in the later stages of the con¬ ference.58 All this was sound and fury of little importance. A truer picture was presented by Denis Allen of the Foreign Office, a member of the British delegation at Potsdam: Mr Eden had at one time favoured a compromise whereby Polish gains would have been limited to Oppeln Silesia and Eastern Pomerania or at most the lands east of the Oder and the Eastern Neisse. But while he expressed these views to the Poles no such proposal was ever put forward formally to the Con¬ ference. By the time Mr Attlee and Mr Bevin took over it had become clear that the Poles had full Russian support in standing out for their full claims or nothing and the Secretary of State [i.e. Bevin] decided not to challenge the extent of these claims (beyond placing on record his doubts as to their wisdom) but rather to seek in return for his support for them satisfactory assur¬ ances on internal conditions in Poland etc, as well as acceptable arrangements on German reparations and supply questions. During the conference itself, Allen had suggested that there was nothing to be gained from continued outright opposition 47

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

to the Oder-Neisse frontier: not only was the Soviet Union adamant about its necessity, but so were the non-Communist Poles, belatedly reconciled to the Soviet-imposed eastern frontier, and determined on maximum compensation in the west. He suggested recognition of Polish administrative control, though not sovereignty, in these areas in return for the supply of five million tons of Upper Silesian coal to meet the needs of Berlin, and of any surplus food from the area to help feed west Germany. Poland would then in effect be paying ‘rent’. By the autumn, the Foreign Office were also abandoning the notion that in practical terms Poland would find it impossible to populate the new lands. O’Neill thought that a combination of Polish refugees from east of the Curzon Line and residual over-population in central Poland (despite the immense war losses) would soon enable the Poles to bring these territories to within measurable distance of their pre-war population of nearly nine millions.59 In any case, after Potsdam the British and American Governments confined their remonstrations to Poland and the Soviet Union about the expulsion of Germans from the OderNeisse territories to demands that the process should be carried out in an ‘orderly’ way, not that it should be stopped or reversed.60 It appeared clear to the British that any changes on Germany’s western or southern frontiers would have to be extremely modest, if only because of the huge excisions in the east. France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and also Czechoslovakia (which was not content with recov¬ ering its pre-Munich frontiers and securing the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans) seemed likely to raise demands, but there was one change which the British considered on their own initiative. This was the cession to Austria of the Berchtesgaden area in the Bavarian Alps, where Hitler had had his famous mountain retreat, and which formed an enclave jutting into Austria. The British hoped in that way to console the Austrians for the probable Allied refusal to cede much, if any, of the South Tyrol, with its German-speaking population, from Italy to Austria, and, more importantly, to prevent the retreat from becoming a place of pilgrimage for Nazis. It was supposed that a future German Government

48

The German Problem

might well permit such use, whereas any Austrian Govern¬ ment would be unlikely to do so. The proposal foundered on both points. Mack, the Foreign Office representative in Austria, reported little interest in acquiring Berchtesgaden, as well as much bitterness over the prospect of not regaining the South Tyrol. E.L. Woodward, when consulted, thought that such a cession would do little to prevent a Hitler cult since there were alternative shrines at Munich and Nurem¬ berg, which might well appear more suitable to the Nazis themselves. The hope had to be that: ‘The Germans are a silly people, but even they might see something absurd, fifteen years hence, in processions of ageing S.S. men marching up and down a mountain under the aegis of the German republican police.’ He also thought that even so small a cession might seem to give a positive BritishAmerican endorsement to the Oder-Neisse frontier which the two countries would not wish to give: ‘It will appear that we had no objection to adding a last straw or two.’ Wood¬ ward snorted in conclusion: ‘I should add that, of course, all this pother about territorial boundaries is fantastically out of date, and irrelevant to the real political shape of things to come, but there are many other things equally antediluvian which we cannot just sweep aside.’ Though the war had ended, Woodward clearly thought that it was still a bad old world, and that the Germans at least as much as anybody made it so.61 Sentiments akin to Woodward’s had continued to flourish during the last year of the war. Perhaps one reason why the Foreign Office sometimes felt more concerned with ‘liberal opinion’ in Britain about a German peace settlement than about the wishes of the Germans themselves was that liberals were in some degree amenable to reason. There was great doubt whether the same could be said about Germans. Any idea of appealing to high moral values in influencing them was seen as absurd, and there were also doubts whether even the forthcoming experience of shattering defeat would cure the Germans of aggressive urges. A flurry of minutes on this theme by members of the German section in the Foreign Office in June and July 1944, after the success of the

49

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Normandy landings had made German defeat seem certain and possibly imminent, was replete with pessimism. Harvey called for ‘a slow process involving a combination of educa¬ tion and force’, with emphasis on the latter or at least the threat of it. The Germans could never be convinced that they had done anything discreditable, but there might just be a chance ‘to convince them that victory simply isn’t possible owing to the European and extra-European reactions which German aggression inevitably produces’. Towards the end of the year O’Neill was more optimistic. He thought that the bitterness of defeat might throw the German political mind into the melting-pot, so that no development could be excluded except one: ‘If Germans become anarchists, something will really have happened.’ However, the likeliest outcome was that right-wing and militarist impulses would remain uppermost, and, from a position of weakness, would try to play off East against West. Rather than any Utopian idea of trying to turn the Germans into liberal-democrats, the Western powers should give them a modicum of flattery for the work of Goethe and other cultural achievements (playing upon the ‘odd’ German desire ‘to be respected, admired and loved by the rest of the world’), and, more important, should foster a cult of material well-being: ‘Germany must be encouraged to aim at being a super-Sweden, cleaner, better planned and healthier than any state ever was before, with better social, medical, and educational services and a higher standard of living than any state ever had.’ (O’Neill was more sanguine than one of his colleagues, John Chaplin, who had noted that the building of a prosperous welfare state would have to be preceded by a long period of material sacrifice while its economic base was built up, and that the Germans might find it ‘irresistibly attractive’ to use that base to make war ‘as a short cut to supreme prosperity’.)62 The July bomb-plot against Hitler, and the subsequent purge of anti-Nazi elements, caused little or no modification of prevailing harsh judgments against the Germans as a people. Pierson Dixon rejoiced that Germans were at last turning their homicidal urges against one another, and clearly thought that the plotters were motivated largely by 50

The German Problem

expediency. He wrote in his diary on 22 July: ‘Meanwhile the Germans are executing one another in the most satisfac¬ tory way. It is pleasing to contemplate the Huns exercising on themselves the Gestapo methods practised for so long on subject peoples.’ (Slightly earlier, Dixon had recorded his feelings of ‘horror’ after a talk with the future Israeli President Chaim Weizmann, referred to as ‘old Weizmann’, whose subject was the German extermination of the Jews.) He thought that there was no chance of the Germans learning anything unless ‘the final throes of the war’ were ‘thrashed out on German soil’.63 In so far as grudging tribute was paid to the plotters the feeling was that with them and their sympathisers executed there would be less chance than ever of setting Germany on a better course. In September, Roberts observed that the war would probably go on for long enough to give the Nazis time to exterminate ‘all saner elements’ in Germany.64 A final note of gloom was struck by the Ministry of Food, which asserted that ‘there was certain to be starvation in the cities in the British and American zones in west Germany, no matter what directives we might give’, since the food to feed them simply would not be available.65 It required little perspicacity to see that starvation would be unlikely to improve the temper of the Germans in the direction of liberalism. Views on German psychology had an obvious bearing on another vexed question of the last eighteen months of the war: whether to issue a declaration of reassurance about their future to the German people. As with dismemberment, British unilateral action was clearly out of the question, but, also as with dismemberment, counsels within the British Government were deeply divided about whether there should be a declaration at all, and, if there should be, about its content and timing. The issue was tied up with that of punishment for war criminals, and while there could be no question of refraining from that type of justice, there were propaganda attractions to announcing that only individuals and perhaps only prominent individuals - would be made to pay for their crimes. Churchill was prompted by Stalin’s proposal at the Teheran Conference for a holocaust of the 51

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

German officer corps, which he abhorred while not knowing whether Stalin was joking or not, to suggest to the War Cabinet in January 1944 that the Allies should publish a list of ‘some fifty to one hundred outlaws of first notoriety’ who would ‘suffer capital punishment’, all other Germans being guaranteed their lives from judicial killing. ‘This would tend to reassure the ordinary people.’ As for other peace terms, he thought that the ‘vaguer terrors’ of Unconditional Sur¬ render made better propaganda than what would inevitably be a very onerous, even if only partial, list of terms.66 The Foreign Office, as occasionally happened, found wisdom in Churchill’s approach. Eden and Cadogan wrote that the Prime Minister’s arguments had made them change their minds and turn against a declaration of reassurance. Cadogen remarked that any list of terms would indeed be so severe that the Germans would be likely to continue fight¬ ing, ‘hoping that something may turn up’. However, all parties in this debate (including Roosevelt) were frequently to change their minds, except for the British and American General Staffs, who were fairly consistent in urging what amounted to the abandonment of Unconditional Surrender and the offer of very mild peace terms. (In the Foreign Office, by contrast, there were very few doubts about the wisdom of Unconditional Surrender. Besides the belief that it was better for propaganda purposes than a ferocious list of detailed peace terms, they thought that the Allies needed to have complete freedom of action in defeated Germany. Discussion tended to be on almost metaphysical lines about whether the details of Unconditional Surrender could be negotiated with a German government, or whether such negotiations would themselves be a breach of the doctrine. It was usually concluded that they would not be such a breach. In July Strang invoked his Soviet counterpart on the European Advisory Commission, Gusev, to inject a note of ruthless common sense into this argument: ‘He had on one occasion asked M. Gusev how he would propose to deal with the surrender of Germany by an unsuitable government. M. Gusev had said that he would accept the surrender, and then get rid of the government.’) Within less than a fortnight of reading Churchill’s 52

The German Problem

remarks, Eden had reverted to saying that a declaration would be beneficial after all if it avoided political issues, and concentrated on promises to abstain from mass reprisals and to ensure Germany a reasonable economic future. Perhaps what stands out in these discussions is the unwillingness of all concerned to tell blatant lies, even to an enemy like the Germans, nearly all of whom were thought to be fighting wholeheartedly for a disgusting cause whose defeat must yet entail the shedding of much British and Allied blood; unwillingness to lie to the Germans conjoined with state¬ ments that they were a people lacking in any sense of morality, and that the old distinction between the Nazis and the German people was obsolescent. Even so, it might be said of proposals like Eden’s that they would have been misleading by omission. Churchill thought so. In February, he wrote: If we are going to take all this territory away from them and shift six or seven million people out of their homes, and if several millions of them are to go and work in Russia, I doubt very much whether we are in a position to give these assurances, bleak though they be. Later, Stalin’s readiness to make promises, and then to break them in the most blatant way, was to play a large part in the descent into Cold War, and was to bring incidental benefits to the Germans.67 On 13 March the War Cabinet agreed not to take up the question of a declaration with the Soviet or American Governments. As the time for the Normandy landings drew near, both the Foreign Office and Roosevelt advocated the advantages of a psychological softening up of the Germans, not least the troops in France, by a declaration. Churchill repeated his objections of principle, but had to adopt a defensive attitude, saying that the best time, if there had to be a declaration, would be after, not before, successful landings: I may say I think it all wrong for the Generals to start shivering before the battle. This battle has been forced upon us by the Russians and by the U.S. military

53

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

authorities. We have gone in wholeheartedly, and I would not raise a timorous cry before a decision in the field has been taken. The issue was to continue to arise from time to time until nearly the end of the war. Churchill could claim considerable credit for preventing a declaration which either would have been misleadingly mild, or would have stimulated many Germans into renewed feats of resistance.68 The early months of 1944 were a time when it was almost possible to speak of leisure in considering the German and other post-war problems. There seemed almost no chance that the war would take a critical turn for the Allied powers, but neither did a German collapse seem at all likely before the opening of the Second Front, the success of which could not be taken for granted. Questions discussed included whether Germany should be granted an armistice, whether the peace settlement should be imposed quickly or slowly, and the treatment of the economy and public administration after victory. It was also the time when Britain and the United States (with Russia almost on the sidelines) argued over the division of the country into occupation zones - a topic discussed below. The survival of the Unconditional Surrender doctrine to the end of the war, despite occasional sniping at it from the General Staffs on both sides of the Atlantic, and even from Roosevelt himself, did not dispose of the problem of what the Germans should be told when they announced their readiness to surrender. The possibilities were a short docu¬ ment simply giving the Allies the freedom to do whatever they wished or a detailed set of terms for the defeated enemy to observe. The Foreign Office were haunted by the way in which Germany after November 1918 had tried with much success to discredit the armistice of that date by the accusa¬ tions, both highly debatable, that it violated Woodrow Wilson’s liberal Fourteen Points war-aims declaration of January 1918, and that Britain and France had been bound to endorse Wilson’s declaration. It was not clear which type of armistice or surrender document would best prevent a 54

The German Problem

recurrence. The Germans might argue that a simple surren¬ der implied no loss of territory. On a more mundane level, advantages were seen in specifically ordering the police and junior civil servants to remain at work. However, by the spring a consensus had come to favour a short document giving the Allies carte blanche powers. The Foreign Office, like the military planners, still wanted a functional adminis¬ tration and economy in Germany after surrender to avert the twin evils of starvation and inflation. Fear of the latter was very strong, and was another attempt to learn from the years after the First World War, when the great German inflation of the early 1920s was seen as having sown many of the seeds for the success of Nazism. In July Eden warned his Cabinet colleagues that the British occupation troops in Germany would have ‘English hearts’, and would find it hard to accept mass starvation around them. He begged his Labour Party colleagues in particular not to misconstrue any Foreign Office proposals for Germany as meaning that they had any sympathy for the Junker landowners or the indus¬ trialists. In October Troutbeck argued that although the encouragement of free trade unions would be an important objective of occupation policy in Germany, it should take second place to the prevention of inflation in that wage controls would be necessary, and would deprive the trade unions of their most important bargaining function.69 Even more visionary were all questions relating to the ultimate peace settlement in Europe. At the end of 1943, two giants among British historians of the time, E.L. Wood¬ ward and Charles Webster, both naturally in government service during the war, discussed this issue, with the medievalist H. St L.B. Moss writing a postscript. Woodward agreed that there were some advantages to delay, and, in any case, the fact that the Americans were in a mood to ‘play the governess in the affairs and administration of not only enemy but also allied countries’ could not be ignored. But he came down in favour of speed, partly because only then could radical changes be made: ‘There is a risk that wrong decisions may be taken when passions are still red hot, but Europe is malleable only when it is molten; you cannot apply methods of “cold shoeing”.’ Also, Britain would not 55

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

be equipped to govern both itself and part of Europe. Many of the best men would perish in this war as in the previous one: ‘If we send third-rate people to settle Europe over a period of years, the -results will be bad. If we export too many of our relatively small supply of first-class men, we starve ourselves at a critical time.’ He shuddered to think of the competition which British universities would face in getting a reasonable share of good people. Webster accepted the existence of this dilemma but thought that Britain should sacrifice its own needs to those of the continent, especially of the occupation regime in Germany: ‘Even the immediate interests of higher learning must be sacrificed in order that it may be able to exist at all.’70 The Foreign Office were ready enough to agree that post-war tasks in which they would be involved, including the treatment of Germany, should have priority of skilled manpower, but that did not answer the question whether there should be a full occupation regime. In January, the Germany experts in the Office saw great advantages in avoiding ‘the vexations attendant on administering in detail a vast, hostile and bankrupt country, smarting under defeat, distracted by every sort of factious dissension, and con¬ fronted with countless problems arising out of the switch¬ over from war to peace economy’. By the summer they had decided that what was needed was a system ‘controlling’ the government of Germany but not ‘exercising’ it: ‘Germany will in other words be a kind of protectorate.’ An Allied High Commission would supervise lower-level German authorities, and there might even be a government of experts, a device with precedents in the country’s history. The Germans could be expected to co-operate, if sullenly: ‘There seems no particular reason to suppose that the Germans under occupation will show the kind of dogged intransigence that Poland alone of the occupied countries has shown during the present war.’ (Despite this, they saw a danger of civil servants being intimidated: ‘The Germans are old hands at underground murder clubs.’)71 A detailed occupation administration would enable the Germans to demand succour from their occupiers for their inevitable 56

The German Problem

post-war sufferings, and would in any case be unnecessary since the Allies would only be interested in some aspects of government - ‘the military, political and economic ser¬ vitudes and reforms to be imposed after the surrender’.72 As far as the balance between servitudes and reforms was concerned, the emphasis was largely on the former. Planning for land reform, for example, was half-hearted. This was partly because only modest results were anticipated from the break-up of large and medium estates; the estimate was that 285,000 families could be settled over a period of ten to fifteen years. But it was also because of the complete lack of belief in the Foreign Office in the theory that the land¬ owning classes had any special responsibility for Germany’s sins. Troutbeck wrote at the beginning of 1945: ‘The German common man, as represented by Hitler, has proved even more dangerous to us than his Junker predecessor.’ However, just as some Conservatives continued to believe in the myth of Prussia’s special responsibility for German aggression, so many in the Labour Party adhered to the more specialised myth of the uniquely evil Prussian land¬ owning class. At a Cabinet committee meeting in July 1944, Bevin and Lord Cranborne became caricatures of the views of their respective social classes, with Bevin arguing that the break-up of landed estates in Prussia was of supreme importance because ‘the strength of Prussian militarism was largely based’ on those estates. Cranborne stated his belief that the landowners included many ‘violently opposed to the Nazi regime.’73 Unfortunately, servitudes were seen to have their draw¬ backs: the twin phenomena of the ability of the ingenious Germans to circumvent them and the probable unwilling¬ ness, after a time, of public opinion in the democracies to enforce them. In July Roberts still reposed much faith in ‘simple and clear-cut control measures which can be applied immediately to Germany, coupled with a determination to act at the first sign of any infringement of these control measures’. The favoured method of action was bombing, but on that doubts crept in: the elite in some future German dictatorship might be indifferent to it since they would take good care that their own lives were protected. Less crudely, 57

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the inevitable ever-growing technical complexity of warfare would afford the Germans golden opportunities. In November 1944 the historian G.F. Hudson pointed out that the key to success in future wars might rest in developments in industries such as light chemicals and electrical equipment in which the Allies could not as yet make out a case for German participation to be barred. They might therefore condemn the Germans to economic destitution and political humiliation to no purpose: ‘All hopes of re-education and reconciliation would disappear, and in the civil wars which would inevitably ravage these lands of misery it cannot be assumed that all the ex-victors would be on the same side.’ The work of a committee on German science and industry backed up Hudson’s hunch in concluding that a system of control which prevented the fruits of German science from being used for military purposes would be extremely difficult to enforce.74 Given the prevailing hostility to the Germans as a people and the dangers which were perceived in possible half¬ measures, it might be expected that British officialdom would have welcomed the Morgenthau Plan, a scheme by the Secretary of the United States Treasury, released to the world by the American press in late 1944, for the complete de-industrialisation of Germany as well as its political parti¬ tion. In addition, Roosevelt professed that his support for the plan was partly dictated by a wish to help Britain economically; Congress would probably discontinue LendLease aid when the war ended, and Britain would then be faced with an economic crisis from which the elimination of all German competition in world trade might extricate the country. In fact, a concern with obtaining purely commercial advantages for British exporters was notably absent in British governing circles, and, ironically, was less than that of Roosevelt and Morgenthau, if their expressions of con¬ cern about the post-war British economy are accepted at face value. As is well-known, Churchill did give temporary support to the plan, much to Eden’s disquiet and that of the War Cabinet. This was not only because of his constant wish to stay on good terms with the United States, but also 58

The German Problem

because he was somewhat seduced by the prospect of economic advantage to Britain. In Moscow in October he told Stalin that he desired a weakening of German industry partly for the benefit of the British export trade, which would be ‘only fair’ in view of Britain’s financial sacrifices during the war. However, at the Armistice and Post-War Committee of the Cabinet in 1944, discussion of German industry was almost entirely concerned with preventing it from putting the country in a position to launch a new war. Only the Germanophobe Labour politician Dalton spoke of the need to hold back sectors of the German economy which would otherwise compete with Britain. On 21 September the committee expressed ‘considerable doubt’ as to the ‘practicability’ of the Morgenthau proposals. At the very end of the year, a Foreign Office memorandum for the commit¬ tee argued that the benefits to British trade of massive German de-industrialisation would have to be set against increased occupation costs. No doubt that was self-interest of a sort, but the option of simply letting starvation run its course was implicitly ruled out. In January 1945 the commit¬ tee agreed that the Morgenthau Plan simply ‘would not be the solution to the problem of preventing future German aggression’.75 Morgenthau’s scheme did not therefore succeed in win¬ ning British support by appealing to economic selfishness. Echoing, as did so many so often, Keynes’s denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, S.D. Waley of the Treasury argued that it would be almost impossible for Britain or the United States to attain prosperity if Germany was artificially held down. ‘In matters of international trade, we are all members of one another.’ The plan could be justified only if it diminished the likelihood of another world war. ‘This con¬ sideration is infinitely more important even than the ques¬ tion of our material prosperity and full employment.’ How¬ ever, it was much more likely to increase than to diminish such a danger; the Germans would be left with no motives of self-interest to behave decently, and the Allies would lull themselves into a false sense of security in which the wartime partnership would dissolve completely, so that eventually Germany might again be able to try picking them off one by 59

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

one. Roberts saw superficial advantages in the Morgenthau Plan in view of the evident Nazi campaign to wipe out ‘saner elements’ in Germany before the war ended, which would render any hope of the country’s re-integration with ‘the family of European nations ... illusory for a long period’. Although this obviously dictated an overwhelming emphasis on security, rather than Germany’s re-integration with international society, he thought that measures less drastic than Morgenthau’s might suffice, especially the denial to Germany of control in key industrial areas such as its coalfields. It began to look positively beneficial that Poland was to absorb one of Germany’s major coalfields, the Silesian. That left the Ruhr, and, Roberts suggested, Britain might well take up the French idea of setting up a special regime there in which the degree of Allied control would be much greater than in the rest of the Reich. Colleagues suggested drawbacks: Germany would simply not be able to recover economically if it was denied the coal of the Ruhr.76 The more the problems were examined, the more did it seem likely that Germany’s anticipated evil instincts would have to be restrained in the long term by measures external to the Reich, especially the permanent maintenance of a coalition against the country. In this connection it was alarming that the Germans, having been unable to beat the Russians, might decide to join them. Harrison foresaw that Communism would probably be a strong force in post-war Germany. It could take any of several forms: an external alliance with the Soviet Union, but little emulation of Soviet measures domestically; the reverse; or both. Unfortunately, the last was seen as quite likely. In July the German section of the Office stated that ‘The influence of Russian prestige [might] have the strange effect of persuading German Communism that the Drang nach Osten was only a yearning to be received into the bosom of the Eurasian ‘Heartland’ a development which would serve us ill.’ In less flowery language, Harrison noted that the Germans’ ‘innate rever¬ ence for ruthless power’ might transform them into wholehearted devotees of Stalinism, with only the Roman Catholics dissenting. Robert’s view was that fewer Germans 60

The German Problem

would be attracted by Western than by Eastern models. Sargent was cautious in his predictions, but he too thought that it would ‘look rather curious if we review the prospects of Russian influence in every European country except the one where it will be most dangerous, and where in many respects the ground will be most favourable.’ He wondered whether the Soviet Union would ‘play’ with the ‘strong, vigorous and aggressive Communist Party’ to be expected in Germany or would denounce it as ‘Trotskyist’. Outside the realm of psychological speculation, it was feared that Russia would have a great potential advantage in that the major food-producing regions of Germany would be within its zone. Whether the Soviet Union chose to send food to the western zones with great propaganda fanfare, or else with¬ held the food, it would profit politically, and the Western powers would get the blame.77 The danger of the Germans offering their allegiance to Moscow made it more imperative than ever to maintain co-operation with the Soviet Union. However, the Foreign Office did not see why that should preclude the security organisation of Western Europe in order to guard against German adventures in the future. The question also in¬ escapably arose whether preparations should not also be made to contain Russian power, especially a Russia which might have the willing support of large numbers of Germans. One response to this danger would have been to insulate the Western occupation zones from all Soviet and Communist influence, while preparing to organise them as an anti-Soviet bulwark in the event of Russia becoming hostile to its former allies. During 1944 this was to be a course of action strongly advocated by the British Chiefs of Staff and just as strongly resisted by the Foreign Office. That conflict within Whitehall arose while the longdrawn-out process of reaching agreement among the three major powers on the division of Germany into occupation zones was taking place. It is unnecessary to discuss that division in detail, partly because it has been extensively treated already,78 and partly because it was characterised by a British-American quarrel in which the Soviet Union was very much on the sidelines, and which was therefore of only

61

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

marginal importance in the development of British-Soviet relations. Even so, some discussion is necessary because the issue illustrates better than any other Britain’s determina¬ tion to remain a full Great Power, and also because it marks an important initial stage in British plans to organise the security of western Europe, plans with which the Soviet Union was to find the greatest fault, and which were to play an immense part in the post-war decline of British-Soviet relations. When Eden visited Washington in March 1943 Roosevelt told him that America was ready for planning for the occupation regime in Germany to begin. The President discussed the matter with Churchill at the Teheran Con¬ ference eight months later, where they found themselves in agreement that Germany should be divided into occupation zones of the three powers, rather than any alternative such as mixed occupation forces all over the country or leaving some of it unoccupied. (Churchill would have been less happy if he had known that Roosevelt had just told Averell Harriman that he foresaw no permanent United States role in holding Germany down - a sort of forerunner to his celebrated remark at Yalta that he expected American forces to be out of Europe two years after the end of the war.) Roosevelt’s preference as to the nature of the division presented problems; he desired the American zone to be in the north-west of Germany, with Britain in the south-west, as opposed to a British wish for the opposite geographical arrangement. Later the United States produced a plan - said by George Kennan to have been based on some doodles by Roosevelt which a sedulous official had recovered from the presidential waste-paper basket - under which the United States would have taken central and much of eastern Germany, as well as the north-west, giving itself thirty-three million Germans, compared with fifteen million in the British zone, and only eleven million in an exiguous Soviet zone in the far east of the country. There proved little difficulty in inducing the Americans to be more generous to the Russians, who, if they did not reject the American proposal outright, could be expected to use it as an argument for excessive influence in south-east Europe. Agreement in 62

The German Problem

the European Advisory Commission on a Soviet zone in the eastern one-third of Germany was reached in principle early in 1944, and details were finalised in June. The British were fearful of the Red Army occupying'most or all of Germany before the war ended, and sought a legal basis for requiring the evacuation of the greater part of the country. Judging by the relative eagerness with which Stalin responded to British proposals he must have feared that the war might end with his army still outside the Reich. Circumstances were thus ideal for agreement between Russia and the Western powers on this particular issue.79 The British-American quarrel about which power should be in north-west Germany and which in the south was finally resolved at the Quebec Conference in September 1944, with victory for the British, the Americans contenting themselves with the minor concession that the North Sea ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven should be detached enclaves of theirs within the British zone.80 Before this happy outcome was reached there had been much anguish in the British camp over whether to accept the United States preference for a British southern zone, followed, once the southern zone idea had been rejected, by annoyance with the Americans for demanding a carve-up of Germany unacceptable to Britain. Both countries assumed that each would ‘lead’ the ‘minor’ west European states adjacent to its occupation zone. The southern occupier would ‘lead’ France, while the northern would ‘lead’ Norway and the Netherlands. Belgium could fall to either, but would more logically be northern. Foreign Office discussions in the winter of 1943-4 took it for granted that these countries, including France, were ‘minor’, though an eventual enhancement of status for France was considered both possible and desirable. Indeed, with un¬ conscious arrogance, the British wondered whether they should concentrate their beneficial energies on France or Germany, the point being that north-west Germany was regarded as the core of western Germany owing to the concentration of industry and coalfields there, and the south as a peripheral area. The country which controlled north¬ west Germany would, therefore, be in a position to give a lead to the occupation regime in Germany as a whole. 63

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

On political grounds the Foreign Office were truly per¬ plexed about which of the two tasks, both of which they thought only Britain could adequately perform, they should actually choose. Apart* from the problems of occupation in Germany, with which, wrote Roberts, ‘I cannot help think¬ ing that we shall be better equipped than the Americans to cope’, there was the distressing prospect of ‘abandoning’ the Norwegians, Dutch and possibly Belgians to the rude whims of the Americans while taking on what was recognised as the thankless task of guiding France back to greatness. In December 1943, Ward commented upon the near¬ impossibility of expecting a reasonable response from the French, even when everything was being done for their benefit. By contrast, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium would be unhappy, if not inconsolable, if Britain ‘deserted’ them. Ward continued: There is I think little doubt that the Americans will handle these small allies a good deal less tactfully than we should have done, and there may in particular be serious difficulties over the restoration of the allied governments, in view of the well known American suspicions of ‘refugee’ governments who have been in this country. If the Americans get across public opinion in these three allied countries, it may well have reper¬ cussions after the war on their attitude towards a security system based in Western Europe upon Anglo-American power. Continental western Europe needed American power for its security, but it also needed, and supposedly wanted, British leadership. In March 1944 John Alexander of the Foreign Office wrote that the yearning for British leadership extended to Spain, Portugal and Italy as well as the small democracies of the north-west, and was absent only in France where admiration for the Russian war effort pre¬ dominated. British material power would be committed; for instance the Royal Air Force was already developing pater¬ nalistic links with the Norwegian, Dutch and Belgian air forces. Alone, however, it was acknowledged that it would be inadequate.81 64

The German Problem Despite all this Harvey thought that Britain should accept the proposal for a southern zone. Only a restored France could be of much assistance in western European security, and only Britain could achieve thaFresult. As for disappoint¬ ing the other countries, the Dutch and Norwegians would probably regard the Americans as an acceptable second-best to the British. Sargent and Cadogan agreed with Harvey, while Eden found the choice ‘really difficult’ and was ‘really doubtful’ about what to do. Finally, at the very end of 1943 the Foreign Office took heed of advice from the Chiefs of Staff that on logistical grounds a British zone in the north¬ west was absolutely essential, and embarked upon pressing for that outcome.82 It is unpleasing that once the Foreign Office had so painfully made up their minds where their preference lay, they became almost abusive towards Roosevelt and the Americans for making a proposal in which, for a time, they had seen great merit. They wondered whether his wish for a northern zone was dictated by an intention to facilitate withdrawal of United States forces from Europe soon after hostilities ended - admittedly not a groundless fear - or whether American Big Business was using him to get its tentacles around the industries of the Ruhr. Nevile Butler of the North American section of the Office pointed out the absurdity of the latter suggestion since Roosevelt and Big Business were, and had always been, implacable foes. Butler thought that the President’s attitude stemmed from his deep dislike of France and from the fact that if the north-western zone was logistically convenient for Britain it was convenient for the United States also. The Americans probably did want to play top dog in Germany, but, wrote Butler, it was not easy to see any moral difference between that and the identical British inclination.83 The decision to demand a north-western zone might mean, it was thought, that Britain’s self-appointed task of building up French power would be more difficult, but it did not involve any retreat from the intention to undertake that task. Eventual help in the occupation of Germany was the first dividend to be sought, help which would become vital if the United States did ‘abandon’ Europe. In the aftermath of 65

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the decision to press for a north-western zone, Harvey wrote in January 1944: We want France, for good British reasons, to play a large part in occupying and controlling Germany after the war, and it would be only natural therefore that she should take her place in the control machinery of Berlin. In July an anonymous official wrote with some magna¬ nimity: In the peace settlement France will occupy an inter¬ mediate position between the lesser European allies and the Big Three. As her strength recovers after the war and (as is likely) direct United States interest in European security lessens, her role will grow in impor¬ tance, and it will probably not be long before we are again sharing with her on equal terms the lead in the defence of western Europe. By that time the de Gaulle French authorities were pressing for an occupation zone of their own in Germany. The Foreign Office were basically sympathetic, but felt that they had to concentrate on gaining a north-west zone for their own country, and that there was no hurry since France was expected to be too weak to administer part of Germany during the immediate post-war period. They were ready to accept joint British-French control of part of the British zone as a first step towards a separate French zone.84 Towards the end of the war, just as the nightmare of dismemberment was lifted by the Soviet ‘clarification’ that it opposed such a course, another danger replaced it: repara¬ tions. There had never been doubt that Russia would expect reparations from Germany. At the Yalta Conference Stalin demanded a specific commitment with great earnestness, demanding ten billion dollars for the Soviet Union alone. Churchill shared the view of the Foreign Office that repara¬ tions on such a scale would be ‘madness’. Though Roosevelt was inclined to support the Soviet case, Churchill was able to ensure that on this problem the conference ended in stale-

66

The German Problem

mate. He also extracted from Stalin assent to the idea that such reparations as there were should largely take the form of the confiscation of German assets, rather than come from current production, which would have meant part of the post-war German economy being diverted from German to Soviet needs. At the Potsdam Conference, the British and Americans presented a united front in trying to deny the Soviet Union reparations from the western zones; the Russians were already stripping the east zone of assets, and there was nothing that could be done to prevent that. In the end, a complicated formula was agreed by which Russia would receive 25 per cent of its German reparations from the western zones. Three-fifths of that would be bartered against food and coal from the Soviet zone, and only two-fifths would be unconditional. The Soviet Union was also to acquire all German assets and investments in eastern Europe (except Greece) and the Soviet zone of Austria, which offered rich pickings since property which had been confiscated by the Nazis could be and was taken over by the Russians, instead of being returned to its original owners.85 At Yalta Stalin demanded both dismemberment and immense reparations. The Foreign Office consoled them¬ selves with the thought that he could not have both since the former would be so destructive as to make the latter on the scale demanded by Russia physically impossible. Troutbeck toyed with the idea that huge reparations would be better than partition since they would keep Germany economically weak without providing the Germans with a supreme politi¬ cal grievance. In March 1945, he wrote: If Germany is prosperous, she will also be dangerous. It was well said that ‘German nationalism becomes more overweening in good times than bad’. On the other hand, if Germany is not prosperous her neighbours will suffer as well as herself. We have got to choose which we want - prosperity with a risk, or a low standard of living without the same risk, though possibly with other risks in its place. This was a curious opinion in view of the huge, if not decisive, part which the Great Depression of the early 1930s

67

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

had clearly played in bringing the Nazis to power. It illustrates how far the Foreign Office were from an un¬ ambiguous policy of rebuilding the German economy with¬ out thought for Soviet wishes. However, Troutbeck did go on to note that it would be extremely difficult to reconcile Western and Russian views on what would constitute a just level of reparations. An acknowledgment that the Russians under Stalin were themselves not the most refined of people came with a remark that if they found that they had stripped away so many of the resources of their zone that there were not the means of life left for all its population, they might simply respond ‘by deporting a few starving millions to rebuild the cities of Russia’. At all costs, however, Britain must not despair in the face of its problems in Germany and retreat into isolation, even if the Americans did so; that ‘might mean cutting off our nose to spite our face’.86 By the time the Potsdam Conference ended, British officials had some reason for satisfaction: dismemberment seemed to have been buried, and satisfactory decisions had been taken on reparations. Waley of the Treasury wrote early in August that the Russian wish to obtain most of their formal reparations from the Western zones (the Soviet zone having been already stripped of ‘practically everything’), had been frustrated. It was unfair, but would do no real harm to Britain, that the Soviet Union was to receive perhaps £100 million of reparations from the Ruhr, while the Western powers had renounced any claims of their own in Bulgaria, Romania, Finland and eastern Austria. On the positive side, Britain had made important gains: French membership of the Reparations Commission, and the decision not to subject Austria to reparations except in the guise of appropriating German assets.87

II The Austrian sub-issue Austria was incorporated into Germany by Hitler in 1938, with no more than token protest from Britain, and the Foreign Office soon accustomed themselves to regarding it as an integral and permanent part of the Reich. During 1942 68

The German Problem

and 1943 there was a slow transition in British Austrian policy towards allowing (or, if necessary, forcing) the country to resume its independent status. As late as January 1944, the Office’s legal expert, Fitzmaurice, reminded his colleagues that Austria’s legal status was unquestionably that of an integral part of the German Reich.88 British policy was not greatly influenced by such a legal consideration in itself, but that did for long give pause for thought when placed alongside the additional facts that many Austrians appeared to want to be part of Germany and that the Austrian republic of 1918-38 had shown itself to be the economic and political sick man of Europe. In addition, the Atlantic Charter was interpreted as clearly forbidding a territory to have independence forced on it against its will, though the Charter was to be treated with steadily decreas¬ ing seriousness. Finally, there was the absence of an Austrian resistance, and the uninspiring character of the Austrian anti-Nazi emigration. The main organisation of Austrian emigres in Britain, the Free Austrian Movement, was 90 per cent Jewish in membership, and most of those were Communists, according to the Foreign Office, social democrats being excluded. The success of these emigres in winning support among the British public, including ‘high level functionaries like the Mayor of Manchester and the Corporation of Glasgow, to say nothing of sentimentalists like Sir Walford Selby, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter and even Harold Nicolson [who] cannot be ignored’, was seen by Central Department officials as a reason only for a few public relations gestures. (Selby was a recent British envoy to Vienna. It is not clear in what category the Foreign Office would have placed Lord Cranborne, a member of the government and at times a junior minister at the Foreign Office. In a letter to Lord Robert Cecil on 5 October 1939 he wrote that the restoration of Austrian independence should be a British war aim, though the complete reversal of the Munich agreement in favour of Czechoslovakia would be ‘unattainable’.)89 Pressure to reconsider this attitude came from the highest quarter. That did not stop Makins in January 1942 from being sardonic: 69

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

The Prime Minister has now intimated that he is ‘by no means committed’ to the Austrians deciding their own future, though I am not quite sure whether this means that by an extension of the theme of the Contrat Social they are to be forced to be free. However, Churchill’s pronouncement could be ignored only if it proved to be another of his passing fancies, and Eden wrote in favour of enforced independence as a real possi¬ bility for Austria.90 In July Roberts proclaimed himself a convert to enforced independence, while noting that a British big stick would not solve the problem of economic viability, and that Austria’s eastern neighbours, especially Poland which did not have a frontier with Austria, were opposed to its participation in any federation in east-central Europe. (The Poles were perhaps still smarting from their miscalculation of the 1930s that they could do business with Hitler because he was Austrian, not Prussian.) To the Foreign Office, an Austrian-Czech-Hungarian federation, without Poland, recreating the unity of the Habsburg Monarchy, had a lot of merit economically, but the principal objective of the pro¬ posed federations was strategic, and from that point of view Polish membership would be essential. Unfortunately, Churchill had an obsession with a Danubian federation, based on nostalgia for the former Monarchy yet preferably incorporating much of southern Germany as well, and the officials could not therefore bury the topic.91 The fact that British official views in 1943 veered deci¬ sively towards the restoration of an Austrian state is one of the surest indicators of British thinking about the future security of Europe. Danger was apprehended from two sources, not one, from Germany as well as from the Soviet Union. If solely Russia had been feared, it would have been logical to preserve the Anschluss, especially in view of the evidence that most Austrians were at least resigned to it. In May Roberts noted with apprehension that the Austrian units in Tunisia were ‘fighting like tigers’ and added: The most discouraging feature of the Austrian question has been the enthusiasm with which Austrian troops 70

The German Problem

have fought in the German army. It should be remem¬ bered that it was through the common experience of fighting together against France in 1870-71 that the Hanoverians and south Germans who had fought against the Prussians in 1866 became good and con¬ tented members of the Second Reich. On 16 June the War Cabinet accepted a suggestion from Eden that British propaganda should openly pronounce in favour of the independence of Austria, providing that first there were discussions with the United States and the Soviet Union, and that there was also propaganda in favour of a Danubian grouping. There was anxiety in the Foreign Office, shared by Eden, that the new policy would be incompatible with the Atlantic Charter by implicitly denying the Austrians the opportunity to remain part of even a democratic Germany. Eden concluded that as far as Austria was concerned the Charter was best forgotten.92 The opportunity for discussions with the other major allies came at the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference in October. The Americans and the Russians both favoured a declaration in favour of Austrian independence, but whereas Stalin at his meeting with Eden in 1941 had called for an independent Austria without reservation, Molotov now insisted that Austria would have to pay reparations in view of its participation in Barbarossa - no doubt Austrian soldiers in Russia were also fighting like tigers. Britain and the United States could do no more than secure that this should be stated euphemistically rather than directly; Austria ‘could not evade responsibility for participation in the war on the side of Hitlerite Germany’.93 The Foreign Office could now proceed to think about the serious problems of setting up the Austrian state again, though they also had to spend time refuting some very silly suggestions from certain very prominent people, notably Jan Smuts and J.M. Keynes. The former - deliberately or otherwise acting as Churchill’s mouthpiece - recommended to the Foreign Office the merits of a new state combining Austria and Bavaria. Harrison pointed out that in the likely event of Bavaria wishing to rejoin north Germany, Austria

71

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

would be drawn into the reconstituted Reich also. Such a state in any central European confederation would be utterly undesirable as comprising too large a Germanic element. Finally, Harrison was puzzled about what made Smuts and Churchill think that Bavaria was better from a western, civilised standpoint than Prussia when ‘Bavaria is the cradle of Nazism and many prominent Nazis and generals are Bavarians’. Keynes was even more otiose with a politically and geographically illiterate suggestion that Trieste should be restored to Austria.94 In serious discourse, the Foreign Office saw three main problems: the Soviet insistence on reparations, the pro¬ cedure for setting up an Austrian government, and the division of the country into occupation zones. The last was the subject of much indecisive debate in the European Advisory Commission during 1944, caused by America’s initial unwillingness to accept more than a token role in the occupation of Austria. Strang thought that a bilateral British-Soviet occupation might be preferable to that. Yet the Chiefs of Staff stated that they would have great difficulty in finding any troops to occupy Austria, despite protests from Law that it was ‘politically essential that we should meet this commitment, otherwise Austria might fall entirely under Russian domination’. At the end of 1944, Roosevelt agreed to full American participation in the Austrian occupation regime. Such a role for the United States had been simplified logistically by its capitulation to Britain in accepting a zone in the south of Germany, not the north-west, though, ironically, the President may have been influenced by Soviet pleas to take on a full role in Austria.95 The other two problems were not so immediate. On reparations, the Foreign Office were torn between a feeling that Austria deserved to be made to pay some, though at far lower amounts per capita than Germany proper, and the inescapable fact that more than nominal reparations were incompatible with the country’s economic viability and would weaken such appeal as renewed independence might have to Austrian opinion. As for an Austrian government, British officials sought some form of democratic syrup to sweeten the fact that the Austrians were going to have their 72

The German Problem

own state again whether they liked it or not. It was hoped that the political parties there would nominate repre¬ sentatives to a provisional government pending elections, rather than that the occupying powers should simply nomi¬ nate a government which the Austrian public might regard as one of stooges.96

73

2 Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

I British-Soviet relations before the German invasion of Russia Never can two countries have become allies under less amicable circumstances than Britain and the Soviet Union in June 1941. In August 1939 Stalin had rejected an alliance with Britain and France in favour of a pact with Hitler. Sheer greed at the magnitude of what Hitler offered him - half Poland and the Baltic republics - was probably uppermost in the Soviet dictator’s mind, but mistrust of the Western powers, especially Britain, was certainly also present. Although the British response to the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939, after the back of Polish resistance had been broken by the Germans, was relatively mild, British-Soviet relations reached a nadir after the Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939. British con¬ sideration of coming to Finland’s aid - which may have been thwarted only by Finland itself making peace with Moscow in March 1940 - showed not so much hatred of the Soviet Union as supreme contempt, reinforced by the Red Army’s miserable performance against the small Finnish forces. In February 1940 the Foreign Secretary, Halifax, told a Labour. Party delegation that ‘the fear of Russia declaring war on us ought not to deter us from any course of action that would certainly seem wise’.1 The Government were in fact con¬ sidering the occupation of the iron-ore fields in north Sweden and of the Norwegian port of Narvik, from which

74

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

much of the ore was shipped to Germany, while justifying these steps as necessary to provide a passage for British and French troops being sent to Finland. The British Govern¬ ment dithered over the project, but their doubts were caused more by the implacable wish of Norway and Sweden to remain neutral than by fear of driving Russia into the war on Germany’s side. It should be added that the British did not expect Stalin to rest content with overrunning Finland, but to go on to occupy northern Norway, with immense and self-evident dangers to Britain.2 It was perhaps Stalin’s turn to feel contemptuous of the Western powers when Hitler’s armies achieved what Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, in a telegram of congratulations to his German counterpart, Ribbentrop, called their ‘splendid victories’ in France and the Low Countries in 1940. It might be added that Molotov followed his compliment with the information that the Soviet Union was about to annex the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as if to thank Germany for making that step possible by eliminating France from the war and isolating Britain. Even so, Soviet appeasement of Germany became inevitable.3 Stalin was glad when Britain decided not to accept Hitler’s peace offer after the fall of France, or so he told the new British Ambassador, the left-wing politician Sir Stafford Cripps, who had been appointed by the Churchill coalition Government, whether out of a mistaken belief that Stalin would be pleased by the choice of a leftist but non-Communist Ambassador, as Churchill was to imply, or out of a wish to remove Cripps from the British political scene where he seemed intent on setting himself up as a critic of the new Government. A Soviet historian also assured his readers that his country had ‘a high regard for the courage of the British, who did not flinch before Nazi Germany during the days when Britain stood alone in the war’, and at Yalta in February 1945 Stalin was to reduce Churchill to tears by praising in a banquet speech Britain’s lone stand of nearly five years earlier.4 In a famous exchange of words in a bomb-shelter in Berlin in November 1940, the visiting Molotov dealt very roughly with Ribbentrop’s claim that for all practical purposes Britain had been defeated.5 75

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Despite all this, the lack of cordiality between Britain and the Soviet Union as the year 1941 opened was almost total. Like the proverbial conversation between two deaf men, the two powers talked, in so far as they talked at all, at cross-purposes. Britain naturally sought some form of co¬ operation in the war effort, particularly in the blockade of Germany which was being rendered almost nugatory by German-Soviet trade, and also in certain areas such as the Balkans. Laurence Collier, head of the Northern Depart¬ ment of the Foreign Office, commented on the GermanSoviet trade pact, just concluded, that it gave Germany everything that Russia possibly could give it. When, shortly afterwards, Molotov consented to give Cripps his first inter¬ view since the previous October, the Foreign Minister made no sort of overture, instead making even the possibility of British-Soviet co-operation dependent on British recogni¬ tion of the Soviet annexation of the small Baltic republics, plus certain other demands, including provision by Britain of a ship to transport some Soviet personnel from London to a Russian port. This demand provoked an explosion of anger from Fitzroy Maclean: The obvious solution would be for the Soviet Govern¬ ment to send a Soviet ship to fetch them. All our shipping is fully occupied on work of national impor¬ tance. The Russians, on the other hand, would have plenty of ships available if they were not using all the shipping that they can lay hands on to carry cargoes destined for Germany. There seems no reason why we should deprive ourselves of shipping which we badly need simply in order that the Soviet Government may further the war effort of our adversaries.6 Recognition of the Soviet position in the Baltic was an even bigger issue, as Molotov must have known since Britain’s refusal to give Russia carte blanche to intervene in those republics had been the one outstanding political (as distinct from military) obstacle to a British-French-Soviet pact in 1939. British recognition in 1941 would have been more than an abstract gesture since it would have enabled the Soviet Government to claim the Baltic States’ assets in

76

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

Britain through the courts - presumably too humiliating a prospect for the British to contemplate.7 In April, the launching of a new German Blitzkrieg into Yugoslavia and Greece failed to stir the Soviet Government into talking with Britain. At this point the chiefs of the Foreign Office began to feel that the officials in the North¬ ern Department, which dealt with Russia, were adopting over-rigid attitudes. Sargent, whose duties included super¬ vision of the Department, wrote on 9 April about the Soviet demands regarding the former Baltic States: We would do well to remember in this connexion that if in 1939 we had been ready to approve the Soviet Government’s intention to occupy the Baltic States, it is probable that Stalin would have concluded his treaty with Great Britain and France, instead of with Germany. At that time we could not bring ourselves to make this sacrifice of principle, and we paid the penalty accordingly. This time we may well hesitate to adopt an equally uncompromising attitude. He recommended recognition of Soviet demands if there was the clear prospect of a massive Russian quid pro quo. Cadogan advised against making such a gesture, while military events were favouring Germany. R.A. Butler, then the Foreign Office junior minister, endorsed Sargent’s view of the nature of any offer, and Cadogan’s on its timing. Eden, who had long prided himself on not being a hidebound Tory in his attitude to Russia, professed to feel encouraged by Moscow’s recent display of interest in the independence of Turkey, and stated that nothing should be done to increase Soviet suspicions of Britain. Cripps was instructed that Russia could have satisfaction on the Baltic republics, short of full British de jure recognition of their annexation, if it showed a change of heart, particularly a readiness to co-operate in blockading Germany.8 This initiative was nipped in the bud by Churchill. On 22 April he sent the Foreign Office an order: None of this seems to me to be worth the trouble it has taken to send. They know perfectly well their dangers, 77

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

and also that we need their aid. You will get much more out of them by letting these forces work than by frantic efforts to assure them of your love. This only looks like weakness, and encourages them to believe they are stronger than they are. Now is the moment for a sombre restraint on our part, and let them do the worrying. Above all we ought not to fret the Americans about it.9 If the proposed overture to Moscow had been made instead of being blocked by Churchill, it would undoubtedly have met with no response. The next two months were the time of Stalin’s tragi-comic efforts to beg Hitler not to invade the Soviet Union. These efforts ranged from the picturesque and relatively innocuous, such as publicly kissing a German diplomat at a Moscow railway station, to the more serious: the vast Soviet forces in the western border areas were forbidden to take any special precautions to resist the blatant German invasion preparations. This colossal error of judgment was to cost countless Russian lives during the early months of the war, and was pursued despite many warnings, including some from the British Government, about German plans.10 Stalin seemed to think that Hitler would not strike without some minimal provocation - a strange attitude on the part of a dictator who had recently liquidated millions of his own subjects who had done nothing provocative whatever. As late as 18 June, four days before the onslaught, Cripps, who was in London, had lunch with the Soviet Ambassador, Maisky, and told him that Hitler was on the point of either invading or presenting the Soviet Union with a sweeping list of demands. Although Maisky went through the motions of professing to see ‘no reason for a break in Soviet-German relations’, he allowed the conversation to proceed on a basis which suggested the opposite. Cripps went on to record a standard belief in British official circles; the military strength of Russia and Germany might be equal on paper, but: I thought the Russian characteristic of being unable to organise accurately would bring about their defeat. He 78

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

admitted this incapacity in organisation, and, although he tried to persuade himself and me that they could hold the Germans, I don’t think he succeeded in convincing himself and he did nothing to convince me. [Maisky departed] seeming very depressed.11 In view of these assessments it may seem odd that British officialdom wanted Russia and Germany to become embroiled in war. In May the Foreign Office, advising on the answer to a query from the Australian High Commission about whether Britain wanted such an extension of the war, noted that the military staffs and the Ministry of Economic Warfare felt that it would be ‘distinctly to our advantage to see Russia engaged in war with Germany’. Eden also took this view. Yet the expected rapid German conquest of the Soviet Union would not only have guaranteed the Germans the Soviet raw materials which they were admittedly already receiving, but would also have threatened the invasion of the Middle East and even India from the Caucasus and Soviet Central Asia. An explanation or partial explanation was the fear that in its anxiety to avoid German attack the Soviet regime would make so many concessions as, for all practical purposes, to enter fully the war against Britain. After conquest, the Germans would at least have been faced with the burdens and distractions of an occupation regime. The British obviously did not want the German invasion to succeed, as is shown by their warnings to the Soviet Government, warnings which, because they were in a sense self-interested, have been twisted by Soviet historians into an excuse for the fact that they were ignored. These his¬ torians are themselves defeated into ignoring, instead of trying to justify, the deaf ear which Stalin turned to warnings from Communist and neutral sources, such as the Swedish Government, about invasion.12

II From the launching of Barbarossa to Eden’s visit to Moscow, June-December 1941 The early German victories in Barbarossa, the name which they gave to their campaign against Russia, did nothing to 79

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

dispel the belief in official London that Soviet defeat was extremely probable, though those victories were fewer than Hitler had been expecting. Later attempts by the Foreign Office to foster a legend that they had been unusually prescient in foreseeing that Russia would not be defeated must be treated with caution. Early in July, the new head of the Northern Department, Christopher Warner, managed to make two major errors of judgment in one short minute. The Soviet embassy was demanding that Soviet publicity material should be given wide circulation in Britain, includ¬ ing by the BBC. Warner wrote that ‘the public - the BBC listeners anyway - will see through what is being done and, unless I am mistaken about their general level of intelli¬ gence, will feel that they are being “propagandised” in an obvious way and will dislike it.’ It would be better to show Soviet films to British cinema audiences, who were a less critical lot than radio listeners. In any case, the problem was not a major one: ‘I dare say that, if the Germans are in Moscow in a fortnight or three weeks, not many Russian films will reach us.’13 Warner thus combined a belief in Russia’s imminent collapse with a conviction, which was to be proved false, that ‘intelligent’ members of the British public would not become starry-eyed about the Soviet Union.14 Ironically, within the Office, Warner himself was to become something of an apologist for Soviet actions before reverting to outraged anti-Communism after the war. Scepticism about the Soviet Union’s survival prospects had curiously little impact on British relations with Russia. Following Churchill’s welcome to the country as an ally, unequivocal while unrepentant about his own anti-Bolshevik past and carefully phrased to restrict friendship with Russia to the emergency which had just arisen,15 the Foreign Office settled down to forging an alliance with the most difficult ally imaginable on the assumption that if Hitler was victori¬ ous in the east nothing would have been lost, even if nothing was gained. In November 1941 Warner did express the fear that ‘an alliance might oblige us, if things went wrong in Russia, to restore a certain form of regime in that country, or to make premature engagements as regards territorial boun¬ daries.’ In reality, it was totally inconceivable that Britain 80

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

would have acted to restore a defeated and exiled Soviet regime in the same way as they intended to do what they could to return the London Polish Government to Warsaw. It also proved possible for a long period to have a functional alliance without engagements, premature or otherwise, on frontiers. The Foreign Office’s caution in wishing to leave the boundaries question till a much later date may indeed have been misplaced. As Adam Ulam suggested, in their frightened mood of July 1941 the Kremlin leaders might conceivably have accepted a clause in the Polish-Soviet treaty then being negotiated to restore the August 1939 boundary, if Britain had been prepared to make the sort of brute ultimatum which the Soviet Union was in the habit of making when it was strong. The opportunity, if it existed, was lost, just as Roosevelt decided to extend Lend-Lease aid to Russia without demanding any political quid pro quo at all, not because of any major illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime but simply because he wanted to keep it in a condition where it was both able and willing to remain in the war.16 British (and American) moderation and restraint in their treatment of Russia during the most desperate hour of its history was not entirely unmatched on the Soviet side. For one thing, Britain had at the outset a tremendous asset, though one difficult for British minds to grasp, in its rejection of Rudolf Hess’s one-man mission to Scotland, a few weeks before the start of Barbarossa, to negotiate peace with Britain. Hitler had known nothing about Hess’s inten¬ tions, of which he would never have approved. To the British it was a weird joke. Stalin evidently believed that the mission was an authorised one - a view still enshrined in what passes for historiography in the Soviet Union - and that the Churchill Government had agonised long and hard before rejecting it. He may have felt real gratitude for this ‘rejection’.17 Russia almost immediately began demanding the launch¬ ing of a ‘Second Front’, an invasion of western Europe by Britain (and after Pearl Harbor by America as well) to relieve the pressure on the Soviet-German front. The initial demand in July was almost apologetic in tone, and, despite 81

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 the later ‘Niagaras of folly and misstatement’ which Churchill was to accuse them of making about that subject, Stalin’s realism about the extent of the aid which he could expect from Britain wa's indicated by the fact that for long the Soviet military liaison mission in London was headed by an admiral. Britain was quick to start sending convoys laden with war materials to the Russian Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel. Stalin sent to London a man who could argue for more such aid in an informed way. Churchill for his part sent Lord Beaverbrook to Moscow in September to see what could be done about increasing aid, and Roosevelt asked an American envoy, Averell Harriman, to accompany him. The mission was a success, owing chiefly to Beaverbrook’s determination to accept the Soviet definition of a provocative act, which included requesting information of any kind about Soviet strategic plans, and to refrain from it. An aid protocol was signed at the beginning of October, and during the following winter the British were to give absolute priority to aid to Russia, objections from the service chiefs being repeatedly overruled. In addition, the Royal Air Force had already greatly stepped up its bombing raids over Germany to draw part of the Luftwaffe away from the eastern front.18 The British were acutely conscious that these measures were all that they could do to help Russia in its struggle for survival. Fortunately, the Soviet Union’s most insistent early de¬ mand was at worst inconvenient rather than impossible. It was that Britain should declare war on the countries which had joined in Hitler’s attack. Besides Italy, these were Finland, Hungary, and Romania. Eden reported to Cripps in October that Maisky was being very insistent on this, arguing that ‘At a time when it was not possible for us to give a wide measure of material aid, it was all the more important to meet the Soviet Government, so far as we could, in these political matters. “Please do it”, the Ambassador said.’ The British had no objection to declaring war on Hungary and Romania, whose regimes they regarded with contempt. Finland was a different case. Its decision to ‘continue’ the Winter War of 1939-40, in which British sympathies had been wholly on the Finnish side, seemed unwise and unfor-

82

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

tunate rather than reprehensible, and it was hoped to win the country back to neutrality. Ultimately, Britain had to yield; war was declared on all three countries on 5 December after Finland had ignored a British ultimatum to return to neutrality. The British were always to be at pains not to depart from the spirit or the letter of this gesture of solidarity; peace overtures from these enemies were invari¬ ably to be made known to the Soviet Government.19 By that time Stalin was pressing for discussions, even if not for actual agreements, on war aims. He even put the idea to Harriman in September, despite the neutrality of the United States. When Harriman asked him what he wanted, he replied with the incongruous combination of an agree¬ ment on war aims and the shipment to the Soviet Union of vast numbers of American lorries to transport the Red Army about the battle fronts. The American could offer any satis¬ faction only on the latter. Roosevelt, if only for reasons of domestic politics, was determined not to make any agree¬ ments on territory which his opponents could denounce as deciding the fate of peoples without consulting them. Stalin’s anxiety may have been stimulated by the idealistic terms of the Atlantic Charter which Roosevelt and Churchill had issued at the end of their meeting off Newfoundland in August. The promise that all post-war changes would be dependent on the consent of the peoples affected had certainly alarmed the Polish Government. Strang noted that the Declaration ‘will not make the Poles any more con¬ tented. It, in effect, denies them East Prussia’. Roberts saw it as desirable that there should be some modification to the Atlantic policy to allow Poland (and presumably other allies) ‘equitable’ boundaries. Stalin would surely have agreed.20 Whatever the reasons which led Stalin to raise long-term political issues while the Soviet Union was in the throes of a struggle for its very survival, a refusal to talk was impossible. As Warner noted, the intense suspiciousness of the Russian mind would be aroused if Britain did not respond. By November the Foreign Office were speculating on how far discussion would have to concentrate on the uncongenial and almost sordid question of frontiers, and how far it could 83

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

be deflected into a new international system for ensuring collective security. At a meeting on the 18th, Cadogan, Law, Sargent, Strang, Harvey and Ronald derived comfort from the fact that to date Soviet policy declarations had eschewed talk of further annexations or the creation of puppet states as the path to future security. It was believed that: The chief aim of Russian policy is security and if the threat to her from any European or Asiatic Power can be conjured by some international scheme, then Russia would not necessarily have to adopt the policy which led to the partition of Poland, the absorption of the Baltic states and the establishment of Russian bases in Finland. What was to be an almost invariable caveat was added that little could be done that did not have the assent of the United States.21 However, even if Stalin was to see the key to future security in such a policy as the strict disarmament of Germany, it was clear that he would also insist on the recovery of the territorial gains which he had made in 1939-40 at the expense of Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic republics, which had been wholly absorbed. Britain washed its hands of any concern for Finland and Romania with the declarations of war in early December; there had indeed been little for Romania before that. With evidently less justice, the Foreign Office prepared to write off any interest in the former Baltic States which they had been toying with ‘disowning’ in April before Churchill had intervened. As the Germans advanced through the Baltic States in August, it was remarked that if their populations co-operated with the invader Britain could not be expected to feel concern for the restoration of their independence. This was written in advance of any serious evidence that collaboration was taking place and ignored the rigours to which the inhabitants were known to have been subjected during a year of Soviet rule. By the end of the year officials were concocting almost a doctrine that small states in vulnerable strategic locations had no right to exist. Armine Dew wrote:

84

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

My own feeling is that more trouble is caused by the existence of small states unable to defend their inde¬ pendence but occupying important strategic positions than by any rivalry between two 'Great Powers as to the ownership of those territories. I do not feel that the independence of the Baltic States is a European neces¬ sity.22 Only Poland, to be discussed elsewhere, posed a major problem for the British, excluding problems with the United States, even at this early stage.

Ill Eden’s visit to Moscow Churchill reluctantly decided to send Eden to Moscow, specifically because Stalin started to demand an agreement on war aims in early November, and, more generally, because, as Eden remarked to the Polish Prime Minister, Sikorski, the British ‘had such evidence of the deep suspi¬ cion which had implanted itself in the Soviet Government’s mind that there was no alternative but for him to go’. Eden himself was quite eager to make the trip; he feared that the frequent correspondence between Churchill and Stalin meant that the Foreign Office was being bypassed, and he was somewhat jealous of Beaverbrook for having been to Moscow. He also felt that he could get on well with Stalin.23 Eden, together with a party which included Cadogan and Ismay, travelled by sea to Murmansk. Maisky was also on the ship, but it was a sign that relations between the Soviet Union and a capitalist country were ‘special’ that the Soviet party insisted on having no contact whatever with the British during the long voyage. Arrived at Murmansk, the British travelled to Moscow by train. Their protection against attack by German or Finnish aircraft was provided by an anti¬ aircraft gun on an open railway wagon. Eden was touched by the suffering of the gun crew, exposed to the intense Arctic cold, while Cadogan seemed to find their ordeal amusing.24 Once in the Kremlin, the meetings with Stalin began. As at their first encounter in 1935, Eden could admire the Soviet leader for being ‘a quiet dictator in his manner’. His

85

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

lack of gestures made it impossible to guess what he was saying until the translation was given, but Eden approved of that. Their conversations were also less difficult than Eden had expected whfen military topics arose. Since Sep¬ tember Stalin had been pressing for the dispatch of twentyfive to thirty British divisions to the Murmansk area or to southern Russia if they were sent via Iran, demands which Churchill was to characterise as ‘absurdities’ steeped in ‘utter unreality’. A British plan to offer a much smaller force for use in the south had had to be abandoned before Eden set out, owing to Rommel’s successes in North Africa. Even an offer, subsequently planned, of ten RAF squadrons for use in Russia had to be reversed when Japan entered the war. Fortunately, Stalin no longer seemed to want British troops or airmen. This reflected the improvement in Soviet military fortunes which reawakened the regime’s wish to have as few foreigners as possible on Russian soil. At the same time, Stalin assured Eden that the Second Front could as easily be in the Balkans as in France. That he encour¬ aged a British invasion of so cherished a potential zone of Soviet influence as the Balkans, instead of saying that the Second Front had to be in France, was a sign that his mood was only a little removed from the earlier desperation.25 Stalin passed over in tactful silence suggestions which Churchill had earlier made that a good form of Anglo-Soviet military co-operation would be for the Russian garrison in northern Iran to be replaced by British troops and Poles transferred from the Soviet Union. (Iran had been occupied in August and September by British forces in the south, and Russian in the north in a joint venture to depose the pro-German Shah.) Stalin can have had no interest in withdrawing the relatively small forces involved, and must have suspected — in this case with some justification - that the British proposal was more political than military. It is interesting that the Official Historian of the Foreign Office in the war noted that in the case of Iran’s neighbour, Afghanistan, it was decided to exert only nominal pressure to break with the Axis powers, partly because ‘the continued presence of the Germans would indeed be preferable to a Russian occupation’.26 Even more courteous, Stalin was

86

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

apologetic in his inevitable turning down of Eden’s plea for Russia to ‘relieve the pressure on us in the Far East’, in other words to declare war on Japan. Given his country’s still precarious position he could' have replied that the British were showing the same insensitivity towards the limitations of Soviet resources that the British accused him of displaying in his demands for an early Second Front. Instead he said that he could not declare war because the Soviet people would regard it as an act of aggression and would not support him. At the same time, he seemed genuinely afraid that Japan itself might still decide to attack the Soviet Far East.27 On military co-operation there was only serious acrimony when the Russians proposed a joint expedition in the north to capture the Finnish Arctic port of Petsamo and the neighbouring Norwegian town of Kirkenes. The plan immediately floundered on the British demand for feasibility studies before they could commit themselves in principle. On reflection, the Foreign Office were not unhappy since the Norwegian Government in London might be displeased at the prospect of their northernmost town being liberated by Soviet forces and would ‘no doubt want assurances that their sovereignty would be respected and would wish the forces left in occupation of Norwegian territory to be Norwegian and/or British and not Russian’.28 Political topics provided Eden with no such easy time. The British had hoped that discussions could be kept tentative and agreements confined to general issues such as not concluding a separate peace and endorsing the Atlantic Charter-itself scarcely tailor-made for Soviet requirements. They even hoped that Stalin might be satisfied with the simple fact of talking to a British leader who was known to enjoy Churchill’s closest confidence. Above all, they did not want to commit themselves on the restoration of the Soviet Union’s June 1941 frontiers or on the future treatment of Germany. On the eve of the mission, Sargent, who himself never went on such journeys, issued a warning to his colleagues against any mention of the possible partition of Germany: ‘for I take it that the idea is one that we do not want to encourage in any way.’ Cadogan agreed: ‘We should 87

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

all like to see Germany broken up but that is a process which, to be lasting and genuine, must come from within.’29 Dismay was therefore the inevitable reaction when at his first meeting with Eden on 16 December Stalin proposed not only a formal military alliance but also an agreement to co-operate in post-war reconstruction, with a secret protocol dealing comprehensively with the post-war frontiers of Europe. Among other things, Poland would receive East Prussia, while the Rhineland, Bavaria and Austria would be separated from Germany. The Soviet Union would retain its annexations of 1939 and 1940 with the minor additions of Petsamo, Finland’s only Arctic port, and the Baltic port of Memel which Germany had seized from Lithuania in March 1939, and which Stalin clearly felt would complete the Soviet annexation of that country. Stalin also urged Britain to set up military bases in Norway, Denmark, the Nether¬ lands, Belgium and possibly France to prevent renewed German aggression. Finally, Russia would require repara¬ tions. Stalin readily agreed when Eden urged him to confine himself to reparations in kind, and not repeat the disastrous quest for money reparations of the 1920s. That proved an isolated point of easy agreement. Eden’s discomfiture included surprise that Stalin could be interested in, and fairly well-informed about, such matters as Rhenish separatism and the future of the Dodecanese islands at a time when the Germans had so recently been beaten back from the very gates of Moscow. Stalin was giving the British an insight, which most in the Foreign Office were commendably swift to appreciate, into the difference between his foreign-policy thinking and theirs, between a system of thought which placed most emphasis on frontiers and territorial changes and one which was more concerned with economic and strategic considerations, and which, when those did not dictate otherwise, would have been glad to let the fate of disputed areas be settled according to the wishes of their inhabitants. Eden was to show himself rather less fitted than either Churchill or most of his own officials to cope with the Metternichian mental processes of the Soviet dictator. Eden’s second meeting with Stalin proved the most dif¬ ficult, setting a pattern for future talks with British leaders in 88

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

which a pleasant meeting would be followed by an acrimoni¬ ous one, almost like acts in a play in which Stalin was both playwright and star performer. He said that Britain must without delay recognise at least the^Soviet annexation of the Baltic States and the new Soviet-Finnish frontier. He recal¬ led that the Soviet alliance negotiations with Britain and France had broken down in 1939 over the small Baltic States, and that their two countries had been poised to go to war in March 1940 just before Finland had decided to make peace. Britain should make amends for these errors unless it wished Soviet public opinion to be ‘horrified’. Eden argued that he could not give Stalin what he wanted on the spur of the moment. The Cabinet, the United States and the Domin¬ ion Governments would all have to be consulted. (Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Washington at this time, and, though Eden cannot have known it, may have agreed informally to leave all territorial issues until after the war.)30 A badly shaken Eden sent messages to the War Cabinet and to Churchill, asking to be allowed to give Stalin satisfaction on an issue which he had evidently chosen as an ‘acid test’ of British intentions. Sadly lowering himself to cynicism and appeasement, Eden suggested that American objections might be assuaged by a Soviet promise to hold another plebiscite in the Baltic States to confirm the popular wish to be part of the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union would be likely to make such a concession ‘since they would foresee no obstacle when time came in arranging for necessary vote in their favour’. Eden’s plea was rejected by both the Cabinet and Churchill, who felt that Hitler had left Russia with no choice but to continue the struggle without Britain making ‘wrongful promises’.31 Again reflecting what was to become a familiar pattern, this stormy meeting was to be followed by others - in this case three - in which Stalin was to be much less demanding. They concentrated to a con¬ siderable extent on Poland, and are discussed below (see chapter 3). Even so, the year 1941 ended with the British-Soviet alliance as what it was to remain throughout, one based solely on having a common enemy, whose existence still failed to make it possible to transcend the differences of 89

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

mentality between the British and Soviet ruling elites. The traditional animosity between the two had left an abiding legacy. Two examples - one from shortly before Eden’s visit and one from just afterwards - may be cited. As the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (7 November) neared in 1941, the British Government agonised over what sort of a message of greetings, if any, to send. Anything with the King’s signature was ruled out because of respect for his murdered Romanov relatives. Churchill told the Cabinet ‘that nothing would tempt him to send a message’, though others could do so. Eventually, Eden sent a suitable communication to Molotov.32 On the Soviet side, after Eden had left, the Polish Ambassador, Kot, reported increased self-confidence in Kremlin circles, ‘though they expressed quite clearly their distrust, suspicion and almost dislike of Great Britain’. Soviet officials, past masters in the art of hypocrisy that they were and had to be to survive under Stalinism, do indeed seem to have had difficulty in pretend¬ ing to feel cordiality towards Britain, difficulties which were not nearly so acute in their attitude to the United States.33 The next six years were to see these attitudes struggling to retain their predominance and ultimately triumphing.

IV Foreign Office assessments of Soviet policy in 1942; the Anglo-Russian alliance and Churchill’s first visit to Moscow Early in 1942 the Russians achieved moderate success in pushing back the Germans from territory west of Moscow, and, though the front soon stabilised, the danger of an early Soviet collapse had clearly been averted. Apart from such broad facts the British continued to suffer from an almost pitiful lack of knowledge about the military and economic position of the Soviet Union. As a rule the Soviet authorities were willing to divulge information only about the situation in the German-occupied parts of the country, which they obviously did not control, and the British treated these with scepticism. Detailed reports of German atrocities in these vast areas were indeed at first met with outright incredulity;

90

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

the confessions at the Moscow trials a few years before had, after all, also not been lacking in detail. By the spring of 1942, to the Foreign Office (unlike the British military authorities with their residual Gerrfianophilia) the evidence was looking more convincing, but it was still thought that the objective of German ruthlessness was economic exploita¬ tion, and not that people were being murdered on a vast scale to meet the dictates of Nazi racial ideology. Nor was it realised that Hitler was deliberately spurning the support of the Ukrainians and other non-Russian peoples. In a jewel of a priori reasoning Geoffrey Wilson wrote in November 1942 that an American report that the German Minister for the Eastern Territories, Rosenberg, was urging efforts to win over the Ukrainians and that Hitler’s viceroy in the Ukraine, Koch, was successfully opposing them, was clearly false: ‘Koch is the man on the spot, who feels the necessity of giving the locals more to do before they can be expected to cooperate. Rosenberg, being further away, feels this less strongly.’ In fact, the American report was wholly correct about both Rosenberg and the unspeakable Koch, who sought to make amends to Hitler for his social-democratic past by wantonly brutal treatment of his Ukrainian sub¬ jects.34 The extent of the carnage and destruction in Germanoccupied parts of the Soviet Union was directly relevant to some Soviet war aims, such as reparations. Whether the British slowness to appreciate what the Germans were doing in occupied Russia otherwise made much difference in Anglo-Soviet relations is open to doubt. It was enough to know the self-evident fact that Germany had very nearly brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Stalin would have wanted security, generously interpreted, for Russia after the war with or without German atrocities. His attitude, and that of the Stalinist official class as a whole, to the Soviet population was so detached that German misconduct seems to have had little of the effect on Soviet foreign policy that it might have had in another society. The belief of such contrasting British personalities as the Labour politician Hugh Dalton and Field-Marshal Montgomery that the British-Soviet alliance could have been placed on a firm 91

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

foundation if only Britain had shown proper sympathy for the sufferings of the Soviet people at German hands was almost certainly, to borrow a phrase from an earlier period of Russian history, a 'senseless dream’. Insulated, therefore, from any very real idea of the realities of life in either the occupied or the unoccupied parts of Russia, British policy towards the Soviet Union took on a shape which it was to retain until the closing stages of the war. There were two recurrent but mutually exclusive fears: that Russia might rest on its laurels after driving the invader back to the June 1941 frontiers, or, conversely, that it might defeat Germany virtually single-handed, leaving the entire continent at Stalin’s mercy. In March Sargent took alarm at a statement by Stalin that Russia’s war aim was the expul¬ sion of the enemy from the national soil, with no reference to the necessity of destroying Nazism altogether. Other officials, such as Strang, gloomily referred to the real possibility of a victorious Red Army establishing a new era of Soviet predominance in at least eastern Europe. A less widespread fear, propounded by Geoffrey Wilson, who elsewhere distinguished between a ‘free world’ whose lead¬ ing lights were Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, and an unfree one composed of Germany and its allies and conquests, was that Moscow might concentrate on developing relations with the Free French unless Britain went out of its way to prove that it did not seek a dominating position in Europe, and showed proper concern for Soviet wishes.35 To avert these and other dangers the question was debated of how to treat Russia in order to make the most of such opportunities for co-operation as might exist. At this early stage in the wartime alliance the Foreign Office staff, as diplomats, found it hard to believe that, even with a totalitarian dictatorship, only military and economic strength mattered. They thought that the way in which they treated individual Russians below the supreme level of Stalin and Molotov might be of real importance. In February Warner suggested a theory that Soviet officials were ‘pecul¬ iar’ people whom one should nevertheless treat as ‘normal’, chiefly because that was how they liked to be treated. 92

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

Strang agreed: It is essential to treat the Russians as though we thought that they were reasonable human beings. But as they are not, in fact, reasonable human beings, but dominated by an almost insane suspicion we have to combine this treatment with infinite patience. Sargent was anxious that patience should not degenerate into flattery which was ‘merely a minor form of appeasement and was open to the same objections and dangers which are the inevitable consequences of appeasement whatever form it may take.’ Cadogan interrupted these musings on the Slav soul and the lessons of recent history to observe that firmness and patience were no substitute for a British military effort which the Russians would be unable to denigrate.36 The consensus seemed to be that there was no magic key to achieving results in dealings with the Russians. The basic assumption that Britain was a Great Power with legitimate interests in the future of eastern Europe, which could not simply be abandoned to the Soviet Union, became explicit at the start of the year when the editor of The Times, Barrington-Ward, sent the Foreign Office a memorandum from the paper’s foreign editor, E.H. Carr, a former member of the Foreign Office. Carr suggested that it should ‘fall to Russia to interpret and apply ... the guiding principles of the Atlantic Charter in east Europe’. Echoing Eden’s recom¬ mendation to the War Cabinet from Moscow in December, Carr added that the inhabitants of the former Baltic States would not be badly off under Soviet rule - presumably excluding the high proportion deported to Siberia after the initial takeover in 1940! - besides which their independence between the wars had been ‘almost accidental’. Sargent recalled the disastrous effect which a Times leader by Carr, advocating the same course, had had six months earlier on the morale of the occupied peoples and, perhaps worst of all, on Turkey, which was unlikely indeed to give up its neutrality to facilitate the creation of a Soviet-dominated Balkans to its north-west, (Turkish entry into the war was strongly desired by both Britain and the Soviet Union.) 93

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Sargent continued: Surely it is clear that if we are to establish a sincere and fruitful system of cooperation with the Soviet Govern¬ ment this must be based on the result of close bargain¬ ing in which we shall try to maintain all our rights and interests, and not on a series of abdications such as Mr Carr seems to contemplate. Such a policy of appease¬ ment would, I am sure, defeat its own ends. In any case it would be altogether too disingenuous to think that we could successfully hoodwink the Americans and placate the Russians by means of the particular formula of abdication proposed by Mr Carr in his memorandum.37 Having decided so emphatically what they did not want, the Foreign Office had to consider what they did desire. Soviet pressure for a political alliance, including British recognition of Russian territorial war aims, continued relentlessly in early 1942. The officials had to wrestle both with their conception of British national interests and with American objections to any territorial undertakings at all to Stalin. Early in February, Halifax was sent what was hoped would be a potent list of arguments to present to the State Department: the Soviet Union would be an indispensable counterweight to German power in Europe for the foresee¬ able future; it might defeat Germany alone and ‘would be tempted to work for establishment of Communist Govern¬ ments in majority of European countries’ unless there was a treaty to tie its hands; in the short term, all hope of co-operation with Russia would vanish if the demand was not met. Eden vetoed a second message by which the Americans were to be asked to make clear to Moscow, if they rejected British pleas, that they were acting against British advice. As a sort of substitute, Halifax did put it to Hull that if there was not a ‘political substitute for material military assistance’, leading to an Anglo-Soviet break, Churchill might fall and be replaced by a ‘frankly Commun¬ ist, pro-Moscow’ government. Hull remained unmoved by every argument. So, in a sense, did Roosevelt, but he was by 94

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

no means wholly negative; he put it to Stalin’s envoy, Litvinov, that American opinion would not understand agreements between the Allies about territorial changes. When that did not work he tried to divert Stalin by offering a Second Front in 1943 or in the autumn of 1942 if the Soviet military situation then was utterly dire. Churchill very reluctantly supported this initiative. Stalin was evidently impressed, and ordered Molotov to follow his planned British visit with one to Washington. Roosevelt’s action must have played a part in Molotov’s sudden dropping of the demand for territorial provisions in the Anglo-Soviet treaty, discussed below, which the British were to find as pleasant as it was surprising.38 Not aware that Roosevelt was giving a helping hand, the Foreign Office also had to consider their own interests and consciences. The main problem, given that they were neither willing nor able at that stage to sign away eastern Poland, concerned the former Baltic States. Unlike the territory which Stalin was determined to recover from Hitler’s Romanian and Finnish allies, it was difficult for decent men truly to convince themselves that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania ‘deserved’ such a fate as annexation by the Soviet Union. (On the other hand, it was axiomatic for the British that they could do nothing for the non-Russian nationalities of the pre-1939 Soviet Union who were not necessarily any happier under Soviet rule than the Baltic peoples. In June 1942, Wilson, expressing for once views which nobody in the Foreign Office would have challenged, wrote that a sugges¬ tion from a member of the House of Lords that Britain should press for more autonomy for the Ukraine was out of the question, ‘just as it would be impossible for them to intervene with us in favour of self-government for Scotland or Wales.’39) Eden while in Moscow had fallen into true Stalinist cynicism with his plea to the Cabinet to recognise Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic States in return for the holding of a ‘plebiscite’. Later there was some revulsion at the idea of colluding with Moscow in such a sham, or in some variant such as a Soviet promise to give the former states ‘cultural autonomy’. Churchill, Eden and Sargent all thought that in the last resort Britain would have to yield, but that 95

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

would still have left American objections as a very great obstacle to meeting Soviet wishes.40 The Foreign Office were moving towards the idea that if Stalin persisted with hi's exaggerated emphasis on British recognition of the Soviet Union’s 1941 frontiers with small additions from East Prussia and Finland, Britain should seek his blessing for its brainchild to contain German and, in effect, also Soviet power in eastern Europe - a network of federations or ideally one super-federation from the Baltic to the Aegean. Sargent urged in April that when the forthcoming British-Soviet treaty was drawn up, Russia should be asked to accept an appendix listing the countries which should ‘participate in the regional understandings and confederations’: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and possibly a restored Austria. He met an objection from Eden that this might involve ‘treating friend and foe rather too much alike’ with a characteristically magisterial pronouncement: Although the treatment would be the same, the enemy states would certainly not welcome confederation as would our friends. In fact Hungary, Bulgaria [which had been omitted from his original list] and to a lesser extent Rumania, would have to be forced into any confederation and would probably have to be kept in it by force. Our demand that they should enter one or other confederation would not be in order to benefit them, but because to tie them up in a confederation is probably the only effective way of keeping them under control, and preventing them from misusing once again the absolute independence which they have hitherto enjoyed.41 A more real objection to the inclusion of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria in a system of federations than that they were Germany’s present allies was that that very fact would give a victorious Russia an excellent excuse to treat all these countries as it wished, free from any worries about allowing the return of any Allied governments-in-exile. Stalin had told Eden that in Romania he would require mili96

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

tary bases and a permanent Soviet-Romanian military alliance. The Foreign Office were left to speculate on what would remain of Romanian independence after that, while acknowledging that it would be almost impossible to prevent it. Stalin’s approach to Hungary seemed purely vindictive; the whole of the Transylvanian territory given by Hitler to Hungary at Romania’s expense in his Vienna Award of 1940 was to revert to Romania, and Hungary was also to return even the purely Magyar districts which it had gained from Czechoslovakia after the Munich Conference. This did at least suggest that he did not propose to turn the country into a Soviet dependency. However, a weak and embittered Hungary would scarcely be a major asset for an east European confederation. It more and more seemed neces¬ sary to think in terms, at least at first, of arrangements between Germany’s victims: Poland and Czechoslovakia in the north, Greece and Yugoslavia in the south.42 At this point, in late April, occurred what Oliver Harvey called ‘a big and pleasant surprise’: the news that Molotov would shortly fly to Britain for consultations and, inevitably, to seek satisfaction for Russian frontier demands. Arrived in Britain, Molotov demanded not only that but also British assent for Soviet-Finnish and Soviet-Romanian mutualsecurity pacts of the type which had preceded the annexation of the Baltic States. He also intrigued his hosts by his behaviour as their guest, including the provision of a pistol under his pillow at Chequers, and the making of his bed by a chambermaid in his entourage in such a way as to facilitate leaping out of it if disturbed in the night. The British decided to give in on the Baltic States. The Conservative MP Victor Cazalet, who had organised a campaign against recognition of the Baltic annexations, was told by the Foreign Office that such recognition was absolutely inevitable. (Churchill and Eden had also overriden stiff opposition in the War Cabinet from Attlee and Bevin against such a step.) Then, in the first of many astounding political somersaults in dealings with the Western powers, Molotov suggested a treaty of alliance bereft of territorial clauses. He also set aside the proposed security pacts with Finland and Romania. His - or rather Stalin’s - motives were and must remain conjectural. The 97

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

bait of an early Second Front which Roosevelt was dangling must have been attractive, especially as the Germans were launching a new offensive which was soon to cause the dark shadow of total defeat to loom again over Russia. Certainly, Stalin seems to have attached real importance to a treaty with Britain. Molotov bade farewell to his bewildered but grateful British hosts, and flew to Washington, where in a similitude of secrecy the American authorities dubbed him ‘Mr Brown’, causing a journalist to ask the White House press secretary why they had not chosen ‘Mr Red’.43 Britain thus acquired a twenty-year treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union. Among the policy-makers, views on its value varied from the opinion that, apart from propaganda, it might be useful in containing Soviet power, to a cautious hope that it might result in real co-operation. While waiting for Molotov’s arrival, Makins had written that the trend of Russian policy was clear: This is an extension of exclusive Russian influence over the whole of Eastern Europe, to be effected by the occupation of Finland, the Baltic states and Rumania, the closest possible association with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the crushing of Hungary and the encirclement of Poland. Dew replied that if that was truly the case a treaty, by providing for mutual consultation, would allow Britain at least to claim a voice in the affairs of these countries. The higher in the hierarchy, the greater was the optimism. After the treaty was signed, Sargent made a plea not to ‘jump unnecessarily to these sinister conclusions’ about Soviet policy. Eden refused to accept that relations with the Soviet Union could only be ones of veiled hostility; Britain must take a cautiously favourable view of Russian intentions since by the very fact of doing so Soviet policy might change for the better. Five months after the treaty he was to write: ‘We have to make an effort to put our relations with Soviet [sic] on a better footing. Even if the fault is all theirs, this is still necessary.’ By that time the Foreign Office had gained from the Russians something else which was much to their liking. In 98

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

July the Soviet Union assented in principle to a British proposal for a ‘self-denying ordinance’ against the conclu¬ sion of bilateral arrangements with the exile governments of any German-occupied European"’states, further discussed below (see pp. 105-10). Even so, Armine Dew’s notion was to command increasing support. It would be unjust to sneer at it. Almost everyone knew that paper obligations alone would be unlikely to restrain Stalin. It was simply felt that, depending on the outcome of the war, there might be nothing else to lessen a massive accretion to Russian power in Europe.44 The officials were actually left with some time on their hands in the summer of 1942 as the Second Front issue caused foreign policy and grand strategy to merge virtually into one for a time, and as Churchill assumed supreme control. In June he journeyed to Washington to try to divert the President’s thoughts from an invasion of France to French North Africa. Without knowing it, he was preaching to a convert. Roosevelt deviously used Churchill’s attitude as an excuse to gain his military advisers’ assent to an African expedition which they did not want. The plan for landings in Algeria and Morocco in November was approved, and with it went almost any chance of a Second Front in 1943 as well as in 1942.45 A variety of motives now impelled Churchill to pay a visit of his own to Russia. Stalin was bound to be angry, and likely to suspect treachery when he learnt that his abandon¬ ment of the demand for political concessions was not to be rewarded by a European Second Front that year. (There could be no question of telling him that a Second Front in 1943 would also be unlikely.) Churchill was almost certainly right to think that the blow could be softened by his telling Stalin about it personally. An additional reason for the resort to personal diplomacy stemmed from the British decision to cancel summer convoys of supplies to Russia’s Arctic ports after enemy action virtually annihilated convoy PQ 17 which had set sail in late June. In fact, apart from one in September, there were to be no more northern convoys until December, and in the winter of 1942-3 they were to be on a reduced scale before again being cancelled entirely 99

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

from March to September 1943. The reasons for this reduced effort were inescapable, and succeeded an almost super-human British aid effort from October 1941 to June 1942. Even so, Soviet* bitterness and even despair as German forces neared the Volga were easy to understand, and it was difficult to feel offended by wild Russian accusa¬ tions that Britain was ‘stealing’ American Lend-Lease aid which should have gone to the Soviet Union. Churchill sought an invitation, which was readily granted, to go to Moscow, and Averell Harriman decided to go with him to demonstrate Anglo-American solidarity.46 Churchill’s first Moscow visit followed the pattern of Eden’s, though the stage-managing may not have been total since it coincided with very bad news from the battle front which may have contributed to Stalin’s abrasiveness on the second day. In any case, the Stalinist scenario of a cordial first day followed by an acrimonious second and a reconcilia¬ tion on the third was enacted. As a mark of favour, and given that it was summer, Stalin put up Churchill at his own dacha just outside Moscow where the Soviet ruler liked to relax by personally putting out food for the birds to eat in winter and tending the roses in summer. The conversations were held in the Kremlin where on one occasion Stalin accompanied Churchill to the door, which, Molotov told the Prime Minister’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, was ‘without any precedent in the history of the Soviet Union’. Churchill’s main purpose was to inform Stalin that there would be no Second Front that year, but that there would be an invasion of north-west Africa. Stalin clutched at the latter and seemed to seek a promise that it would not be called off, as if the Western powers were only doing it for Russia’s benefit. Otherwise, a certain conviviality arose between them, and Stalin may, for instance, have concluded that Britain under Churchill would not be likely to make a separate peace with Hitler, which, as will be discussed below, did not stop the Soviet leader himself from making peace feelers to the Germans.47 If Stalin’s confidence in Churchill soon waned, so did Churchill’s in Stalin. By October he was musing about the ‘measureless disaster’ of Russian ‘barbarism’ threatening to engulf Europe.48

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Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

V Soviet-British relations from Stalingrad to the eve of the Moscow and Teheran Conferences of 1943 Towards the end of 1942 there were gratifying signs that British military victories, now that they were at last occur¬ ring, would produce a bonus in relations with the Soviet Union. At the very end of 1942 Cadogan, after studying at leisure Stalin’s speech on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in November, pronounced that it indicated ‘a major decision of Soviet policy’ to co-operate with the other two Great Powers. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the speech had followed the British victory at El Alamein, and Rommel’s retreat back into Libya. In fact, the Soviet media continued to give a favourable picture of the North African campaign until its victorious conclusion in May 1943, for instance allowing the Soviet public to buy maps of Tunisia. Generally, in the spring of 1943 Soviet propaganda was favourable to its allies. Western aid to Russia was praised at a time when Britain had been compel¬ led to suspend the northern convoys, though American aid on a massive scale was at last getting into its stride, using other routes.49 This atmosphere of goodwill was to prove short-lived. This was probably chiefly because of Stalin’s almost certainly genuine feelings of dismay and betrayal as the prospect of a Second Front in 1943 steadily receded. Roosevelt’s decision to invade French North Africa had made a large-scale landing in France before 1944 unlikely. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Pre¬ sident allowed himself to be persuaded by Churchill to follow victory in Africa with an invasion of Italy. More reluctantly, he had also had to accede to the United States’ navy’s insistence that a large proportion of American landing-craft production should be earmarked for use in the Pacific. These decisions made a Second Front in France in 1943 impossible, as Stalin gradually learned. Roosevelt found it much easier than did Churchill to live with the implication of this strategy: it made it likely that most of eastern Europe would fall under permanent Russian control.50 The Foreign Office had plenty of time to continue their

101

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assessments of Soviet intentions before the tempo of dip¬ lomatic activity was stepped up with Eden’s second wartime visit to Moscow in October. There was anxiety about a separate peace between “Germany and Russia precisely as the Red Army rolled westwards. As to Stalin’s aims the Foreign Office were certain only that he was determined to recover his 1941 frontiers, and they feared that as the Germans were pushed back towards those frontiers they might concede this basic demand. Even so, the Foreign Office paid too little attention to the admittedly vague reports which reached them concerning actual GermanSoviet peace talks, which took place in Stockholm. Instead, there was speculation about a separate peace after a palace revolution in Germany. In August Law wondered how long it would be before the Russians informed the British ‘of terms of surrender which they have already handed over to General Von X representing the Badoglio German Government’. They were also fascinated by a report received in September by the former Soviet diplomat Helphand, who had defected from the embassy in Rome in 1940, fearing liquidation, and had gone to the United States. His argument that a quest for a special relationship with Germany was the inescapable driving force in Soviet foreign policy, which Russian leaders could not depart from even if they wished, seemed to Armine Dew to be worthy of attention coming from a man who was in a position ‘to know a good deal of the cynical and opportunist way the Kremlin mind works’. Dew felt that Soviet policy to date bore ‘two interpretations’: it could really be aiming at co-operation with its allies, or at a separate peace. Sargent thought all this too alarmist. Stalin would now only be interested in Germany as a partner, if he was interested at all, as a junior one, which meant that it had first to be defeated, which could be done only with British and American help. He went on to project his own Germanophobe sentiments into the mind of Stalin: I have no doubt too that Stalin is alive to the fact that even an orthodox Communist Germany might prove just as much a snare and a delusion to the Kremlin as

102

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

the orthodox democratic Germany of 1918 proved to be a snare and a delusion to France and Great Britain. In both cases the regime would be merely a facade behind which the eternal Germany would be planning to bite the hand which was helping him.51 Cavendish-Bentinck wrote what may have been a shrewd remark when he said that a Soviet-German realignment would become a real possibility if Hitler were overthrown by Himmler or by a clique of generals. It is not clear whether he meant that that would remove the stumbling block on the German or the Soviet side. If the former, he had hit the nail on the head since it is now known that Stalin was prepared to deal with Hitler, whereas Hitler repeatedly vetoed the various tentative peace contacts between the two countries initiated either by his own underlings or by Stalin because of his burning hatred and contempt for a country which embodied everything that to him was racially and ideologi¬ cally obnoxious. As he was to tell Ribbentrop in 1944: ‘If I come to terms with Russia today, I would be at her throat again tomorrow - it’s in my nature.’52 Churchill and the Foreign Office were therefore right to suspect Russia’s fidelity as an ally. This must have been reinforced, and was a subject for concern in its own right, by the fact that even in periods of mutual propaganda amity, the Soviet regime appeared determined to prevent the growth of any spirit of comradeship between British and Soviet people when they came into contact with one another. This was a subject for distress, though not for bitterness, to Cripps’s successor as British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. In an interview with Stalin on 28 February 1943 he pleaded to be allowed the same freedom to make friends and influence people that Maisky enjoyed in London. As it was, he lamented, he could speak freely to nobody except Stalin and Molotov, with the result that his mind was becoming rpsty and that of a fool. Although Stalin did little more in reply than grunt, Clark Kerr reported himself ‘impressed by the benignity of Stalin and Molotov. It was not all the pipes and the walking stick.’ Apart from Geoffrey Wilson, a tireless apologist for Soviet

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Russia, most officials in Britain found this state of affairs less surprising but also more outrageous than did the Ambas¬ sador. There were remarks on the sheer stupidity and xenophobic suspicion which led the Soviet authorities to persecute a fervently pro-Soviet British journalist for marry¬ ing his Russian secretary. There was impatience, if not contempt, for Maisky’s argument, repeated like a gramophone record stuck in its groove, that aloofness in personal relations and such irritating habits as repeated failure even to acknowledge official letters whose contents were unwelcome were all the result of Russia’s historical inferiority complex. At the very highest level, Churchill did not suffer the indignity of writing letters which Stalin failed to answer, but he did object to the bluntness, if not rudeness, of many of Stalin’s replies, as he told Maisky in July.53 The Foreign Office were unimpressed when the Comin¬ tern was dissolved in June 1943 and a very suspicious form of Soviet overture for strengthening the alliance made to Britain. Dew thought that the winding up of the Comintern simply had no significance. It had become ‘embarrassing’ and irrelevant to the Soviet Union. Its abolition was a propaganda measure designed to appeal to public opinion in the United States and to facilitate the British Communist Party’s application for affiliation to the Labour Party: ‘The old idea of world revolution is dead and the expectation now is that the success of socialism and communism in the USSR will serve as an example to foreign countries and gradually incline them in the same direction.’ The alliance overture was contained in suggestions by Maisky to his British official acquaintances that the two countries should draw together more closely to resist the imperialist encroachments of the Americans, as well as to hold down a Germany which would be certain to thirst for revenge. It would be helpful if British domestic policy took some modest steps in the direction of socialism, such as implementation of the Beveridge report and enhanced educational opportunities for the masses. Eden, despite his deep wish for friendly relations with Russia, contented himself with a remark that it was ‘rather cheek to tell us how to improve ourselves for Russian companionship’ ,54

104

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

Ironically, many in Washington, unlike the British, were highly impressed by the dissolution of the Comintern. Wooed by Russia with the transparent aim of driving a wedge between the Americans and themselves, the British were determined to resist, especially as they were haunted by a fear that Anglophobia could be aroused with ease in the United States, and that anti-Communism was shallow by comparison. Fear of the American reaction remained the sole obstacle to British recognition of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic republics. The Foreign Office wondered whether American opinion would be happier if British recognition was made conditional on the population of these and other Soviet acquistions in 1939 and 1940 being given the option of emigration. It seemed unlikely that Stalin would agree to anything but a very restricted formula at most, and the British felt unable to sound out the American Government on these questions, partly because of nothing more than the personal jealousies between Roosevelt’s chief foreign-policy advisers, Hull and Welles.55 With stalemate on the political front, the Foreign Office in the summer of 1943 embarked on a long-term policy of expanding or initiating relations with Russia in the areas of trade and education. At the instigation of the Foreign Office, a committee of officials and academics was set up to consider the state of Russian studies in British universities and educational exchanges with Soviet institutions, while efforts were made to form a similar committee of officials and businessmen. The Foreign Office were concerned that British trade with Russia would always be small-scale unless the subject was treated as frankly political and artificial stimulants were applied. Otherwise Russia might again, as one official wrote, turn to Germany as a trade partner, leading ultimately to some ‘wider bargaining’ with the Reich.56 Of much more immediate importance than trade and introducing Stalinist-approved ‘Soviet intellectuals’ to the delights of British academic life were dealings with Russia over the future of a central Europe still occupied entirely by the Germans. The major British preoccupation remained the fostering of federations, and in the meantime with the 105

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

idea of a self-denying ordinance by which both countries would undertake not to conclude special arrangements with the exile governments of any of Germany’s victims. In February, Roberts sought to empathise with the prospect that the Soviet Government would oppose the British ideas: It seems to me that they are bound to do so since the building up of a large and economically prosperous unit under what would in fact amount to Anglo-American control on the borders of Russia can meet no Russian interest. As there are few if any common economic interests between Russia and the European states we are now considering, Russia has no interest in seeing them more prosperous. On the other hand, she has an interest in preventing the standards of prosperity in those countries being higher than those in Russia herself. In view of his own reflections Roberts may have been surprised when the Foreign Office received a little later a ‘temporising but not fundamentally unsatisfactory’ reply from the Soviet Government on confederations. Roberts felt that the British should ‘hasten slowly’ in the hope of organic growth. Eden received some encouragement on the eve of his visit to Washington in March from Maisky’s grudgingly favourable remarks on the subject. The Soviet Ambassador criticised any federations on the odd grounds that the constituent states would be small. However, his Government would be ready to tolerate a Balkan federation (excluding Romania), a Scandinavian one (excluding Finland) and one of Poland and Czechoslovakia, if Poland was friendly to Russia. Though his remarks could be taken as confirmation that Russia intended to annex Romania and Finland in everything except name, they were otherwise encouraging.57 Unfortunately for the British, ‘organic growth’ of the confederation idea did not take place. With or without Soviet encouragement, the Czech President, BeneS, became obsessed with making his own arrangements with Stalin. He secured an invitation to visit Moscow in July. Although the Russians cancelled the visit at the last minute out of concern not to offend the British, Bene§’s overtures to them were

106

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

clearly attractive, and they began trying to extricate them¬ selves from their informal promise shortly after the AngloSoviet treaty against bilateral pacts with small allies - the ‘self-denying ordinance’. Clark Kerf was instructed in early July to remind the Soviet Government that the aim of the latter - ‘to avoid undignified competition amongst smaller Allies’ for Great Power favours ‘when basic understanding had not been reached between us on the subject of general post-war arrangements’ - remained valid, so that any depar¬ ture from it would be ‘deeply deplorable’. The Soviet response was adverse; they tried to set aside their ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ of July 1942 in favour of the self-denying plan not by claiming that it had never been made, but by complaining that the British had not followed it up by a more ‘concrete proposal’. The British replied that the Russians had asked for no concrete proposal at the time, and could have one now if that was what they wanted. Molotov reverted to temporising. Eden was still seeking to limit Soviet power by paper commitments, while Stalin seems to have been uncertain of Russia’s ability to inflict many more defeats on the Germans.58 By that time Roberts had come to the conclusion that the self-denying ordinance was doomed, if only because of the Czech wish to reinsure with Moscow, and that it should be dropped, especially as its abandonment might serve some British purposes, such as a possible treaty with Greece. His superiors, Sargent and Harvey, put up a rearguard action with idealistic arguments. The latter opposed anything which ‘ran contrary to the ideal we are working towards of the three Great Powers cooperating equally in all areas of Europe and [which] would much strengthen the alternative policy of dividing Europe into a Russian east and an Anglo-American west.’59

VI The Moscow and Teheran Conferences of 1943 The eventual European settlement was occasionally touched upon in British-Soviet contacts during the first nine months of 1943. Before going to Washington in March, for instance,

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Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Eden talked with Maisky, who said that his Government favoured the break-up of Germany and reparations in kind, but not, reflecting the British preference, in money.60 Con¬ tacts between the two Western powers and the Soviet Union entered into much higher gear in the autumn. A conference of the three Foreign Ministers took place in Moscow in late October, followed by the first of the three great wartime meetings of the three heads of government in Teheran at the end of November. The War Cabinet debated what instruc¬ tions to give the Foreign Secretary on 5 and 8 October. They were much preoccupied with Polish-Soviet relations, dis¬ cussed elsewhere, but there is no record of dissent from Eden’s recommendation that on frontiers other than Polish, Russia should recover all that it had in June 1941, plus the Finnish Arctic port of Petsamo, which Stalin had declared that Russia must have. The Cabinet decided to ‘reaffirm the principles of the Atlantic Charter, noting that Russia’s accession thereto is based upon the frontiers of 22 June 1941. We also take note of the historic frontiers of Russia before the two wars of aggression waged by Germany in 1914 and 1939.’ The formula was confused and reflected unease at confirming the 1939—40 gains. Easier to approve was Eden’s proposal for a permanent political-military commission of the three countries to meet in London, the future European Advisory Commission. Eden explained that eventually France should become a full member, but that other countries should attend only as their interests came up. Eden wanted such a body as keenly as the Americans wanted a United Nations organisation, and both were, at different times, to make major concessions to attain their wish. The Moscow Conference was notable in at least two ways. It has been identified by one historian of the period as the last important occasion when Britain spoke for the West, with the United States accepting a subordinate role, a view supported by Harvey, who wrote in his diary: ‘A.E. does practically all. We are carrying the American delegation’.61 This reflected a lack of experience and self-confidence on the part of the Americans which was virtually certain to, and soon did, disappear. Secondly and equally transient, it was 108

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

the last meeting between Russia and its allies at which the latter, still unsure of their capacity to defeat Germany and doubtless not paying the Western powers the compliment of thinking that they were any less ready to do a deal with Nazi Germany than was Stalin himself, put military con¬ siderations solidly before political ones. Strang may have been right to conclude from this that the Soviet Union was determined to continue the war, but the background to it was Hitler’s recent breaking-off of Soviet-German peace contacts. The suspicious Armine Dew had been premature rather than mistaken when he had written at the end of July that the Soviet Union would discourage British and American military operations in Italy and the Balkans in favour of an exclusive concentration on France so that the Red Army would be master of south-eastern Europe when the war ended. (The Foreign Office at that time mistrusted Soviet motives in generally supporting British political views about the treatment of Italy after Italian surrender. It seemed too good to be true.) At Moscow the Russians urged the British and Americans to do anything, whether in Italy or the Balkans, as long as it distracted some German military effort from the Soviet Union. They also pressed strongly for Turkey to be induced to enter the war. Although another suspicious British diplomat saw this last proposal as possible evidence of a Soviet plot to undermine Turkey, it is much more likely that the Russians wanted the Turks, despite their fervent anti-Communism, as allies because of military neces¬ sity, and realised that politically it would be much better if Turkey remained neutral so that at the end of the war Moscow could make demands on it from a standpoint of superior moral righteousness.62 Differences on military strategy between Britain and the United States were to prevent the British from taking any advantage of the Soviet readiness to support Western mili¬ tary operations anywhere. In any case Eden’s mind was concentrated on the more rarified topic of his political commission to meet in London. To gain this in the face of American as well as Soviet lukewarmness, he suddenly dropped the British insistence on a self-denying ordinance, in so far as it stood in the way of a treaty between Russia and 109

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Czechoslovakia. He explained this by reference to the proclaimed readiness of the two countries to include Poland in their web of amity at a suitable time, perhaps when pigs could fly, a cynic might -have thought. The real reasons were his enthusiasm for the London commission, the determina¬ tion of Benes to have his way, and the almost Pavlovian way in which the Western and, superficially at least, the Soviet representatives responded to these gatherings in feeling that unity and intimacy had been achieved, reinforced in Eden’s case by the evident fact that Stalin and Molotov treated the conference more seriously than did Churchill in London. Even so his volte-face was amazing. Earlier in the con¬ ference he had opposed Averell Harriman who strongly supported a Czech-Soviet treaty on the grounds that the Czechs would be more likely to get a better deal for themselves before the Red Army entered their country than afterwards. Eden had passed a note across the conference table to Harriman, against the Czech treaty: ‘I am sorry to take your time but behind all this is a big issue: two camps in Europe or one.’ Eden afterwards gave instructions for senior British ambassadors to be apprised of the intimate character of the conference discussions and of the ‘considerate chair¬ manship’ of Molotov: [Eden’s] two interviews with Monsieur Stalin went very well. He thinks we have underestimated extent of feeling of exclusion from which Russians have hitherto suffered and which scope of their victories has only served to intensify. It is now clear that they were most anxious for Conference to succeed.63 In this atmosphere and with the Russians and Americans graciously giving Eden his European Advisory Commission, though as a technical body without teeth, the British dele¬ gates could put the best possible construction on everything: on the Soviet demand for a free hand in dictating armistice terms to Finland, Hungary and Romania, which was con¬ ceded; on the Soviet rejection of Eden’s suggestion that it would be a ‘valuable addition to the work of the conference’ if clauses on the right of liberated peoples to choose their own form of government and on a repudiation of spheres of

110

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

influence - or ‘areas of responsibility’ to use the American phraseology; presumably, to them ‘spheres of influence’ was such a sinister phrase that it could not be used even to be condemned - were to be drawn' up; and on Molotov’s statement that he could not discuss the future of Germany because the Soviet Government had fallen behind in its studies, a euphemistic way indeed of referring to the recent peace feelers to the Germans, though the failure of those talks did open the way for Soviet endorsement of the separation of Austria from the Reich. On his reticence about territorial arrangements the Russians also had a problem in assessing the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who issued a ringing denunciation against greed for territ¬ ory, while at the same time declaring territorial issues utterly unimportant compared with the setting up of the future United Nations. Molotov cannot be blamed if he did not know what to make of that.64 The Teheran Conference was preceded by the bitter experience for the British of a conference at Cairo with American and Chinese representatives, led by Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek, in which the British were appalled by American proposals for amphibious operations in the Bay of Bengal, and, in Eden’s case, by American efforts to emascu¬ late the European Advisory Commission. Teheran itself has been described by a historian as a ‘shambles’ and by a participant as an experience in the expression of ‘inchoate and informal ideas’.65 Stalin veered from Molotov’s line of only a few weeks previously by stating a firm Soviet pre¬ ference for the British and Americans to concentrate their future European operations exclusively in France. He may have been influenced by the knowledge that that accorded with Roosevelt’s preferences, and by a belief that such concentration would best serve both the military and the political interests of his own regime. Politically, Stalin was reluctant to be drawn and, when he did make comments, may have been trying to make Churchill and Roosevelt as forthcoming as possible. The President said that Germany should be broken up into five states, while Churchill favoured only two (earning praise from Clark Kerr for being ‘optimistic, magnanimous and tender-hearted’ towards

111

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the Germans.66) Churchill wished very badly for at least the broad outlines of an agreement on Poland by which the country would be moved bodily westwards and, in return, the Soviet Union would allow it to choose its own form of government (see chapter 3, section I below). Roosevelt had already shot the ground from under his feet, if a former American Ambas¬ sador in Moscow, Joseph Davies, is to be believed. He was to claim that in August 1943 the President had sent him on a secret mission to Mexico City to convey to the Russian Ambassador there a ‘personal guarantee’ from Roosevelt to Stalin that a meeting between them would result in an understanding that the United States ‘would not ultimately object to the Curzon Line’, or to Soviet annexation of the Baltic States. Only then did Stalin agree to such a conference as that which met at Teheran.67 At all events, at the conference itself Roosevelt told Stalin that he could have eastern Poland and the Baltic States if only he would keep quiet about the issue until after the next presidential elec¬ tions in a year’s time. He made no serious effort to get anything in return for the Poles. The two were readier to talk about France than about Poland, and vied with one another in the vehemence of their remarks that France not only would be very weak after the war, but that it ought deliber¬ ately to be kept weak, which, among other things, would entail the loss of at least some of its colonies. The bitterest remarks of all about France came from Molotov.68 Stalin drew the correct conclusion that Roosevelt had almost no interest in Poland or the Balkans, and that the British were backing down there, with their acceptance of a Second Front in France in May 1944. His advice to his fellow-leaders that the regimes in Spain and Portugal should be replaced by ones of a ‘more suitable’ character gave an insight into what could be expected from him in eastern Europe when Russia had the whip-hand there. There were moments of real intimacy, especially between Roosevelt and Stalin, though the latter was touched by the British action in presenting him with a ceremonial sword in token of British appreciation of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. Stalin remarked that only the vast size of Russia

112

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

had prevented defeat in 1941 and 1942, and that the Soviet war effort had become dependent on Western aid.69 Back in Cairo, Churchill conferred with the Turkish leader Inonu, Pegging him to take his country into the war as the only way to start a Balkans campaign which might keep the Soviet Union out of south-east Europe. His failure rendered him physically ill.70 Unlike the Prime Minister, many in the Foreign Office found it possible to be hopeful about Anglo-Soviet relations in the wake of these major conferences. Not surprisingly Geoffrey Wilson was in the forefront among them. He wrote on 12 December: The Soviet reactions to the Teheran conference are marked by a warmth and interest, which are quite new, and it is being celebrated in leading articles and at factory meetings in a way which has hitherto been reserved for major events on the home front. Some, however, were notably less starry-eyed. This was shown by the manner in which they buried the remains of the self-denying ordinance idea. Strictly speaking, Eden had allowed the Russians and the Czechs to negotiate a treaty as an exception to the policy, which still remained. Harrison in late November suspected that the Russians were trying to extract political capital from this fact with their suggestion that the whole idea should not be abandoned but should be redefined so that it would still apply to states which did not border Britain or the Soviet Union. The catch was that Russia would have frontiers with most of the countries of Eastern Europe, whereas Britain, as an island-country, pre¬ sumably had no bordering states, except Eire. Sargent wrote: Behind all this manoeuvring lies, of course, the fact that the Soviet Government are going to try to establish an exclusive sphere of influence for themselves in Eastern Europe. This, I think, is shown clearly not merely by their present proposal, but still more so by the fact that they turned down flat at the Moscow conference our proposed declaration against all spheres of influence in Europe. 113

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 He concluded that Soviet chances of success were ‘steadily improving’. Eden, still infected by the atmosphere at the conferences, thought Sargent ‘not quite fair’ without explaining how he was'being unfair.71

VII The Foreign Office versus the Chiefs of Staff Until the summer of 1944 the attitude of the Chiefs of Staff veered between an unwillingness to discuss post-war security issues on the grounds that they were too busy waging the war itself, to a fairly orthodox line on such matters. In February Jebb reported that they had treated as rather a joke a Foreign Office proposal which he had presented to them for a permanent Military Staff Committee of the Allies after the war to keep Germany and Japan in order. They said that con¬ tinued British-American military co-operation was highly desirable, that the Russians would themselves probably wish to remain as militarily isolated as they already were, and that the idea of Chinese participation was ludicrous. Jebb had tried to reassure them that the diplomats were not recommending a Chinese force on the Kiel Canal or any¬ thing else wildly impractical, but he simply could not com¬ mand much interest from them. The air chief, Sir Charles Portal, suggested that their successors should be appointed at once so that they could win the peace while the existing chiefs won the war.72 As for orthodoxy, the Foreign Office would have found little exceptionable in a paper from the office of the Chiefs of Staff in April 1944 which recom¬ mended complete destruction of Germany’s armaments industry and disbandment of its armed forces during a relatively short occupation, to be followed by a graded system of punishment for the Germans if they sought to rebuild it or otherwise behaved incorrectly: first, economic sanctions should be applied; then, bombing should be resorted to; finally, strategic areas of the country should be reoccupied. Above all, Germany’s neighbours, as well as Britain, should maintain a high level of armaments. In an earlier paper (December 1943), the Chiefs had combined similar advice with the enlightened argument that the occupation’s objec-

114

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

tives should include, besides demilitarisation, that of seeking to ensure ‘that tolerable living conditions for the German people are restored at the earliest possible moment’. If that was done and if the political errdr’ of a long occupation, which would ‘prolong the humiliation of Germany unduly, with the risk of driving the whole German people into the Nationalist [sic] camp’, was avoided, the Chiefs thought that Germany might settle down satisfactorily. It was to prove only a short journey for them to the stage of seeing Germans as possible allies.73 In fact, as the summer approached, the Chiefs and certain ‘wild acolytes’ (to quote J.G. Ward of the Foreign Office) of theirs in the important Post-Hostilities Planning Committee did very much apply themselves to post-war security, assum¬ ing that Russia would simply replace Germany as Britain’s enemy. A related problem was that relations were usually deplorable between British and Soviet officers who came into contact with one another, whether in London or Moscow. This threatened nightmare problems when such contacts were multiplied many times over following the collapse of Germany and the inauguration of the occupation regime. Pausing to consider attitudes to the Soviet Union in the British defence establishment, distrust of, and contempt for, that country reached their apogee in the Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, a former home civil servant. In July he told a Cabinet committee ‘that, on the long view, it would be no bad thing if Germany should suffer so greatly from very rough Russian treatment that a purged Germany might turn towards association with Western Europe rather than eastwards.’ Some generals, such as Dill, also hated Soviet Communism passionately. This was a subject for complaint by Stalin during the war and by Soviet historians afterwards.74 More complex was the situation surrounding the British Military Mission in Moscow. During 1943 it was headed by General Sir Giffard Martel, whom Eden described with some justice as ‘something of a calamity’ for Anglo-Soviet relations.75 Early in 1944 he was replaced by the much more suitable choice of Lieutenant-General M.B. ‘Brocas’ Bur¬ rows. Writing to Ismay in April about the fortunes of the 115

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 Mission, Burrows saw faults in the past on both sides. The Mission had tried to interfere in many petty matters where the Soviet General Staff might well have felt that the British were wasting their time” especially as Soviet military plan¬ ning was in the hands of a very few officers who were hard-pressed to do all the work which fell to them. On the other hand, the Russians were unforthcoming on great matters as well as small. His Soviet liaison officer with the General Staff was ‘very young, very stupid and very fright¬ ened’. Molotov was occasionally informative. ‘Apart from that, as far as contacts and planning with the Russian General Staff is concerned I might just as well have remained in London.’ Five days earlier, he and Deane, his American counterpart, had requested a meeting to inform the Soviet General Staff of the date for the launching of the Second Front and were still awaiting a reply. In July Clark Kerr wrote to Eden that Burrows had been somewhat haughty in his behaviour with the Russians purely because he had thought that that was the way to achieve results. It had not, and so he had turned to the exercise of his powers of charm, which seemed to be going down well with them. Nor did Ismay, in his high position as Chief of Staff to the Minister of Defence, who was also the Prime Minister, Churchill, betray anything that could be called anti-Soviet prejudice. In May he wrote to Burrows that although the Russians needed to be told in advance only the bare date for Overlord since they knew nothing about amphibious opera¬ tions, ‘Once we are well established ashore, it will be a different story. We must tell them all that we are doing and hope to do and we must insist on their doing like¬ wise.’76 At ground level, Soviet co-operation with the small British military element in Russia followed an erratic but often depressing course. In the middle months of 1943 great bitterness had built up over the physical ill-treatment of British personnel at the north Russian ports. In Moscow in October Eden had negotiated an agreement with Molotov for their well-being; it worked fairly well. On the other hand, of all the countries in the world it could probably have happened only in the Soviet Union that the British Military 116

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

Mission was refused permission to inspect the huge beach defences which the Germans had constructed at Odessa on the Black Sea to defend it against attack by the Russian navy. The city was retaken by the Red Army in April 1944, and the Military Mission learnt about the defences from Western correspondents who were allowed to view them. The Soviet refusal to permit British military inspection was made despite the obvious relevance of these defences to the Second Front landings soon due, whose success undoubtedly mattered immensely to the Soviet regime.77 It is clear that the attitudes of the British military to the Soviet Union were mixed, rather than uniformly hostile, and that they were scarcely lacking in causes for genuine com¬ plaint. The Foreign Office, however, were extremely sensi¬ tive on the subject of military Russophobia. Geoffrey Wil¬ son was zealous in drawing his superiors’ attention to real or imagined cases of this phenomenon, and in urging a purge of officers ill-disposed towards the Soviet Union from all contact with Russian counterparts. Eden and Cadogan sym¬ pathised with him but were unwilling to act. Wilson had a useful ally in Brigadier E.O. Skaife, a retired officer who was adviser to the Foreign Office on Russian military matters and who was a Russophile from his contacts with the former Tsarist army. In October Skaife drew attention to a War Office pamphlet ‘On Dealing with the Russians’ for the guidance of British officers when the two armies met in Germany. In it Soviet officers were described as childish barbarians, ‘inordinately’ proud of the Red Army’s technical achievements and, presumably, lacking in the true qualities of officers and gentlemen. (Skaife was, it should be added, too level-headed to be a full ally for Wilson. When the embassy in Moscow gently suggested that the Russians might be partly to blame for the many failures in BritishSoviet personal contacts, Wilson argued that reserve and suspicion were so ingrained in the Russian character as, somehow, to be wholly excusable. Skaife’s response was to recall that in Imperial Russia he had had complete freedom of social contacts, even during the Russo-Japanese War when Britain had been in treaty alliance with Japan.) The Foreign Office did make protests at this stage but they had 117

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

no effect. They were unable even to secure the removal of Brigadier Firebrace, the author of the offending leaflet on dealing with the Red Army, being told by the War Office that any formal request for his removal would be ‘turned down with a thud’.78 In any case, many in the Foreign Office questioned the importance of personal contacts, whether friendly or acrimonious, in a system like the Soviet where, despite its frequent invocation by Stalin and Geoffrey Wilson’s obsti¬ nate belief in its potency, public opinion was for all practical purposes non-existent. John Balfour in the Moscow embassy grimly reported in March 1944 that although some social contact between British people in the Soviet Union and Russians was now permitted, presumably in response to the Ambassador’s appeals to Stalin, its practitioners on the Soviet side not infrequently disappeared for no apparent reason except their acquaintance with foreigners. Cadogan pointed out that Soviet diplomats, including those on the European Advisory Commission, were terrified of exer¬ cising initiative. He doubted whether personal relations with people devoid of responsibility mattered very much, while Clark Kerr lamented his continuing inability to do an ambassador’s normal job of winning friends for his country and influencing people.79 Episodes of personal unpleasantness were totally over¬ shadowed by the question of whether there should be planning for war with Russia, perhaps with western Germany as an ally. In April 1944 Warner, head of the Northern Department, opposed his colleagues in Central who wished to recommend that Britain and the liberated countries of west Europe should maintain a high level of armaments after the war because the Russians as well as the Germans might be tempted to take advantage of anything else. Warner feared that France might go Communist, and that in that case ‘the simple military mind’ would treat such a recommendation as a signal for all-out preparation for war with Russia and the rebuilding of Germany. Here lay the essence of the problem. Members of the Office - even, momentarily, Geoffrey Wilson who in September men¬ tioned the possibility of ‘sinister Russian designs in Europe’ 118

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

accepted that conflict was possible. Warner wobbled to the extent of saying that any west European security grouping must, if directed against both German and Soviet aggressive designs, be directed against the latter only tacitly. But they also thought that the ‘simple military mind’ could not prepare against such a danger without making it much more likely than if the subject was simply left alone. Wilson put it well in August: The view taken in the Foreign Office has been that, in planning along these lines, the military will make inevitable the very danger they are trying to avoid. The implementation of their plans could not be concealed from the Russians. On Germany there was an even more fundamental gulf between the Foreign Office and the military: the former thought that the Germans would respond with only baseness and trickery to any attempt to enlist them as allies, perhaps even transferring their allegiance to Stalin. Three months later the ‘simple military mind’ was confronting the dip¬ lomats with far from simple problems. Assurances from Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, who had a liaison role between the Foreign Office and the Chiefs of Staff, that the latter were approaching the problem in sorrow rather than anger (‘War with Russia would be even more distasteful to the Service Departments than war with Germany was to Sir Horace Wilson’) could count for little beside the evidence of what was going on in the Post-Hostilities Planning Commit¬ tee, dominated by the military, where the Foreign Office representative was Jebb.80 In late July Jebb outlined to his colleagues the thinking of the Chiefs of Staff as expressed at the committee: that they could see no possibility of a danger to British security from Germany after the war, that Russia was the only possible enemy and that, since the United States might revert to isolation, as a ‘protection against Russia it would be essential for us to have either the whole of Germany on our side or alternatively as much of Germany as we could draw into our “sphere of influence”.’ He explained how he had tried to denounce all this: 119

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

The policy of building up Germany which is pre¬ sumably the policy of the Chiefs of Staff would result not only in the collapse of all hopes for a tripartite alliance but also in the creation of the very situation which all sensible people must wish to avoid. If we allow our attention to be diverted from the defeat of Germany and from the permanent control of that country we shall, if we do not succeed in losing the war, at any rate succeed in losing the peace. Apart from anything else, there is small hope of building up a Western European bloc against Russia for the two reasons (a) that our European allies would not stand for it and (b) that in no circumstances would they want to admit large quantities [s/c] of Germans into the bloc. That finally and more generally, the adoption in advance of any necessity to do so of a policy of building up our enemies so as to defeat our allies would seem, if it were taken literally, to derive from some kind of suicidal mania. Roberts sympathised with Jebb: ‘In any case the Chiefs of Staff are not only crossing their bridge before they come to it, but even constructing their bridge in order to cross it.’ Sargent accused the military chiefs of ‘a most disastrous heresy which ought to be nipped in the bud at once’. The Foreign Office’s first step was, however, one of disengage¬ ment. They withdrew from full membership of the PostHostilities Planning Committee, an action which, according to Sargent, the Chiefs of Staff ‘welcomed’. Warner amplified this by stating that the Office wished to give the committee freedom to employ ‘all the rope they want to hang them¬ selves’.81 In the major debate over future security which now took place the diplomats and the military could at least agree on one point: that the United States could not be relied upon and that planning should be on the assumption of a selective American interest at best in world affairs. Looking at Britain’s imperial preoccupations, past, present and, it was expected, future, with which Americans found it notoriously

120

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

hard to sympathise, Nevile Butler doubted whether the United States would support Britain in the event of a British-Russian clash in Afghanistan or ‘in anything like the Crimean War’ - whatever that meant. The assumption of permanent British-American friendship, he warned, ‘might in foreseeable circumstances be stultified’. Harvey took the view that: ‘We must regard the United States as a bonus but not a dividend in making our plans.’ He went on to castigate the military chiefs for thinking that the German danger to British security was virtually at an end. On the contrary, Germany would start another war ‘if she can’. There should be a British-led security bloc in western Europe, naturally excluding any German role, and Stalin would be welcome to form a similar one in eastern Europe, ‘provided we think always in terms of the Anglo-Soviet alliance and not, as the Chiefs of Staff would have, in terms of “Russia the next enemy”.’82 Since the military planners persisted with their ‘antiRussian extravagances’ and ‘childish generalisations’, the Foreign Office intensified its counter-attack. The most radi¬ cal proposal came from Wilson: that Britain and Russia should agree to hold staff talks after the war to maintain the alliance and as an earnest that Britain regarded the 1942 treaty not as ‘a temporary convenience’ but as ‘the basis of our future foreign policy’. The Office hierarchy combined the usual rapturous praise for any proposal from Wilson with a series of criticisms which effectively demolished the whole idea. His starting point had been a Pravda article which he read as a plea for British-Soviet military collaboration. Sargent studied it and did not think that it could bear such interpretation. Jebb thought that bilateral talks in Europe would make little sense since so many other countries were involved. Only in the Middle East did Britain alone face Russia, and he did not favour talks over that area ‘since it would be rather difficult to see what could come under discussions here except defence against each other and this, I imagine, would not be a very profitable topic for debate’. Wilson noted that there had been minimal co-operation during the war without asking whose fault that was, and persisted with his staff talks idea even after the Soviet

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Government suspended their shuttle-bombing arrangement with the United States in late August. This was a scheme by which American bombers based in Italy would attack targets in central Europe, land at Soviet airfields in the Ukraine, refuel and return, dropping more bombs on the way. As Nevile Butler pointed out, the Russians could not be un¬ aware that the project was close to Roosevelt’s heart and that in pressing for it he had run ‘the risk of losing some of the hyphenated Polish vote in November’ when the pre¬ sidential elections were due. Yet they had cancelled the entire operation after a successful German air-raid on one of the Ukrainian air bases as if the natural response to a Nazi victory was capitulation. It is difficult to see how anyone could have wished for clearer evidence of the Soviet regime’s attitude to military co-operation with the democ¬ racies of the West.83 Eden did not take up the staff talks idea; instead he produced a memorandum for the enlightenment of the military chiefs, in which he argued that any idea of a west European security bloc with German participation ‘should be avoided like the plague ... we shall quickly destroy any hope of preserving the Anglo-Soviet alliance and soon find ourselves advocating relaxations of the disarmament and other measures which we regard as essential guarantees against future German aggression’. The Foreign Secretary was not being truly frank with the military leaders. If he had been he would have had to tell them that their fears might prove real but that their ‘simple military minds’ were unequal to coping with the situation. For all their supposed simplicity Brooke, Portal and Cunningham produced argu¬ ments which were not easy to disprove. Russia was ‘a country of enormous power and resources which has been cut off for 25 years from contact with the outside world and the trend of whose policy no one can foretell’. They would be failing in their duty if they treated conflict with it as inconceivable. The Chiefs held to this line at a meeting with Eden and Sargent on 4 October. They simply refused to accept that Germany was, by definition, Britain’s only possible enemy. Nor were they put off by Eden’s analogy with France in the early 1920s which their predecessors had 122

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

chosen to regard as a likely future enemy with nearly self-fulfilling consequences. Portal said that if Britain did not make overtures to the Germans after the war, Russia might do so and ultimately construct a German-Soviet alliance which Britain would be totally unable to resist - the Foreign Office’s nightmare, which they felt unable to confide to anybody else. It was agreed that contingency planning for a war with Russia should continue but should be confined to ‘a very restricted circle’. A week later the Chiefs undertook that in official papers they would take care not to mention the 'misconception' that they desired to build up north-west Germany as a British ally, though they were unrepentant in thinking that an attempt to administer Germany jointly with the Soviet Union would be unworkable and that the country would have to be dismembered. It was impossible not to see in this an implication that Britain should be ready to rearm its zone at short notice.84 It is unlikely that the military chiefs changed their minds on security problems but their pronouncements became very much less provocative. Jebb admitted that it was music to his ears to read in a November 1944 report from the dreaded Post-Hostilities Planning Committee that: ‘We conclude that, unless and until a major clash with the USSR is clearly unavoidable, we must adhere to the policy of eradicating German ability to wage war. This would limit the assistance which the USSR could obtain from Germany.’ However, they had not forgotten Eden’s assent to ‘top secret’ planning against Russia. At the very end of the year Warner wrote about a ‘special security treatment’ for papers mentioning the Soviet Union as a potential enemy.85

VIII Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations in the year of the Second Front There were marked ups and downs in British dealings with the Soviet Union as the time slowly approached for the Normandy landings, and a great improvement afterwards, whose highpoint was Churchill’s visit to Moscow in October. Early in 1944 there was a small-scale propaganda war 123

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between the Soviet press and a minority of British papers, notably the Daily Express, in which the Russians exhibited their perpetual tendency to accuse others of their own sins: Britain was declared to'be guilty of considering a separate peace with Germany. For once Soviet embassy officials hardly tried to deny that everything of any consequence in the Soviet press was directly inspired from the highest circles in the Soviet Government. A furious protest from Clark Kerr finally silenced the Soviet accusations, but Eden felt that some permanent damage might have been done: Suspicions can grow on both sides and there is no doubt that the Pravda business and Russian attitudes to Poland generally have raised suspicion of Russia here, never very far away in some sections of the Conserva¬ tive Party. This is a real danger latent in these clumsy, or rude, Russian performances.86 It was left to Wilson to put the best possible construction on Soviet motives. Russia only wanted ‘friendly and stable administrations based upon popular assent in neighbouring countries’. A drunken Russian officer with Tito’s partisans who had been reported as having said that after the war his country would have no time for anything except internal rebuilding and the development of Siberia, spoke for ‘the average Russian’ and ‘most intelligent Russians who have not swallowed the complete Communist Party line’ - con¬ ceivably a correct statement so far as it went, but one which showed a complete failure to understand the nature of Soviet totalitarianism under Stalin. Without sharing Wil¬ son’s serene optimism about Soviet intentions, his colleagues did feel that his line should be followed until proved incorrect, and were distressed in the early part of 1944 by indications that the supreme political leadership on both sides of the Atlantic might think otherwise. In late March Halifax reported that Hull was disillusioned with Soviet conduct and was hinting at a British-American joint front to oppose Stalin. Eden’s comment on the inevitable denuncia¬ tion of this idea by Wilson marked a new stage in his thinking: 124

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

I don’t feel so good about Russia as this. Why are they gate-crashing in Italy in this way? Their conduct could be explained as a calculated attempt to smash all left parties and centre parties save the Communists. It is difficult to explain any other way ... I confess to growing apprehension that Russia has vast aims, and that these may include the domination of Eastern Europe and even the Mediterranean and the ‘communising’ of much that remains. Eden’s irascibility with the Russians was probably increased by his own feelings of tiredness at having to do two jobs Leader of the House of Commons as well as Foreign Secretary - and by Churchill’s playful treatment of his complaints about the double burden. In March the Prime Minister had told him that it was obvious which of the two jobs he would have to give up, but Eden had no idea which he meant and had not dared to ask. In any case, Sargent tried to soothe the Foreign Secretary’s fears. He wrote that British and American national interests did not wholly coincide. The latter could afford a break with Russia ‘but it would be disastrous for this country ... unless absolutely forced to’, presumably in view of the continuing German menace.87 At this point Churchill stepped in with a denunciation of Soviet policy which dismayed even Eden in his new mood. Expressing approval for Hull, Churchill pronounced it time to relapse into a ‘moody silence’ towards the Soviet regime. A little discursively, he was ‘anxious to save as many Poles as possible from being murdered’; the Russians would have ample means of blackmail when the Western Front was opened, ... by refusing to advance beyond a certain point, or even tipping the wink to the Germans that they can move troops into the West. Although I have tried in every way to put myself in sympathy with these Communist leaders, I cannot feel the slightest trust or confidence in them. Force and facts are their only realities. 125

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Every effort should now be concentrated on close relations with the United States, ‘but our and especially my very courteous and even effusive personal approaches have had a bad effect’. Churchill sent no reply to the Foreign Office answer to his minute, which was drafted by Cadogan, and, with a sigh of relief, the Office proposed to try to let the matter drop. Cadogan had agreed with the wisdom of a temporary cessation in personal correspondence between Stalin and Churchill, but had contended that Soviet policy was good in some respects, such as their stated intentions regarding relations with Romania and Finland, and bad only on Poland, where at least they did accept a British mediatory role. Britain should therefore ‘let matters drift a little longer before considering a showdown with Stalin’. A few days later Eden embarked on a two-week holiday to refresh himself so that he could continue with both his jobs. Churchill took temporary charge of the Foreign Office, and gave its members a surprisingly easy time, showing, accord¬ ing to Dixon, ‘much greater caution and comprehension’ than when he was on the sidelines. He ‘enjoyed his new toy’.88 After Eden returned, Churchill resumed grumbling as the d^te for the Normandy landings approached, though on the comparatively trivial issue of whether the Great Bell of Sebastopol, a British trophy from the Crimean War, should be returned following the city’s recapture by the Red Army, he thought that such a gesture ‘would in a way be disparag¬ ing to the deeds of our ancestors. I dislike those of our countrymen who wake up every morning wondering what British possessions they can find to give away next. They are a peculiarly national type.’ More privately, Churchill con¬ tinued to indulge in outbursts against the danger of Europe succumbing to Communist barbarism, in remarks for instance to his doctor, while in his public speeches he heaped lavish praise on the Russian war effort. The bell, it might be added, was not returned.89 The success of the Normandy invasion produced a drama¬ tic improvement in Soviet press comment on the British war effort, to which the Foreign Office responded, somewhat selfishly in a sense, by drawing up a shopping-list of requests 126

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

to present in Moscow while the mood of cordiality persisted. These ranged from concessions for the Russian wives of British subjects to the structure of the United Nations and the future of Germany, though Poland was excluded as being presumably simply too sensitive. By then Sargent had been infected by Eden’s concern about Soviet designs in Italy where: We find already in being a vigorous and growing Communist Party which is certainly receiving its direc¬ tions from the Soviet Government. For the moment these directions are in keeping with the general Allied war policy, but once the war is over what line will the Soviet Government take towards its protege? Even so, the Foreign Office was gripped by a mood of qualified goodwill towards the Soviet Union, coupled with dismay that the opening of the Second Front was evidently doing nothing to diminish the uncritical hero-worship of the Soviet Union among the ‘uninformed’ mass of the British public, which was seen as threatening great misfortunes when the inevitable process of disillusionment began. In late September Austin Haigh lamented that the British people did not realise that Russia was not a democracy and was more Asiatic than west European. This could lead to public opinion having a deleterious effect on foreign policy: If the British public continues to harbour the illusion that we have only got to know the Russians better to find that they are the same sort of fellows as we are, then the British public is in for some painful shocks which will lead from time to time to emotional out¬ bursts in press and Parliament. The Russians will find it difficult to understand that these outbursts are not inspired by H.M.G. and Anglo-Russian relations will deteriorate. The Foreign Office saw salvation in the education of the public in Soviet realities, but expected the opposite to result from the dispatch by the BBC of a permanent correspondent to Moscow at the end of 1944. No matter how good he might 127

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

be, the rigid Soviet censorship would ensure that he would only be able to send out reports highly favourable to the regime.90 The more starry-eyed’members of the British public might well have been displeased by the contents of a Foreign Office assessment of future political arrangements in Europe which was presented to the War Cabinet in August, even though the authors erred towards optimism about Russia. This recommended that Britain should concentrate on rela¬ tions with three regional groups of states: France, the Low Countries and Portugal in western Europe; Scandinavia (excluding Finland); and, in the Mediterranean, Turkey, Greece and, eventually, Italy. Soviet suspicions about Allied intentions in Germany should be allayed by meeting half¬ way Russian proposals for that country, which could be expected to be draconian, based, it was to be expected, on deadly hatred and distrust. Such hatred would produce a common bond between France and Russia which would be in no way a danger to Britain since France would realise that relations with London would inevitably be more important than relations with Moscow. In return for all this Russia could be expected to be content with regimes which were merely ‘friendly’ in eastern Europe under non-Communist leaders like Benes of Czechoslovakia. It was probable that Finland would be the only country which Russia would insist on dominating completely - a singularly poor guess. Only if there was a resumption of civil war in Spain with the Soviet Union helping the Communists would British-Russian rela¬ tions be subjected to what might prove an impossible test.91 With its falling between the two stools of pure Realpolitik and pure idealism this document was indeed removed from the popular mood in Britain during the last year of the war.

IX Churchill’s visit to Moscow, October 1944 The main event in British-Soviet relations between the Teheran and Yalta Conferences was undoubtedly Churchill’s visit to Moscow in the autumn of 1944, which

128

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

produced the famous percentages agreement on British and Soviet spheres of influence in south-east Europe. Poland and Germany were also discussed - the Prime Minister was more concerned to obtain an agreement on the former than on anything else - but those discussions are dealt with else¬ where. Like the Foreign Office, Churchill was pleased by the favourable Russian response to the successful invasion of northern France, while being acutely aware that Stalin’s goodwill might be temporary. He was also as keen as anyone in the Office to secure agreements which, if implemented, would limit Soviet freedom of action in areas conquered by the Red Army. By October that body was entrenched in Romania and Bulgaria and was conducting joint-operations with the Partisans in Yugoslavia. The solid but abortive achievement of the visit was, as noted, the percentages deal: 90 per cent British influence in Greece and the same figure for the Soviet Union in Romania, 75:25 in favour of Russia in Bulgaria, and 50 per cent each in Yugoslavia and Hungary - a curiously high figure for Britain in the latter country, presumably reflecting Stalin’s consistent lack of interest in Hungary and perhaps the fact that it was not a Slav country, though the same applied to Romania. Churchill had initiated the process which led up to the deal with the claim that: ‘Britain must be the leading Mediterranean Power and he hoped Marshal Stalin would let him have the first say about Greece in the same way as Marshal Stalin about Rumania.’ Stalin did not challenge this, and immediately turned to securing a quid pro quo in Bulgaria, which he declared guilty of ‘crimes’ against Russia, apparently Tsarist rather than Soviet since Stalin recalled ‘the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where the Bul¬ garians had been on the German side and three divisions had fought against the Russians in the last war’. (It is well known that in August 1945 Stalin was to justify war against Japan in terms of just retribution for Japan’s defeat of Imperial Russia in 1904-5.) Churchill was unwilling to give up Bulgaria wholly in the way that Stalin had so graciously set aside any possible claim to Greece. He emphasised how little he was claiming in Romania, where Britain would be a ‘spectator’; ‘in Bulgaria she had to be a little more 129

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

than a spectator’. If the Churchill-Stalin conversations smacked of the classic age of imperialism, which Lenin in a famous pam¬ phlet had denounced as utterly sordid, the follow-up dis¬ cussions between Eden and Molotov were a veritable carica¬ ture of that earlier period. Eden resisted tenaciously Molotov’s demand that the British percentage in Bulgaria should be reduced to ten, which, said Eden, ‘was almost nothing’. They traded arguments: Eden that Britain had been at war with Bulgaria for three years, Russia for only two days; Molotov that Britain was claiming predominance in the Mediterranean, which the Soviet Union accepted, while denying it to Russia in the Black Sea, on which Bulgaria had a coastline and which was a mere lake by comparison. On one matter Molotov was conciliatory and even apologetic: he accepted Eden’s demand that Bulgarian occupation forces must withdraw at once from those areas of northern Greece which the Germans had allowed them to occupy in 1941. Eden seemed to take this step - an example of the famous Soviet refusal to show any interest in a Communist Greece - for granted. Molotov also claimed a 60:40 ratio in favour of Russia in Yugoslavia, and explained what that would mean: ‘It meant that on the coast Russia would have less interest and would not interfere; but she would have a greater influence in the centre.’ Eden com¬ plained that that was what the Soviet Union already had since Tito was showing extreme favouritism for the Russians as opposed to the British.92 The British thus pursued their almost naive efforts to limit Soviet power where Britain had little or no force of its own. In Italy, where there was a strong Communist Party but very little prospect of the Red Army reaching the country, Churchill did not offer Stalin even a token ten per cent share, instead asking him to ‘influence’ the local Commun¬ ists towards political passivity, which Stalin promised to do. Despite all current and later protestations, it was intended as a serious, long-term political agreement, and Churchill and others with an interest in doing so were only able to pretend otherwise because of Roosevelt’s immediate veto of the arrangement, partly as not to have done so would have been 130

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

domestically and electorally embarrassing if it had leaked to the press, but chiefly, as Hopkins told Halifax, because the President was unwilling to ‘find himself pushed somewhat into a back seat’. It therefore availed Churchill nothing that he had secured the presence of the American Ambassador, Harriman, as an official observer at the conference and had sent Roosevelt a stream of explanatory messages during it.93 The human side of the conference was illuminating. At no time more clearly than in 1944 was Churchill’s erratic attitude to Soviet Russia better revealed. It is hard to believe that the same man wrote the denunciation of Soviet policy in April quoted above, and yet socialised so merrily with Stalin six months later. Yet Churchill only exhibited in extreme form a feature which was to characterise many Western leaders during the drift towards what was to be called the Cold War: the fact that at personal meetings between leaders problems seemed to dissolve or to become the fault of extraneous nuisances such as the Poles, only to reappear again afterwards. Though Churchill brought with him an imperial-sized delegation of nearly fifty, including Eden and Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Brooke, it was his conference, and his compatriots were often left to observe. Concerning relations between Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary the British journalists in Moscow were under no illusions. One of them wrote about Eden’s response at a press conference at which Churchill remarked that the Foreign Secretary had done most of the work: ‘Ho-ho, ho-ho - not a bit!’ ejaculated Eden. And he sounded so like the sixth-form boy who says, ‘Oh, I say, sir ... really, you know ... you do a jolly sight more yourself, sir!’ that it was quite laughable.94 Therefore the others were left with time and opportunity to observe, and one who did so was Eden’s secretary, Pierson Dixon, who kept a detailed diary of the conference. His favourable impressions are of particular interest in view of his deep distrust, usually, of Soviet intentions, which put him at the opposite extreme in the Foreign Office from Geoffrey 131

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Wilson. One feature of his diary is the emphasis on food; in both quantity and quality food and drink were available to the British delegates in Moscow on a scale which the strict system of food rationing ruled out at home. On the day of arrival, 9 October, lunch for the British party lasted for nearly two hours with every kind of food on offer. Next day came a ‘delicious breakfast of fruit and yoghurt’, which, however, only palely foreshadowed lunch at the Kremlin with Stalin and Molotov: This banquet exceeded all stories of Russian hospital¬ ity. It lasted from 2.30 to 6.30 with a fantastic abun¬ dance and variety of food - about ten courses served, supplemented by the cold fish, meats, hors d’oeuvre, chocolates, fruit and sweets on the table with which our hosts plied us all the time. Drinking was non-stop delicious Caucasus white wine, and red wine, cham¬ pagne and cognac, with which the waiters kept our glasses full, while the table was stocked with bottles of vodka and wine which our hosts seized and passed into our glasses whenever one was empty ... The whole meal was athletic, as there were toasts every five minutes. As the feast warmed up these developed into sizeable speeches of remarkable warmth and affec¬ tion.95 Next day came a ‘fantastic’ dinner for Stalin at the British embassy at which the Soviet leaders were given an essen¬ tially English meal in which the highlight among the eight or so courses was roast turkey with green peas. They approved of everything except the practice of watering down the whisky.96 On the way out of Russia, the British stopped at Simferopol in the Crimea where Dixon found erotic as well as gastronomic delights. When not eating well, he took note of the female traffic police ‘with taut high bosoms’. It was just as well that he travelled on to Cairo and not straight back to London. The culture shock between Moscow and the British capital must have been lessened by the experi¬ ence of conditions in the embassy in the Egyptian capital where ‘blackamoors pad in and out to answer one’s slightest wish’. (There was no equality between British embassies 132

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

during the war. Unlike Cairo, food and other conditions in the embassy in Moscow were normally extremely spartan.97) Nor was Dixon’s preoccupation with food purely personal and destined only to create a temporary amiability. He knew that most Russians had barely enough food to live, and noted the enormous disparity between the rations of officers and men in the Red Army. He concluded that the Soviet Union was a much more class-conscious and hierarchical society than Britain, which he thought encouraging for future co-operation between the two. He found many other pointers in the same direction. After initial grumbles that the Prime Minister might give too many things away, his mood quickly mellowed. Stalin was ‘an immensely impressive figure ... the face and build of a peasant but the gait and manner of a potentate. This poise and ease of gesture were particularly striking. His voice was soft and agreeable, and he spoke without much facial expression, and with lazy elegant hand motions.’ He went on to outline without critical comment remarks by Stalin reminiscent of some liberal supporter of the League of Nations: Stalin’s remarks about the future shape of things were novel and no doubt foreshadowed the set-up on which we can hope to agree. His argument was: ‘The peaceloving nations were caught unprepared by the aggres¬ sors, because the former are never armed and the latter always are. Logically the former can only protect themselves by becoming aggressors. This is a paradox, but what must be done is to equip each of the three Great Powers with an adequate policing force with which to keep the ex-aggressors in order.’ Even more reassuring than all this was the evidence of Stalin’s personal warmth towards Churchill and the absent Roosevelt. The Prime Minister’s interpreter, Arthur Birse, an old Russia hand, thought that such gestures by Stalin as dining at the British embassy - he had never previously dined at any foreign embassy in Moscow, though he had dined at the British embassy in Teheran nearly a year earlier — were remarkable from a man who had ‘never exhibited

133

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

great friendship towards us’.98 In fact, it went farther than that, as Dixon perceived. He wrote in his diary on 11 October: Averell Harriman made an unblushing electioneering speech in favour of Roosevelt, which was cheered to the echo, by none more loudly than Stalin, who likes his fellow potentates and, as he feels more secure, less and less likes changes in the internal affairs of his Allies. (Throughout our conversations U.J. showed strong reactionary and high Tory preferences. He was greatly concerned, for example, at the prospect of a victory for Labour at the next general election.)99 Dixon could see only one fly in the ointment. The military members of the delegation seemed to him to be holding somewhat aloof from the general joviality. He thought that they were jealous of Russian manpower resources and fearful of what the Soviet military could do if they acquired first-rate equipment, especially in the air. However, if Britain and the Soviet Union did have one thing in common it was that the military were of little political importance in either country. In fact, as so often with members of the Foreign Office, Dixon seems to have been a little harsh on his military colleagues. Ismay was one of them, and wrote to his friend Lewis W. Douglas, a future American Ambas¬ sador in London, that he left Moscow cautiously optimistic. I confess that after three visits to Moscow, I am no nearer understanding the Russian mentality than I was at the beginning of the war.’ But he felt encouraged that, after Stalin had publicly made it clear that he ‘thought well of us’, the Russian people had responded with enthusiasm. The ovation for Stalin and Churchill at the Bolshoi ‘was undescribable [s/c] and very moving’.100 When the British party left, Stalin made a final unpre¬ cedented gesture by seeing them off at the airport, though Dixon thought that Stalin looked unhealthy in the open air, as if it were an environment in which he did not belong. A journalist recorded Stalin’s gesture in first saluting the departing British plane (he was wearing a marshal’s uniform 134

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

with a diamond star) and then pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and waving it as if Churchill were a relative.101 Yet it is now known from a Soviet source that Stalin’s suspicions, if they were ever dormant at all, were aroused by Churchill at the end of the visit, and with some justification. While in Moscow Churchill had sent messages to London urging military operations in Istria, on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia where a non-Communist regime in the former and a Communist in the latter could be expected to contend for sovereignty. At the end of the visit Churchill actually referred to his wish for such operations, presumably expecting his hosts to be pleased by such a gesture of confidence. They were not, since the entire object was clearly to limit the spread of Communism. Stalin also remarked to Harriman that Churchill was a ‘desperate fellow' for perpetually running round the world.102 Despite this, the Soviet Government seemed anxious that the atmosphere built up at Moscow should continue. In late October the Foreign Office noted an abundance of proBritish statements in the Soviet press. Early the next month Eden wrote to Clark Kerr that he had recently found the Soviet Ambassador ‘in more cheerful spirits than I have ever known him. He was clearly trying to prove by his own attitude that the recent Moscow meetings had increased friendship between our two countries.’ Since Gusev was the archetype of a humourless Soviet bureaucrat - in 1941 Warner had described him as having ‘the appearance of a collective farmhand on whom had been superimposed a correspondence course in behaviour and six weeks G.P.U. training’ - it may be supposed that cheerfulness had indeed required a special effort on his part.103 It was in this atmosphere that Allen wrote a remarkably warm endorsement of the Soviet claim to Konigsberg and the northern part of East Prussia, which the Foreign Office had previously favoured ceding to Poland. Besides being of great strategic and economic value to the Soviet Union, it would teach the Germans a salutary lesson when ‘this traditional bastion of Prussian culture and the home of Kant’ was absorbed by a nation which they had been taught to regard as one of subhuman barbarians, while, by the same 135

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

token ‘Konigsberg would constitute for Russia a valuable “window on the west”.’104 Hopes of trade . were also stimulated. An inter¬ departmental meeting in late November, at which Lawrepresented the Foreign Office, agreed that although Russia could not continue to receive free aid after the war. it should not be discriminated against compared with other countries as far as credit terms w ere concerned, and that it would be in both the British economic interest and that of international harmony to grant the Soviet Union such credits: ‘The Russian post-war market is valuable and particularly so for heavy electrical and engineering exports which we wish to foster.’105 However, as the year ended suspicions re-emerged. One reason for this was. ironically, the Russian visit of another west European leader. General de Gaulle. Both France and the Soviet Union kept Britain in the dark about their discussions, which actually had little or no concrete result because of Stalin's unwillingness to treat France as a major power. Some in the Foreign Office wronglv suspected a sinister secret deal by which France was to give Russia a free hand in Poland and east Germany, in return for Soviet support for de Gaulle’s aim of a Rhine frontier for France.106 The time was drawing near for another meeting of the supreme leaders, including Roosevelt this time, and, for Churchill and possibly Stalin, some of the goodwill gener¬ ated at Moscow still remained.

X Politics and strategy at the close of the war The Yalta Conference of Churchill. Roosevelt and Stalin in February 1945 marked the zenith of the w artime alliance of their countries. This was partly because of the absence of Anglo-American solidarity. In a report on the work of the European Advisory Commission in late Januarv. its British head, Strang, found more to approve in the Soviet role in that body than in the American. The American repre¬ sentatives themselves had been ‘helpful and collaborative', but they had been impeded at even step by the hostilitv of

136

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

American military planners to the Commission. In the case of the Russians, ‘their ideas and suggestions have generally been sound and suitable’, and they had ‘collaborated faith¬ fully’ on matters on which they had received instructions. Recently, however, they had become obstructive. They insisted that there could be no more co-operation on any¬ thing without an agreement on the repatriation of Soviet prisoners of the Germans now being held by the British.107 The cautious and reasoned optimism of the Foreign Office was in contrast with the awe-inspiring degree of ignorance of Soviet realities betrayed by some leading politicians. For instance, in January 1945 Sir Archibald Sinclair, Leader of the Liberal Party and a Cabinet minister, supported the Soviet demand that all sixteen constituent Soviet republics should be given individual seats at the United Nations on the grounds that such a step would permit the republics ‘to develop their own independent views and policies’. Nobody with any knowledge of the Soviet system could have imagined such a development being permitted. It was an example of the way in which diplomats and politicians not directly concerned with foreign affairs lived in separate worlds of discourse that at the same time as this, British diplomats were telling their American colleague Charles Bohlen that Britain was ready to accept separate United Nations seats for two of the republics, the Ukraine and Byelorussia, not because of any illusion that they were or would ever become independent, but because of the neces¬ sity to gain Soviet assent to the admission of India as a founder-member, despite the fact that it was not for the time being an independent state.108 When the Yalta Conference met it was an occasion both for conviviality, between the three leaders and to some extent between even the minor members of their dele¬ gations, and for agreement on some really important issues.109 The sheer magnitude of the Soviet effort to please their guests struck most of the British delegates forcefully, both on the level of providing creature comforts in Crimean palaces only recently gutted in German-Russian fighting, and on that of a relaxed atmosphere between the Western visitors and their hosts. To quote Ismay, writing to Burrows, 137

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

still head of the Military Mission in Moscow: As you know it was my fourth visit to Russia since the war started, and the difference between the way they treat us now and thd way they treated us in 1941 is remarkable. One is now free to walk about wherever one likes without being shadowed, and the ordinary Russian in the street is only too ready to come up and have a friendly talk, instead of passing by in stony silence ... Another significant feature of the new spirit is that many of the posters stuck up in the towns are very complimentary to the Allied war effort. The conference had had an ‘easy ride’ on military matters: It was the first time that we were allowed to have discussions alone with representatives of the Russian High Command who have had practical war experi¬ ence. Hitherto, either Stalin or Molotov have always been present and the Russian Service folk have only spoken when specifically invited to speak, and, then, most guardedly. Politically, there had been ‘a lot of tough fences, some of which the Conference failed to jump. But, at least, we got the course without any crashing falls.’ Burrows had to reply that there was no sign of increased cordiality towards the British in Moscow, and that the Soviet authorities treated conferences as special occasions - a remarkably apt com¬ ment from this astute British officer which might usefully have occurred to those more directly concerned with politi¬ cal relations with Russia. Burrows also foresaw one of the more harmless policy initiatives of the post-Stalin Soviet Union; he had heard that the southern Crimean coast was beautiful ‘and doubtless the Soviet authorities will try to build it up as a second Riviera in order to bring foreign currency into their pockets in post-war years’. Even when writing his memoirs twenty years later, Eden was to register surprise that the relaxed’ and ‘friendly’ attitude of the Russians at the conference vanished abruptly after the delegates had gone home, instead of seeing that as part of a 138

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

regular pattern whose only real exception had been the period of unconcealed Russian joy after the launching of the Second Front. Churchill was true to form in his lavish private praise for Stalin, not least in remarks to his doctor, Lord Moran (the former Sir Charles Wilson).110 The Prime Minister’s appreciation of Stalin’s qualities was increased by the existence of considerable tension between the British and the Americans. Britain had come in for much criticism in America, though not from Roosevelt personally, for its armed action against the Communist-led EAM movement in Greece; while Roosevelt himself remained opposed to British wishes for the restoration of France as a major power, as he hastened to tell Stalin on arrival in the Crimea, and intent on pressing Stalin for no more than cosmetic concessions to mitigate the establishment of Com¬ munism in Poland.111 The existence of British-American differences and the willingness of all three countries to make concessions on issues not of vital national concern were the keys to the conference’s success. With little support from Roosevelt, Churchill had to yield on Poland (see below). The President retreated rather rapidly over the two issues on which he wished to humiliate France: the denial to it of an occupation zone and a seat on the Allied control machinery in Germany, and the placing of Indo-China under inter¬ national trusteeship. Stalin made some concessions to American views about the constitution of the United Nations. Though Churchill was later to use the phrase ‘what a fuss’ to describe the vehemence of Stalin’s demand for a commitment to the dismemberment of Germany,112 official opinion in all three states was divided on the subject, and a reference to merely possible dismemberments proved generally acceptable. Only on reparations did Russia fail to gain a firm commitment to its demand for ten billion dollars, because of British opposition and despite the fact that they did regard the matter as one of transcendent importance. Russia and America reached a bilateral agreement on Soviet entry into the war against Japan. In many ways, the most remarkable products of the conference were the agreement by which Britain capitulated to the Soviet demand for the compulsory repatriation of 139

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

prisoners, and the Declaration on Liberated Europe. The former was a rare example of the complete suppression of humanitarian values in British foreign policy. The latter stated that the political life of the liberated countries of Europe was to be reconstituted on democratic lines, and that the three countries were to consult with one another before interfering politically in any country where its armed forces were present. In that way, Stalin gave the Western powers a legal basis for protest and retaliatory action, such as a refusal to withdraw to the agreed zonal boundaries in Germany, against arbitrary Soviet actions in eastern Europe, even though he cannot possibly have had any intention of refrain¬ ing from such action. Indeed, within only a week of the end of the conference he was to impose a new government on Romania by the unceremonious use of force. In the very short term, Cadogan, not easily swept off his feet, left Russian soil feeling that the conference had been ‘unusual’, ‘great fun’ and ‘quite useful’.113 Much has been written about the undoubted wish of Churchill and Eden during the last weeks of the war for the British and American armies, which were under the supreme command of Eisenhower, to reorient their operations to give politics predominance over purely military considerations, in the sense of occupying particularly important areas before the Red Army got to them. Just as the German-Soviet war was preceded by an event - Hess’s flight to Scotland - whose nature the Stalin regime ludicrously misjudged, so the end of the war was marked by an episode - certain negotiations in Switzerland between Anglo-American and German envoys for the surrender of the German forces in north Italy - which Stalin at the time and Soviet historiography ever since have magnified into a betrayal of Russia by its allies, even an abortive scheme to join forces with the remnants of the Nazi Reich against Russia, which Hitler and equally demented members of his entourage were hoping for in their bunker in Berlin.114 Having said all that, it is true that the British Government, like the Soviet but not the American, looked forward to occupying as much territory as possible. When the Yalta Conference started, the British and American forces were still on the western frontier of Germany with 140

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

most of the Netherlands still in Nazi hands, as had been the case since October. They had had difficulty in repulsing a German counter-offensive in the Ardennes at the end of the year, and had been greatly aided in doing so by Stalin’s action in bringing forward a mighty Soviet offensive into eastern Germany which resulted in the conquest of vast areas of the Reich before petering out about the time the conference began. It was then that Ward in the Foreign Office wrote that Stalin would probably resist making any more agreements on Germany or Austria because of an expectation that virtually the w hole of those countries would soon have been conquered by his armies. There is no evidence that Stalin had that in mind. In any case, the fortunes of war soon changed. German resistance in the west weakened and even dissolved. Units were transferred to the east where resistance continued ferociously. The Foreign Office looked forward with some relish to the prospect which this opened up. Dixon noted in his diary at the end of March that it now seemed likely that Anglo-American forces would win the ‘race’ to Berlin: ‘It is too much to hope that we shall race them to Vienna too, though that would be even more useful.’115 In fact, Stalin, informing Churchill that the capture of Berlin was a matter of little consequence in Soviet strategy (which the Prime Minister correctly interpreted as meaning that Stalin attached supreme importance to its capture), ordered that the city had to be taken by Soviet forces at all costs, and the Red Army indulged in a huge expenditure of its soldiers’ lives with that object in view, unnecessarily in the sense that Eisenhower and the Americans were unwil¬ ling to join in the race.116 It was one of the great disappointments of Churchill’s career that his pleas to Eisenhower and the American Administration from the end of March fell on deaf ears. His first suggestion to them was that they should aim at the capture of Berlin so as to force Stalin to modify his political demands. Churchill was heavily influenced by what he regarded as Soviet perfidy in Poland, and by Stalin’s out¬ rageous accusations about the north Italian surrender negotiations, but also, more basically, by his mistrust of 141

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Soviet intentions, which always reasserted itself between personal meetings with Stalin. The American rejection was based partly on an estimate of the huge military casualties which a drive on Berlin would have entailed, and partly, with some reason, on a belief that it would be politically imposs¬ ible not to evacuate territory assigned to the Soviet occupa¬ tion zone after the German surrender. Eisenhower had no objection when Churchill ordered Montgomery to con¬ centrate on the capture of Liibeck on the Baltic to prevent Soviet forces from reaching Denmark where, without a military presence, they could exert no influence. However, Eisenhower and his superiors also rejected pleas from Churchill and Eden for his forces to try to capture Prague to give the Czechs a better chance of not simply exchanging German for Russian overlords after the war. Nor would he send troops into north-east Italy to occupy areas known to be coveted by Tito’s Yugoslav regime, though in the event New Zealand troops were the first to enter the major prize in that region, the port of Trieste.117 Immediately after the German surrender Churchill embarked on an equally unsuccessful campaign for American assent to the notion that British and American forces should not evacuate those parts of the designated Soviet zone which they had occupied unless Stalin offered some quid pro quo; assurances that the Russians would send surplus food from their zone to western Germany were one thing that the British particularly had in mind. The idea that Churchill was seeking to keep sections of the German armed forces intact for a possible early conflict with Russia is a fantasy, though one to which Churchill himself lent some credence in his advanced old age. The limited nature of the British aim was disproportionate to the almost apocalyptic language which Churchill used to the new American Pre¬ sident, Truman, including a claim that the Russians had drawn down ‘an iron curtain’ behind their front. Truman refused to bargain about the evacuation of troops from the Soviet zone, and Churchill had to content himself with the reflection to Eisenhower’s deputy that ‘two years ago if someone had told us that the Russian army was approaching the Rhine we would have been very happy about it’ - of 142

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

course, the Red Army never got anywhere near the Rhine.118 While the Prime Minister struggled on in vain in this way, senior members of the Foreign Office speculated on the likely course of Soviet foreign policy. They were still annoyed at anybody outside their walls - in the Services or in Parliament - expressing the doubts which they themselves felt. This was shown well by some notes which were assem¬ bled for a House of Lords debate in late April in which ill-advised criticisms of Soviet policy in eastern Europe were anticipated. These notes, which were for the Government Speaker, Lord Selborne, ironically a staunch antiCommunist, stressed the difficulty of preparing for free elections even in Western Europe, and argued that Britain should avoid any appearance of intervention in the domestic affairs of liberated countries unless the governments and peoples of those countries clearly wanted it. The notes then became ‘private’ in character, outlining a much more troubled outlook than they were ready to admit, but not a hopelessly pessimistic one: The situation is certainly unsatisfactory in the Sovietcontrolled part of Europe, but it cannot yet be exposed without injury to Anglo-Soviet relations, and even if it could be the result would only be to stimulate further and more embarrassing discussion in Parliament. The fundamental cause of our present difficulties with the Russians over Rumania etc, is the totally different interpretation which is placed upon the word ‘democracy’ in the western democracies on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. According to our ideas ‘democracy’ in a liberated country means the right of every individual not actually tainted by collaboration with the enemy or treachery to his country to express his views as to the future regime in his country through free and untrammelled elections as we practise them in this country, ‘the ballot box and not the bullet’ as the Foreign Secretary recently said in the House of Commons. To the Russians on the other hand democracy means something much more on the lines of 143

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

their own system, and they attach more importance to the social and economic aspects than to the political. They label almost everybody as ‘anti-democratic’ whose political ideas -do not suit them or whose senti¬ ments towards the Soviet Union they do not trust, and their idea of an election is a controlled vote of approval for the particular brand of ‘left-wing’ regime which they wish to establish in liberated countries within their control. The history of Russian intervention at Bucha¬ rest to replace General Radescu by M. Groza shows the lengths to which the Soviet Government will go. The ruthless proscription of political adversaries which the Russian-sponsored regime in Bulgaria are carrying out is another example of Russian methods in liberated territory. The situation in Poland was ‘notorious’, but in Finland the Russians had permitted ‘genuinely free’ elections. The offi¬ cials must have had mixed feelings about the actual debate, in which there was a good deal of criticism of British policy in Greece and little of Soviet policy anywhere - even their lordships had evidently succumbed to the pro-Soviet contag¬ ion which gripped so much of the British public during the war.119 As Churchill, Attlee and Eden journeyed to the last of the three great conferences of the war period, at Potsdam, reflection continued in the Foreign Office. At Eden’s sug¬ gestion Sargent drew up a major memorandum early in July on Stock-Taking after VE-Day’. He saw the European situation as much less favourable to Britain than it had been after the armistices of 1918, and argued that British policy, playing a weaker hand, could hope to do better than it had at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and afterwards only by learning from the mistakes of that period, as well as by realistically assessing the facts of international life in 1945, above all the substitution of the Anglo-French power at the time of the Treaty of Versailles by that of the Soviet Union and the United States - ‘neither of them ... likely to consider British interests if they interfere with their own and unless we assert ourselves’.

144

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

First of all, Britain should ceaselessly advocate the merits of three-power co-operation, so as to make it as difficult as possible for the other two to ignore Britain. This was even more necessary in regard to the United States than to the Soviet Union since in America the ‘misconception’ was widespread ‘that Great Britain is now a secondary Power and can be treated as such, and that in the long run all will be well if they - the United States and the Soviet Union - as the two supreme World Powers of the future, understand one another’. Exhortation alone could not achieve this objective for Britain; it needed to be the acknowledged leader in international relations of the Dominions and of France and the smaller west European countries. ‘Only so shall we be able, in the long run, to compel our two big partners to treat us as an equal.’ Even then, differences in ‘outlooks, tradi¬ tions and methods’ would militate against co-operation. The aims of Russian foreign policy in particular were shrouded in mystery. One could assume great consistency of aim in view of the Soviet regime’s immunity from changes of govern¬ ment or from any dependence on public opinion. Beyond that British policy-makers had nothing to guide them - no Mein Kampf and no crude imitation of a stronger dictator¬ ship such as had shaped Mussolini’s foreign policy during his later years in power. However, there was evidence that Stalin was extraordinarily concerned with the security of his regime both at home and abroad, and that his fear of Germany was wholly genuine. In those areas which he deemed essential to Soviet security he might try to create such security either by territorial conquest or by the imposi¬ tion of ‘an ideological Lebensraum’ [whatever that meant]. It could also safely be assumed that he would for the time being make major compromises to avoid serious conflict with Britain and the United States: ‘At the present moment it can surely be assumed that he does not want and could not afford another war in Europe, and it is also doubtful whether he aims at further territorial expansion’. In short, he would want to consolidate Soviet power in eastern Europe but was open to successful challenge in the greater part of that area, including Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugo¬ slavia and Bulgaria, but not Romania and Hungary where 145

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Soviet power was so firmly entrenched that the West might have to ‘abandon’ them ‘as beyond our reach’. The Western powers should issue such a challenge not only for the sake of the six countries themselves, but also to forestall a Soviet challenge in Italy, Greece, Turkey and above all Germany. The West was well-placed to preserve ‘liberalism’ - which Sargent defined as something much less exacting than British or American liberal democracy; rather it was ‘that degree of liberty of action and speech and elementary justice to which the individual was accustomed before the war and before the advent of the Communist conception of the totalitarian State’ - in Italy, Greece and Turkey but less so in Germany, the struggle for which ‘if it is engaged will not only be much harder, but the result will be decisive for the whole of Europe, for it is not overstating the position to say that if Germany is won over to totalitarianism this may well decide the fate of liberalism throughout the world’. Germany would probably recover its political indepen¬ dence, cast aside any democratic forms which its conquerors had imposed upon it and move to some form of authoritarian government, and, with equal rapidity, rebuild its mighty economy. The country would then ‘put herself up to the highest bidder so as to play off each of the three Great Powers one against the other’. That would leave Britain with little choice but to play the game on German terms by urging the United States to offer massive economic aid to Germany and to the other countries of Europe. In the meantime, Britain should intervene politically all over Europe [except presumably in Hungary and Romania] and should refuse to be reduced to defeatism by the almost inevitable American criticism in the early stages in the way that British criticism broke the spirit of France between the wars. Britain had to accept that America’s role in Europe would be one of partial involvement as practised by Britain after 1919. If Britain adopted a tolerant attitude to the fact that the United States will feel that being the richest and strongest power they must also be the wisest and the most fair-minded’ - the British attitude of the inter-war years, remarked Sargent then eventually the Americans might see the futility of trying to mediate between Britain and Russia and come into 146

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

Europe wholeheartedly on the side of Britain. By the time he had finished it was difficult to see what was left of Sargent’s starting-point of three-power co-operation. He acknowledged that the Soviet conception of co-operation might well be agreement on the division of Europe into spheres of influence, but rejected this not only as ‘cynical’, but also because ‘for ourselves it would represent the abdication of our right as a Great Power to be concerned with the affairs of the whole of Europe, and not merely with those parts in which we have a special interest’. Given Sargent’s position in the Office, comment was naturally favourable. Jebb recommended adding Finland and Bulgaria to Romania and Hungary as countries where the Soviet Union would inevitably interpret Allied interfer¬ ence as meaning that ‘their great bogey of a capitalist conspiracy against them was actually materialising’. Sterndale Bennett argued that if Britain was serious about being a Great Power then an active role was also called for in the Far East where Sargent had foreseen a Soviet-American contest for the allegiance of China, with Russia playing an ‘oppor¬ tunist’ role in contrast with the ‘cold realism’ of its policies in Europe. Other minutes warned that the Dominions, espe¬ cially Canada but even New Zealand too, were becoming more independent-minded than before; and that the British public, including ‘the rank and file of the armed forces’, were hopelessly unprepared in a psychological sense for conflict with Russia. Nevile Butler’s comment, naturally on American policy, was that the United States were capable of being won over to the British view of things providing that British foreign policy took its stand on principle and dis¬ pelled the fears of ‘some Americans like Lippmann [who] were concerned about America being dragged into some revived Anglo-Russian rivalry like that in the nineteenth century’. Britain’s trump card lay in its continuing, if some¬ what impaired, strength, in comparison with any other possible American ally. Harvey was even more optimistic, dwelling on what he saw as Britain’s moral strength: We have many cards in our hands if we choose to use them, our political maturity, our diplomatic experience, 147

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the confidence which the solidity of our democratic institutions inspires in the Western World and our incomparable War record. Unlike our two rivals we are not regarded either as gangsters or as go-getters but we must do something about it or we shall find we have no partners to play with. Time is not necessarily on our side.120 While Sargent’s colleagues were offering their comments, the Potsdam Conference was in session (16 July-2 August). As with the two preceding conferences of the supreme leaders, only a bare outline of this major event will be given here.122 The British and Russians had to contend with a new American President, ‘the narrow-minded and rabidly antiSoviet Harry S. Truman’, to quote the words of a Soviet historian.121 Before the conference ended it fell to the Americans and Russians to accustom themselves to a new British team, with Attlee as Prime Minister and Bevin as Foreign Secretary, following the delayed results of the British general election, though Churchill had taken Attlee with him as a member of the British delegation. Whether Churchill’s departure marked an immediate diminution of British influence with the loss of his personal prestige is open to debate. Cadogan, unimpressed by Attlee, wrote of the Big 3 having become the Big 2\; whereas Dixon was greatly impressed by Bevin who was ‘very effective’, with ‘a wholly delightful assumption that, of the 3, we were still the biggest’. Stalin and Molotov were probably simply too amazed by the result to change their attitude to Britain.123 Churchill’s departure decreased what cordiality there was at the conference since he had been the only one present to feel real warmth to both his fellow heads of government, though he cooled towards Stalin after an unsuccessful dinner party on 20 July, while Truman had a curious belief that Stalin was far from omnipotent and was a ‘moderating influence’ in Kremlin policy discussions.124 Attlee was impervious to both Stalin’s charm and his arguments, and had recently acquired a deep dislike for Motolov on meeting him at the San Francisco Conference which founded the United Nations. Birse and Bohlen, British and American 148

Britain and the Soviet Union During the War

interpreters and the latter also a leading diplomat, both emphasised in their memoirs the appearance, rather than the reality, of mutual goodwill.125 Truman had delayed the opening of the conference until the atomic bomb was ready for testing in New Mexico. His motives are the subject of a large literature which cannot be discussed here. In so far as he and his advisers saw the success of the test-bomb as having immediate implications, those all concerned the war against Japan and the question, which Truman would cer¬ tainly have liked to reopen, of Soviet entry into that war, subjects on which Churchill had accepted Britain’s exclusion at Yalta. The conference’s extensive treatment of the Polish problem and Churchill’s attempt - inevitably abortive, if only because of his electoral defeat - to forge a permanent British-American alliance are dealt with in other chapters. Among other issues, Stalin demanded recognition for the governments in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and warded off British and American requests for democratic guarantees there with the argument that ‘if the government is not Fascist, the government is democratic’, which the writer of the Foreign Office notes in April cited above might well have regarded as confirmation of his fears. Britain and the United States would agree only to a limp declaration that they would investigate whether relations could be estab¬ lished with these countries before peace treaties were signed with them.126 The British and Americans quarrelled over the latter’s wish for the full and immediate political rehabilita¬ tion of Italy, but united to resist Stalin’s reparation demands against that country. Eden was highly alarmed by Soviet suggestions that the Soviet Union should receive both a trusteeship in part of the former Italian colony of Libya and a special position in the Straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Somewhat losing control of syntax, he thought that that would place Egypt and the Levant in a vice-grip in which the ‘rich pashas and impoverished fella¬ heen would be a ready prey to Communism’. The Western powers fruitlessly raised the question of the evacuation of Russian troops from Iran. Truman suggested an inter¬ national regime for the great European rivers, which the British thought merely eccentric but which roused Stalin to 149

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

fury, so much so that the linguist manque in him caused the dictator to protest in English.127 The largest issue of all was the treatment of Germany, on which the three countries agreed with little difficulty about a number of matters but disagreed bitterly over the Soviet demand for reparations from the Western zones, on which the British and Americans conceded a little (see above, pp. 66-8).

150

2 Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe During the War I Poland The Polish exile Government in London and its ‘secret state’ in the occupied homeland were Britain’s principal foreign ally between the fall of France in June 1940 and Hitler’s invasion of Russia a year later. The Government grew accustomed to having its wishes carefully considered by the British. When the Foreign Office contemplated recognising the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States early in 1941 one of the chief objections raised had concerned not the vanished states themselves but Poland. In 1939 the Soviet Union had transferred the Polish city of Vilna and its surrounding area to one of the republics, Lithuania - a gesture of apparent generosity explicable only on the supposition that Stalin intended to annex the whole of that country, as happened the following year. Roger Makins wrote in April that recognition of the Baltic annexations, including Vilna, would ‘greatly reduce the prospect of the recovery by Poland of those parts of her territory now occupied by the Soviet Union, more particularly in the north-east of the country’. Yet even at that stage, the main concern was with avoiding the appearance of ignoring the rights of the Poles. Few, not excluding Makins, thought that Poland would really be able to recover much of the territory seized by Stalin under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Both before and after Russian entry into the war, Eden hoped that the Poles would tacitly accept the loss of most of the eastern half of the country. It was

151

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

conceded that governments-in-exile ‘cannot afford to make concessions which will discredit them at home’.1 Russian entry into the war led to Soviet overtures to the Polish Government for a resumption of relations and a treaty between them - itself a sign of the mood of panic and fear which gripped the Soviet rulers in the summer of 1941. (As early as October of that year the Soviet deputy Foreign Minister, Vyshinsky, told the Polish Ambassador, Stanislaw Kot, that the Soviet-Polish agreement had been concluded ‘more from sentimental motives than rational ones’. It would be truer to say that the Soviet rulers were incapable of sentiment but not of panic.) The Soviet-Polish treaty of 30 July 1941 repudiated the German-Soviet agreements of 1939 about Poland without promising to restore the old frontier. Britain affirmed that it did not recognise any changes to Poland’s pre-war frontiers, but exerted no posi¬ tive pressure to get a better bargain for Poland.2 Although the tentative reconciliation between Russia and Poland was obviously welcome, the Foreign Office were constantly aware that they might have to make choices between the two. A pointer to where their choice would lie came with the references as early as July to Poland being no longer Britain’s leading ally; by Christmas it was down to fourth or fifth place, according to Makins, ‘with growing competition from the Netherlands’. Officials can be seen casting around for excuses not to support Poland if a choice had to be made. This tendency was particularly marked in the case of Makins who on 1 July 1941 condemned the ‘short-sighted, typically Polish calculation’ that it would be beneficial if Germany overran Russia on the grounds that if the war ended with Russia among the victors ‘the other allies would not be prepared to make war on Russia to recon¬ stitute Poland’ - scarcely an unfounded fear, it might be thought! Three months later the same official observed that although Britain suffered from a paucity of information about conditions in Russia, it would be almost useless interviewing any of the numerous Poles leaving the country since their information would be ‘always unreliable and often imaginary’. How could Britain be expected to give full support to a people with such grave character defects, he 152

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

seemed to be asking. To Roberts the Polish Ambassador to Russia, Kot, showed ‘the natural muddleheadedness of an extremely inefficient Slav professor’ - a total misrepresenta¬ tion if Kot is to be judged by his book of memoirs and wartime dispatches. The most extreme expression of this attitude came not from any official but from Beaverbrook. When he was in Moscow in September 1941 on an aid mission he refused to earmark any of the military supplies that Britain was to send to the Soviet Union for the use of the Polish forces which were being raised there.3 The British were virtually unanimous in seeing one figure of hope in the Polish situation: the Prime Minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was seen as a realist with a rare ability to surmount any feelings of bitterness towards the Soviet Union. Unlike most members of his Government he was prepared to concede that the country’s eastern frontiers ‘might be a matter for discussion’. At a meeting with Maisky his mood was conciliatory and teasing - what a pity Poland and Russia had not become allies in 1939 instead of 1941 rather than indignant. Small wonder that Cadogan hailed him: ‘The best hope seems to be General Sikorski who, so far as I am able to judge, is a bigger man than most Poles and able to rise above domestic squabbles.’4 The combination of Sikorski’s esteemed personal qualities and the signature of the Polish-Soviet agreement produced restrained optimism among some officials. Roberts thought that Russia might be so exhausted when the war ended that it would continue to treat Poland in the spirit of being ‘publicly committed to the support of movements of national emancipation’ in which it had signed the agreement. Unfor¬ tunately, a major problem arose from a very early stage as a result of the eagerness of the Polish Government to organise the numerous able-bodied Poles in the Soviet Union, many of them in prison camps, into an army to fight the Germans. The Russians were happy to release nearly all their living Polish prisoners, but matters were complicated by the fact that in 1940 Stalin had ordered the execution of some fifteen thousand Polish officer-prisoners and certain other person¬ nel such as border guards. This ‘mistake’, as a drunken Soviet official once called it, was to become known to the

153

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

world only in 1943 when the Germans discovered four thousand of the bodies at Katyn near Smolensk, and even then the Soviet Union was to blame Germany for the crime, as it still does. The Poles, for all their suspicions of the Soviet regime, were slow to suspect the extent of Stalin’s iniquity. Though as early as 24 June 1941 Maisky returned a very cool reply to an inquiry from Eden about the release of Polish officers and other prisoners in Russia, and though Harvey wrote in his diary in July that the Russians had evidently killed many Poles for political reasons, the Polish and Soviet Governments were to duel verbally over the whereabouts of the missing officers during the winter and later, with Polish incredulity over the explanations offered meeting consistent Russian evasiveness. In the meantime, many Poles had been released, including some officers, many of whom had survived by disguising themselves as private soldiers without, in any known case, ever being betrayed to the Russians by their fellow-prisoners during two years in the camps.5 The Soviet authorities were not so keen about arming or even feeding these men as about merely setting them free. There was also the major problem of which front they were ultimately to fight on. The Polish Government were under¬ standably attracted by the idea of withdrawing their troops from Russia or at least transferring them to an area like the Caucasus from which they could escape if Russian resistance collapsed or receive British and American material aid, despite Lord Beaverbrook, if it continued. In October Sikorski told Eden and Churchill that he wished to visit the Polish troops in Russia to ‘rally, sustain and perhaps extri¬ cate’ them.6 Sikorski went to Moscow early in December 1941, and achieved the near-miracle for a statesman with an essentially weak hand to play of getting on with Stalin without being obsequious. He was content to agree on generalities such as the need for ‘due punishment of Hitlerite criminals’ and for a ‘firm alliance of democratic countries’, while making clear in a tactful way his Government’s concern about the missing officers. His decision, made without consulting Britain, to withdraw his request that Polish troops should be trans154

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

ferred to India or the Middle East and therefore into the British orbit may, if only momentarily, have caused Stalin to question his belief that the Polish Government consisted of British puppets. Makins, usually so sceptical about Poles, thought that the information available about the mission ‘reflected much credit on General Sikorski’.7 Although pro-Polish propaganda and practical help to the Polish troops and other Polish citizens in the Soviet Union were soon to abate, the British political mind had more scruples, and would hesitate to abandon the Polish cause while it had a leader like Sikorski who seemed to be almost English in his pursuit of politics as the art of the possible. Eden’s visit to Moscow came hard on the heels of Sikorski’s and his talks with Stalin were at times as full of Polish matters as had been the Polish leader’s. Stalin was soothing on the future of Poland. He indicated that his interest lay in recovering the eastern half of Poland so recently annexed by Russia, rather than in dominating the whole of the country, and that even on the frontier he was capable of being flexible. He called the Soviet-Polish front¬ ier ‘an open question’, adding: With regard to Poland, I hope that we shall be able to come to an agreement between the three of us. Generally our idea is to keep [s/c] the Curzon Line with certain modifications. But it is very important for us to know whether we shall have to fight at the peace conference in order to get our western frontiers. The British were to grasp frequently during the rest of the war at the possibility which Stalin seemed to hold out of giving back to Poland its independence if it would accept the loss of its eastern provinces with their largely non-Polish population. It was a masterstroke of Soviet policy to resur¬ rect the Curzon Line, drawn up in the British Foreign Office in 1920, which was not very different from the Ribbentrop-Molotov line of 1939. If all this was mildly reassuring on one level, on another it was not. Stalin’s reference to the Soviet Union, Poland and Britain deciding the future Polish-Soviet frontier was flatter¬ ing to Britain’s Great Power complex, but could imply joint 155

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

pressure on the Poles from the two stronger states. On another occasion, Stalin was even more explicit. In answer to a question from Eden about whether he had told the Poles his views on the Curzon Line, he replied: ‘No, but you can tell them it will be necessary.’8 Despite Sikorski’s visit Stalin simply could not conceive of relations between a strong and a weak power in any terms except those of the former dictating to the latter. The British, if they had been looking for it, had another insight into how Stalin would deal with the Soviet Union’s neighbours when he was triumphant. Polish relations with the Soviet Government were con¬ sistently tense between the brief honeymoon of Sikorski’s visit and the final break over the Katyn affair. To the British, the Polish standpoint was sometimes foolish and even out¬ rageous, and sometimes all too understandable, but in no case was Britain ready to take Poland’s side. The British rebuffed Polish overtures on a number of occasions. There was even one potential source of British-Polish discord in which the Russians were not involved. In January Eden categorically rejected an offer by Sikorski to place a member of the British Royal Family on the throne of a restored Polish monarchy. In June the British brusquely rejected a Polish request for a strengthened and extended version of the Anglo-Polish treaty of 1939 in the wake of the recently signed twenty-year Anglo-Soviet treaty. Earlier they had pointedly reminded the Poles that British obligations to them in regard to Russia were entirely moral, the AngloPolish alliance being explicitly directed against German aggression only.9 The potential source of British-Polish conflict in which, for once, the Soviet Union did not figure directly concerned the Polish Government’s wish to reduce the size of the Polish Jewish population by emigration. Sikorski told Eden that he would like a great many Polish Jews to be sent to a ‘highly industrialised’ Palestine. This would have posed a threat to Britain’s policy of keeping Palestine a pre¬ dominantly Arab country. Roberts hoped that at the end of the war as many pre-war Polish Jews as possible would be confined within the new frontiers of the Soviet Union ‘where Zionism is fortunately not encouraged’. It was another, 156

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

albeit gruesome, example of the lack of knowledge of what was going on in eastern Europe, obviously making the formulation of foreign policy more difficult, that the Foreign Office, and apparently also Sikorski, had so little idea of the fate which the Germans had started to mete out to the Polish Jews. Admittedly, their systematic extermination did not begin until a few months later, in the summer of 1942, but enormous numbers had already perished through illtreatment and random massacres. The Final Solution was to continue to escape the notice of the Foreign Office to some extent. As late as January 1944 their Poland expert, Frank Savery, was writing that half the Jews (1| million out of over 3 million in 1939) were still alive. In reality very few still survived by then.10 There were some problems of morale with the Polish forces in Britain, though in May 1942 it was reported that the transfer of many of them from Perth to barracks along the Anglo-Scottish border had produced a great improve¬ ment! Infinitely more serious was Polish anxiety about their missing officers in Russia. Roberts noted that it was a ‘burning question with the Poles’ and that Soviet prevarica¬ tion and professions of ignorance were ‘to say the least very odd and disingenuous’. Geoffrey Wilson had earlier made the, for him, characteristic comment that if any harm had befallen the officers the German invaders were very likely to blame. It is unlikely that many in the Foreign Office shared his view, but Clark Kerr was nevertheless forbidden from giving the Polish embassy in the Soviet Union any help in its approaches to the Russians to find the missing men.11 On what they saw as the main issue - frontiers - the Foreign Office moved slowly and reluctantly towards compensating Poland at the expense of Germany for what it had lost to Russia (see chapter 1). However, they noticed an alarming gap between their own thinking, which centred on the timing of an agreement giving the Soviet Union most of what it wanted, and Polish Great Power pretensions which envisaged not only the restoration of the Polish eastern frontier establish¬ ed by the treaty of Riga with the weak Soviet Union of 1921, but also accessions from Germany and the annexation of Lithuania, regarded by Stalin as an absolutely integral part

157

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of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Polish Government went further than this in January 1942 by telling the Soviet Government that they had a vital interest not only in Lithuania, but in the future of the other Baltic States, Latvia and Estonia, as well. This produced howls of derision, particularly from the Northern Department of the Foreign Office which handled relations with Russia but not with Poland, the responsibility of the Central Department. Dew of Northern found Polish pretensions ‘ridiculous’ and wished that they would reduce their ambitions ‘from the vaulting to the skipping level’. Their inability to realise that Britain, the United States and Russia were all-important made it likely that they would ‘suffer the same fate as the Bourbons whom they appear so closely to resemble’. Even Sargent, whose duties included keeping the peace between different sections of the Office, thought that the Poles were guilty of ‘sheer madness’, as did Eden. The Polish Government, evidently alarmed, withdrew its claim to Lithuania.12 As always, Sikorski stood out as a shining light. Warner, head of the Northern Department, spoke of Sikorski’s ‘wise policy’ of seeking co-operation with the Russians. He was prepared to say to Eden that he would accept large losses to Russia if Poland received East Prussia. Most exiled Polish politicians refused to discuss such a possibility in private any more than in public. However, even Sikorski was capable of being touched by megalomania, as when he told Roberts that he regarded the British Government’s decision to proceed with the treaty with Russia as a personal insult since he had advised them not to do so, at least for a time.13 It was clear that Sikorski’s position was not unassailable, and there was a tendency to poke fun at the Poles as politically prone to play ‘childish tricks’ (no matter how brave as allies in battle); a diplomat who had served in the British legation in Warsaw just after the First World War recalled that prominent members of society had shown their disapproval of the Curzon Line by refusing to dance at the British minister’s parties, while being willing to drink his champagne and eat his cold viands.14 By early 1942 the Foreign Office had already become firmly convinced that Poland must accept the Curzon Line, which was slightly 158

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

more favourable to it than the Ribbentrop-Molotov line of 1939, with, it was hoped, some minor concessions in its favour, especially around the city of L’vov (Polish Lwow), where the original line had in fact been left a blur. They saw this as not only politically inescapable but also as just in itself. In February 1942 Savery wrote that if Poland must have L'vov the frontier should run immediately to the east of the city on the grounds that the Ukrainian peasantry who made up the bulk of the population of the area hated the Poles deeply. A majority did not mean all the population, and Roberts remarked on the ‘unfortunate fact’ that large Polish enclaves appeared to have survived east of the Line.15 Since Britain envisaged compensation for Poland in the west which was small compared with what it was to lose in the east, British policy would have resulted inevitably in a much-reduced Polish state, which helps to explain the Foreign Office's profound wish for a Polish-Czechoslovak federation with a real chance of maintaining its indepen¬ dence of both Germany and Russia. During 1943 all hope of such a federation vanished. For this the British blamed primarily the Czech Government, and, accordingly, the issue is examined below in connection with British relations with Czechoslovakia. However, the Poles were not considered guiltless. The grandiose nature of Polish ambitions was regarded as providing the Czechs with both a reason and an excuse for their attitude. In January 1943 Sikorski talked extravagantly to Eden about a super-federation in eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Aegean, naturally under Polish leadership. Eden replied that if Polish-Czech and Yugoslav-Greek federations could be set up that would be quite sufficient to begin with.16 Sikorski’s death in an air accident on 4 July 1943 was seen as removing the one Pole with the statesmanship to stand a chance of negotiating without British help and supervision arrangements with the Soviet Union and Poland’s other east European neighbours. Sikorski had been head of both the political and military wings of the Polish war effort. The British Government had no objection to his successor as Prime Minister, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, but were dismayed by the choice of his military successor, General Sosnkowski, 159

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

an avowed Russophobe, whose appointment went through despite a personal plea from Churchill to the Polish Government to think again.17 The prospect that Poland would be friendless in post-war eastern Europe, together with the accident of Sikorski’s death, appeared to make it unlikely that Poland could be a major asset to any new balance of power in Europe. The British ceased to think that they could extract any political benefits from their relations with Poland, and, instead, those relations were increasingly seen as exclusively ones of moral obligation to an ally, though that factor had obviously been present since the earliest days of the alliance. The British tried to save the Poles from themselves by inducing them to concede Soviet frontier demands without delay and while, it was supposed, Stalin was still prepared to guarantee them their independence in return. Like typical liberals observing intransigent opponents, the Foreign Office dithered. In March 1943 Denis Allen noted that ‘a truly popular proSoviet government in Poland would be in our interests’, while adding that Stalin was doing everything possible to offend Polish national sentiment. In the same month Warner wrote that ‘as regards agreeing a solution of the SovietPolish frontier question with the Soviet Union and forcing it on the Poles, I take it that we should still feel that such a step should not be taken until it is forced upon us by events’. In July Cadogan was still describing the need for a frontier agreement as being ‘at the root of all the trouble’. This contrasted with Mikolajczyk’s conviction that recovery of the 1941 frontiers was only one of Stalin’s ambitions and that ‘his record and his whole mentality’ indicated con¬ clusively that he would want much more. In any case the Polish Government was completely intransigent about the sanctity of its pre-war frontiers, and talked about breaking off relations with Russia if Soviet actions continued to displease it.18 An event which might have been expected to give British politicians and officials pause to think was the Katyn affair, mentioned above. The discovery of the graves by the Germans and the announcement of the discovery in April 1943, the Soviet attempt to depict the corpses, initially, as 160

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

those of prehistoric men (complete with 1940 newspapers and Polish army greatcoats!) and, later, as victims of the German advance into Russia in 1941, and the Polish Government’s refusal to accept such a story without verifica¬ tion from a Red Cross mission led Russia to suspend (but not formally break off) diplomatic relations with the London Polish Government. Perhaps it is possible to agree with the high-ranking German official in occupied Russia who later asked, ‘What is Katyn compared with this?’ in relation to the wholesale extermination of the population of some areas in the name of ‘anti-partisan’ warfare.19 He was certainly at one with British and American officialdom, which showed a consistent desire to ignore or play down the affair that has continued ever since. On 19 April Eden told the War Cabinet that he was urging the Poles not to let ‘this incident’ divert them to the exclusion of everything else. Warner wrote that both Russians and Poles were behaving very badly. Those members of the Foreign Office who com¬ mented on the authenticity of the German allegations had little doubt that they were true, though that did not stop Oliver Harvey from being unsympathetic to the Poles. It was left to Owen O’Malley, British Ambassador to the London Poles, to be moved to moral indignation against the Soviet regime. Eden felt that O’Malley’s detailed report on Katyn was ‘explosive’ and also somewhat prejudiced. He and Churchill were anxious not to reveal its contents to Roosevelt, presumably fearing that his reaction might be too emotional or that it might leak to the press. (If they were animated by the former fear, they need not have worried. One of the last actions that Roosevelt took in his life was to order the suppression of an American officer’s report on Katyn in April 1945.)20 The Polish response to Katyn, if unfortunate, was at least very easy to understand. The Foreign Office failed to consider adequately the motivation behind Soviet actions. Although a total misfortune in a propaganda sense, Stalin may have regarded the episode as a welcome opportunity to reverse his ‘sentimental’ decision of 1941 to establish links with the anti-Communist Poles. Soviet-Polish diplomatic relations were nugatory long before April 1943, with the 161

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Polish embassy being prevented from doing virtually any useful work21 and there were many signs of Soviet pre¬ ference for the Union of Polish Patriots, a front organisation of Polish Communists and fellow-travelling puppets, and, in the military sphere, for a Polish Red Division which was being organised in the Soviet Union. In their calculations the Foreign Office for a long time underestimated Stalin’s readiness to rely on brute force in dealing with Poland; they would have benefited from pondering more the lessons of Katyn instead of trying to banish it from their minds. They preferred to believe that the Kremlin simply could not deny any authority to a government as strong in popular support as that of Poland in London unless driven to it by Polish intransigence on the frontier question. They also drew great comfort from what was seen as the utter weakness of Polish Communism. Never enjoying much support in their own country, even allowing for the repression to which they had been subjected, the exiled leaders of Polish Communism had almost all been liquidated in the Soviet purges of the late 1930s — a mini-Katyn unlamented by non-Communist Poles but now perhaps regretted by Stalin. Trying to think of a surviving Polish Communist of any note in the spring of 1943, O’Malley could think only of Wanda Wasilewska, ‘known before the war as a gifted Communist writer, but still more perhaps for her extravagant and dissolute life’. Polish Communism was thus dependent on ‘one unbalanced woman’, and there were also reasons for supposing that Russia was making up its Polish Red Division by using men from the Polish minority in the pre-1939 Soviet Union.22 Impelled, therefore, by a state of mind which was some¬ where between a determination to be optimistic and pure wishful thinking, Britain embarked on an active strategy to bring about a Soviet-Polish agreement on frontiers, to be followed by a resumption of diplomatic relations. Greatly daring, they proposed to ask Stalin to give the Poles L’vov, to which they manifestly attached special importance. How¬ ever, if Stalin proved adamant the city was to be his, chiefly because he would be in physical possession, though addi¬ tionally, contrary to Roberts’s fears early in 1942, new information indicated that the Germans had removed much

162

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

of its population, leaving the Polish element more than ever a minority amongst the surrounding Ukrainian peasantry.23 The Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers at the end of October appeared a good opportunity to try to implement this strategy. On 23 September Roberts wrote that it was definite Foreign Office policy to support an eastern Polish frontier based on the Curzon Line plus L’vov. The approval of the War Cabinet should be sought. That body considered the issue on 8 October. Churchill said that the Poles should be asked, but not forced, to endorse British views. Eden had to report that they had asked him not even to mention their eastern frontiers while he was in Moscow. The ministers also considered the future of the Polish resistance movement, the Home Army, after the Germans had been driven out. They displayed both realism and a sense of honour in deciding that while the Home Army should be urged to co-operate with the Soviet authorities, Britain and the United States should exert themselves to protect its members from victim¬ isation. It was also decided not to reveal to the Russians details of the campaign of sabotage and guerrilla activity which the Polish Resistance was waging, as had been con¬ sidered in order to impress upon the Russians the Poles’ value as allies, because of the danger that Resistance leaders who were identified would later be arrested or otherwise dealt with by the Soviet security police.24 The theme of burdensome but inescapable moral obli¬ gations to the Poles had now become constant. At the end of September Eden wrote that he felt ‘taken aback’ by the extent of British commitments to the Polish Government after reading a memorandum which his officials had drawn up on the subject. He found that in May 1942 he had signed a letter to the Polish Ambassador promising that: ‘In any negotiations with the Soviet Government, His Majesty’s Government intend fully to safeguard the position of their Polish Allies.’ He would clearly have had difficulty in convincing himself that a British-Soviet agreement on the Curzon Line, signed above the Poles’ heads, could be reconciled with the letter or spirit of that assurance. He complained all the more bitterly about Polish ‘cloud cuckooland’: ‘If Poles persist in this utter lack of realism, there will 163

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

be no Poland after the war and we shall be powerless to prevent this misfortune.’ Polish refusal to let the British negotiate on their behalf was all the more galling in view of the British conviction that they were defending Poland’s best interests. In October Allen wrote that an agreement on frontiers must not ‘merely become another Munich’, leading to the end of Polish independence. Roberts wrote that it was as impossible as it was in some ways superficially attractive to deny Poland any German territory or any territory at all desired by Russia, leaving the country ‘a rump state roughly equivalent to the present “General Government” [the notorious German administrative unit for central Poland]’.25 Roberts evidently had a great liking for the Poles, and was particularly anxious to establish that Britain was in no way betraying them. Earlier he remarked on the ‘stronger and healthier’ Polish state which would result from the jettison¬ ing of the Ukrainians and Byelorussians of the east, so that, ‘I cannot see that it is in any way morally indefensible to attempt to secure’ that result. To the more obvious benefit of the Poles, the Foreign Office became more willing to consider large accessions of German territory, despite a profound fear of the consequences in dealing with the Germans. In late September Harrison wrote that although the Poles should not be offered parts of Brandenburg (the province which included Berlin) and Pomerania, they might have such if they requested them themselves. Roberts thought that in their own best interests they should be discouraged from seeking more than they could settle and utilise, and should realise that a Soviet offer to give them, for instance, all of Germany east of the Oder would be intended to weaken, not strengthen, their restored state. They should remember Virgil’s warning, Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes ‘I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts’), substituting Russians for Greeks - surely an easy suspicion for Poles to assimilate.26 The Polish problem went unraised in any serious fashion at the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference in October, not surprisingly in view of Hull’s dismissal of it to Harriman as a ‘piddling little thing’. Discussion of it at Teheran was fairly abortive; as noted above, Roosevelt wished to leave it

164

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alone.27 Churchill did bring up Poland at his conversations with Stalin on 28 November and 1 December, but only to make remarks unlikely to offend the Soviet leader about the appalling intransigence of the London Poles, and that if Poland was moved bodily westwards, the Poles would then have ‘a fine place to live’ so that he was not prepared to ‘break his heart’ or ‘make a great squawk’ about L’vov. Stalin and Molotov can only have been left with the impres¬ sion that Roosevelt and Churchill did not care about Poland - true in the case of the former.28 On Boxing Day Roberts, hard at work, pleaded against a de facto abandonment of the Poles, for instance by urging them to enter on Russian terms into an enlarged version of the recent Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty. Eden reassured him: ‘Assuredly I do not want to throw the poor Poles to the Russian wolves. That was never in my thought, even though my power to help them may be limited.’29 The Polish problem entered into high-gear in British foreign policy in 1944, with even friends of the Poles adopting the attitude that Britain could support them only within certain limits. Churchill heavily involved himself, and proved the most reluctant figure of all to abandon the cause of a free Poland. By their intransigence on frontiers the London Poles weakened their case, and made it impossible for the British to get any real idea of Stalin’s ultimate intentions towards their country. Early in 1944 the Soviet army advanced into territory which it had first seized from Poland in 1939, and which,' of course, it now treated as Soviet soil. Recognising that this alone made the Polish problem urgent, and perhaps impressed by Russian military achievement, Pierson Dixon wrote some reflections in his diary in February: It is obvious that no Englishman is going to war with Russia or even to risk imperilling relations, for Poland. The English do not feel warmly about Poles, as they do about a few other foreign states, notably Greece. Realism tells us that Poland is too far off for any help of ours to be effective and Poland, as a continental power, does not excite the same sympathies in English breasts 165

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

as does an island power like Greece, with whom we have clear and deeply-felt affinities. Thus in offering to underwrite the Curzon Line solution we are going a good deal further than our public opinion would expect. The more reasonable of the Poles seem to recognise this, but the national urge to suicide is strong. Owen O’Malley is inclined to talk of another crime committed towards Poland. But the only crime - the crime of the 18th century - would be partition. The consensus is clear: if we offer to back what seems to us a reasonable solution and go no further even if the alternative is the absorption of Poland into the U.S.S.R.30 It is not really clear that the ‘British public’ were so pro-Greek and indifferent to Poland, after five years of Anglo-Polish alliance, as Dixon thought, but it is more certain that their patience with the Poles would have been limited in the event of a public clash between the British and Polish Governments. The British Ambassador to the latter, O’Malley - who was in a somewhat artificial position from being resident in London - came in for severe criticism from his Foreign Office colleagues for taking a Polish view of east European problems. However, to be just, Clark Kerr in Moscow did not enhance his own standing in the Office by seeming, as Roberts put it in April, ‘to take the whole question of recognition and our obligations towards Poland very light-heartedly’. There was real admiration for Polish heroism both in the case of the troops and airmen serving alongside the British forces, and among the mass of the Polish people who were known to be offering great resis¬ tance to an exceptionally brutal German occupation regime. The British received a number of reports during 1944 that the Germans, including the ‘Governor-General’, Hans Frank, were trying to win over the Poles by offering to restore independence so that joint resistance could be offered against the westward advance of the Russians. Although Polish rejection of such alleged overtures was natural enough in view of the fact that they were burning with hatred against an enemy who was, in any case, staring 166

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

defeat in the face, such rejection was clearly a continuation of attitudes maintained during much darker days. When someone made a careless reference to ‘Polish quislings’, Roberts tersely corrected him: ‘There are none.’31 As evidence continued to mount of the brilliant intransi¬ gence of Polish nationalism and of the existence of an elaborate ‘secret state’ operating under the noses of the Germans, the Foreign Office increased its hopes that Stalin’s well-known caution would force him to think about the wisdom of incurring the enmity of a nation with such a proven capacity to be a thorn in the flesh of its oppressors. They seem not to have considered the lessons of RussoPolish relations before the Bolshevik Revolution, including what Edward Crankshaw has described as the Russian propensity to think that between Russia and Poland there could be no mutally satisfactory compromises, that Poland had to suffer in the interests of Russian greatness and security.32 These lessons were surely relevant in 1944 and 1945 with Russia under Stalin developing in many ways into a caricature of Tsarism. At all events, Eden and Churchill began 1944 in a mood of impatience with the Poles. The Foreign Secretary endorsed a statement by one of his officials that Poland could no longer hope for L’vov. On 6 January he wrote to Churchill that there was much ‘public impatience’ with the Poles for not responding to Russian victories with political concessions. On the contrary, Romer, their Foreign Minis¬ ter, had just told him that they were ‘far from acceptance’ of the Curzon Line plus L’vov, and would never yield the latter. Dixon noted in his diary that the Prime Minister now thought that he had ‘taken a nine-foot plank to bridge a ten-foot stream’ by not ‘persuading’ the Poles that they had to accept the Curzon Line. However, Prime Minister and Foreign Office had been inclined to forget that the Soviet Union had made two sets of complaints against the Polish Government; frontiers were one, the composition of that Government was the other, introduced when the Katyn recriminations started. The second might be more funda¬ mental to Moscow. If so:

167

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It means that the Russians are determined to have a puppet Polish Government of their own appointing, which will be amenable to them in all things, e.g. stationing Russian troops and airforce in Poland after the peace. If it is the second, obviously we shall get nowhere in settling the present dispute, as the Russians can always find pretexts not to deal with the Polish Government. Such doubts were largely set aside. A week later Eden and Dixon agreed that it would be necessary to find some way of ‘beguiling’ Stalin into making arrangements fair to Poland. Nothing was said about doing the same with the Poles. An opinion in late February by the Foreign Office legal adviser, Malkin, that Britain could not legally recognise changes in the pre-1939 Soviet-Polish frontier without Polish consent must have been embarrassing news, but it did not stop Roberts from writing that ‘a direct Anglo-Soviet deal with¬ out any semblance of Polish participation’ might be needed. Eden commented: ‘I can see little present prospect of an Anglo-Russian deal about Poland without, or with, Polish participation.’33 Churchill, at this point, recognised that his direct interven¬ tion would be needed if there was to be any chance at all of reaching a Polish-Soviet compromise. Perhaps rather oddly, the issue on which he sought special guidance from the Foreign Office was that of responsibility for the Katyn murders, albeit ‘merely to ascertain the facts, because we should none of us ever speak a word about it’. When O’Malley sent a report which, in strong language, set out an overwhelming case for Soviet guilt, Churchill ordered that the very restricted number of people on its circulation list should receive it ‘in a sealed box’. Dixon thought that Churchill might be preparing to abandon the Poles. He wrote in his diary that it was unfortunate that the Prime Minister should be so mealy-mouthed with the Russians, failing to see that they were unmoved by ‘courteous remon¬ strances and rather feeble jokes’. The truth was contrary to this impression. At lunch with the Polish leaders in London the day after Dixon made this private entry, Churchill was 168

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

neither mealy-mouthed nor in an abandoning mood. He told them that if they would not accept ‘Stalin’s offer of a Poland between the Curzon Line and the Oder’, plus reorganisation of their Government, he would develop Anglo-Soviet rela¬ tions without further reference to them. The Poles very grudgingly agreed to consider acceding to the bulk of Soviet demands if they were allowed to keep L’vov.34 Yet Churchill’s bark was always worse than his bite in his dealings with the Poles. In his treatment of Katyn he had merely learnt a lesson, which Ernest Bevin was later to have to learn painfully, that certain subjects were taboo in talks with Soviet leaders. His genuine anxiety to help the Poles was shown by his suggestion to Eden at the end of March that Britain might accept a tripartite administration in the future liberated areas of western Europe if Russia would concede the same in the east, chiefly because ‘It would be of immense advantage if we had a say in the treatment to be meted out to liberated Poland.’35 However, at that time Churchill did not feel able to make a move, feeling the need to await a meeting with Stalin, and, preferably, some indication of American readiness to sup¬ port him. The Foreign Office turned their attention to encouraging a change in the composition of the Polish Government both to meet a stated Soviet wish and to remove those whose intransigence on frontiers was total. The matter took on urgency in view of the fact that Polish Communism (naturally using front organisations) was seen to be acquiring a more than negligible life of its own. A Communist ‘National Council for the Homeland’ (NCH) was set up clandestinely in Warsaw in late 1943, and there was already a ‘Union of Polish Patriots’ (UPP) in the Soviet Union. While the Foreign Office knew little about either body it was impressed by what it heard about the Polish Red Division there.36 It seemed likely that Stalin would grant these people some sort of role as soon as his armies had crossed the Curzon Line, as indeed was to happen in late July. Hence the attraction of replacing any outgoing right¬ wingers from the London Government by one or two UPP men; or women, since Clark Kerr recommended Wanda Wasilewska on the grounds that she was ‘boisterously 169

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Polish’. (Her current marriage to the ‘Foreign Minister’ of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic which laid claim to much of pre-war Poland also made her the subject of a joke among the Western community in Moscow: varying the words of a popular wartime song, they had her husband singing to her, ‘I can give you anything but L’vov, baby’.) Apart from political objections to her candidacy, Roberts questioned whether many Poles would wish Wanda, whose sex-life was reputed to be that of a nymphomaniac, to be thought of as a representative of their nation.37 There were tantalising signs that Stalin would be ready to be reasonable over Poland if the Poles would settle with him over frontiers, most notably the reception which he gave in the early spring to the Polish-born American professor, Oskar Lange. Many in the Office joined Geoffrey Wilson in feeling optimistic. On 31 May Warner wrote about the mounting evidence ‘that the Russians want in their neigh¬ bourhood left-wing regimes genuinely on good terms with Russia rather than Communist regimes imposed upon unwill¬ ing peoples’. Harvey wrote on 11 June that Stalin wanted ‘not a Communist Poland but a kind of bourgeois Socialist Poland with no big estates’. The British were also mentally transforming Mikolajczyk into a new Sikorski. Harvey, again, wrote in May: .‘Mikolajczyk is clearly the chief hope of effecting a reconciliation with Stalin and the Polish Patriots. It is gratifying that he enjoys such prestige.’38 In late July the NCH-UPP set itself up as an administra¬ tive body with the title Committee of National Liberation it was soon to be known as the Lublin Committee and later Government from the city where it sat - following the Red Army’s advance into territory which the Soviet Government recognised as Polish. Russia gave it a limited measure of recognition, falling well short of treating it as a government, and invited the London Government to send a negotiating delegation to Moscow, presumably in response to statements by Mikolajczyk to western newspapers that he would be prepared to make such a journey. Mikolajczyk actually wanted to withdraw this informal offer after the setting up of the CNL, but Eden dissuaded him. He went to Moscow in early August. This coincided with the early stages of the 170

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

heroic Warsaw rising, which was an attempt by the London Government’s Home Army to seize the city as Soviet forces approached. The liberation of the capital by Poles, not Russians, would then have been an immense asset in trying to ensure that one set of conquerors was not replaced by another. The rising made curiously little impression on British officials. Dixon wrote in his diary on 7 August: ‘The Polish rising in Warsaw was set off without any consultation with us or the Russians. We can’t help and the Russians won’t - leaving the Poles in their habitual tragic situation.’ Roberts thought it ‘rather odd’ that the Russians were not giving more help but supposed that there were valid opera¬ tional reasons for it. Their attitude to the rising was like that of later ‘revisionist’ historians, except that the latter have interpreted Stalin’s indifference to the fate of the insurgents as justifiable on political as well as military grounds. At the end of 1944, in a retrospective look at the Soviet attitude to the rising, Allen wrote that the Russians had ample military grounds for their passivity, but that those were reinforced by questionable political motives.39 In Moscow in October Churchill was to accept ‘absolutely’ Stalin’s assurances that he would have liked to do more for the rising, which had by then just ended. The dictator told a different tale to the American and British Ambassadors, Harriman and Clark Kerr; he had withheld aid, for instance by the Russian air force, because he was convinced that the Warsaw insurgents’ motives were anti-Soviet. Since the end of the rising he had discovered that they were really antiGerman. He therefore regretted that he had not given more help. Harriman remained ‘shattered’ by the Soviet attitude to the rising.40 While the rising was going on the Foreign Office were more interested in Mikolajczyk’s talks with Stalin, which they found fairly encouraging though they railed against his colleagues in London for sending him messages which they considered deliberately intended to sabotage the Prime Minister’s mission. After he returned they made a major and successful effort to secure the dismissal of the Polish Commander-in-Chief, Sosnkowski, whose orders to his troops were frequently couched in anti-Soviet terms and,

171

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adding insult to injury as Eden noted, were sometimes critical of the British High Command. He was replaced by General Bor, the commander in Warsaw itself, a change which, however, failed to meet with Soviet approval.41 At his meetings with Stalin in October Churchill made a major effort to wrest concessions on Poland. He tried to make a marriage between two unwilling partners, wielding a British shotgun which everyone knew to be unloaded. A message which he sent to Harry Hopkins was eloquent: ‘under dire threats from us we persuaded Mikolajczyk and the Poles to accept the invitation we had extracted from the Russians.’ Stalin’s attitude to Poland was even more ambiguous than usual at the conference, and the intransigent attitude of the London Poles made it impossible for Churchill to pin him down. The Soviet dictator did at least make it clear that the Polish Communists must play a large, even if not predominant, role; at the same time, perhaps out of sheer mischievousness, he took pleasure in demonstrating his utter contempt for these men, his own proteges. Con¬ cerning the Polish Communists, different British observers differed only as to how to express the superlative of the word bad to describe them. To Churchill’s interpreter, Birse, such men as Bierut and the fellow-travelling Osobka-Morawski, who was ostensibly a Socialist, produced an impression after a visit to the British embassy which ‘could not have been worse’. To Dixon, meeting them with superstitious symbol¬ ism on Friday the 13th, ‘These gentlemen made the worst impression and confirmed all our surmises that they were Russian stooges scraped up for the purpose.’ On Churchill himself they made ‘the worst possible impression’. Churchill and Dixon particularly had in mind a surrealistic meeting with Stalin and the ‘Lublin Poles’ at which Bierut made a passionate plea for Soviet territorial aspirations, while Osobka-Morawski made a long boring speech. ‘Stalin kept looking at Churchill’, wrote Birse, ‘and smiling mischiev¬ ously; Eden looked incredibly bored; only Molotov sat immovable, listening.’ Finally, Churchill got up and made a clatter with the tea-cups to drown Osobka’s voice. Stalin burst into laughter and said that the meeting was over.42 This experience no doubt strengthened Churchill’s deter172

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

mination to try to ensure the return of the London Govern¬ ment to Poland after the war. The next day he urged on the Poles the merits of his plans by which Stalin would allow a largely non-Communist Polish government in return for the London Poles' acceptance of the Curzon line. Dixon wrote that Churchill saw Mikolajczyk and Romer and ‘beat them up' to no avail. Meeting Stalin again only minutes later, the Prime Minister obtained his assent to the formula. This was followed by nearly four hours of late-night conversations with Mikolajczyk in the sitting-room of the British embassy with dim lights and a blazing wood fire, and the Ambassador present in pyjamas and dressing-gown. Having become better acquainted with the non-Communist Poles, Dixon now sympathised with them remarkably in the light of his readiness to dismiss them nine months earlier. He wrote in his diary: ‘It is no easy thing to have to tell your people that the basis of the settlement is the loss of a large part of their country in return for a slab of Germany which they may well only be able to digest at the cost of placing themselves deeply under Russian protection.’43 Churchill was actually less sympathetic. The discussion was resumed the next day when the Prime Minister ‘stormed’ at the Poles for insisting that they had to have L’vov, Eden having asked Stalin for the city and, as expected, been refused. He may also have been angered by the fact that the Poles were offering nothing in return for his telling them that they could have the great port of Stettin on the west side of the mouth of the Oder. This contradicted almost hysterical Foreign Office advice against giving Poland too much German territory, and was presumably intended as a supreme concession for giving up L’vov. The discussions on Poland drew to a close on a note of shrill Polish intransigence which effectively did Stalin’s work for him. To quote Dixon’s diary again: ‘Mikolajczyk’s peasant hardihood much to the fore. However much we cajoled and stormed he sat unruffled and said “Lwow”. Our doubt was whether they would settle even for Lwow, since fundamen¬ tally the bar is that they mistrust the Russians and don’t want a settlement.’44 Talks with the Polish Government were resumed in 173

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

London, with Churchill urging the Poles to take advantage of ‘the friendly atmosphere created in Moscow’ which would otherwise ‘cool’. The outcome was an intransigent refusal to accept the Curzon Line which led to Mikolajczyk’s resigna¬ tion, and the virtual writing off by Britain of the London Government, which, with futile sulkiness, professed the absurd view that the United States was a better friend to it than Britain had ever been. (Yet Roosevelt had forbidden the American Ambassador in Moscow from making any kind of protest about Stalin’s treatment of the Warsaw insurgents and, following his re-election, was flatly refusing any form of American guarantee for Poland.)45 Stalin could afford to present himself as a patient - but not inexhaustibly patient - elder statesman as far as Poland was concerned. In November he observed to Churchill that, ‘In regard to Polish problems it must be admitted that Mr Mikolajczyk is losing a lot of valuable time and thereby diminishing his chances.’ By 9 December he was informing Churchill that ‘Ministerial changes in the emigre Government no longer deserve seri¬ ous attention.’ Churchill’s later efforts to salvage something for the Poles were to be made without reference to the London Government. The only wonder is that he did not banish Poland from his thoughts altogether like Dixon, who wrote in his diary on 15 December: ‘We none of us really wanted to think about Poland when Greece is so much in the forefront of our minds.’ Churchill was greatly concerned with Greece at that particular time, but was to make another major effort over Poland at the Yalta Conference.46 Before turning to the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences and the events of 1945, another issue in connection with Poland deserves attention - the country’s future western frontier, which the British expected, mistakenly as matters turned out, to play a vital part in ensuring or denying peace to Europe. They, and especially the Foreign Office, spoke with two voices. To the Polish Government, by the autumn of 1944, they offered as much territory up to the river Oder as Poland might itself lay claim to, if only it would accept the Curzon Line in the east. Among themselves they expressed dismay at the prospect of an Oder frontier for Poland, 174

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

which, wrote Allen in January, would ‘create the worst possible basis for a lasting peace in Central Europe’. Har¬ vey’s hope, as late as February 1944, that Poland could be denied any German territory at alb was as unrealistic as it was ungenerous to a staunch ally. Stalin’s statement at the Teheran Conference that the Soviet Union was to annex Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, worried the Foreign Office who were still hoping in late 1943 that Poland would make do with East Prussia and no more than rectifications of the frontier with Germany proper, chiefly in Silesia where Polish influences were, or had been, strong. Churchill’s Moscow mission produced a readiness to accept Soviet annexation of Konigsberg, coupled with only the most grudging acquiescence to large Polish gains from the main body of German territory. As before, besides ‘lasting peace in central Europe’, the officials remained deeply concerned about the probable opposition of British public opinion to the policy of the ‘clean sweep’ (see section II below) by which it was expected that the inhabitants of the transferred territories would be expelled from their homes.47 One reason for upholding the London Government for so long was that it was relatively impervious to Stalin’s territor¬ ial baits in the west - in Moscow in August 1944, he offered Mikolajczyk vast areas west of the Oder, including Stettin, Frankfurt-on-Oder and Breslau. Whether they were at last losing hope of recovering the eastern provinces or whether they thought that colossal accessions of German territory were simply their due after the replica of Dante’s Inferno to which the Germans had reduced their country, the London Poles in late 1944 were coming round to the idea of such accessions. This may have contributed to their eclipse from the British official mind. As Roberts put it in October: British public opinion has already reacted most unfavourably to the idea that Poland should stretch to the Oder, and we shall have our work cut out reconcil¬ ing British public opinion even to the lesser compensa¬ tion favoured by His Majesty’s Government and the Polish Government. Shortly after this the latter body moved away from ‘lesser 175

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

compensation’. As noted, in Moscow Churchill offered the Poles an Oder frontier and the port of Stettin to its west. The Foreign Office regarded this as revocable. In November Allen stated the hope that Britain would spin out for as long as possible the question of Poland’s western frontier ‘in the hope that the Poles will not feel able to claim all of this territory after the war.’ Harvey - no friend of the Poles suggested that they should be told that if their territorial demands were ‘excessive’ they should expect no British support against Germany in any future conflict. Sargent fully agreed: ‘We shall, I suspect, when the time comes, want to whittle down to the minimum the transfer of German territories to Poland.’ Taking it for granted that the Germans would be irredentist, and more so as time went by, Sargent continued: ‘The agitations would, as time went on, become increasingly difficult to counter, and would in the end arouse, I suspect, a good deal of sympathy in this country and America. It might well sow the seeds of another war.’ The chief consequence for Poland would be decline into a Russian protectorate: It is a thousand pities that the Poles should have fallen into this trap - for trap I am sure it is - merely because it flatters their wish to be a Great Power and because they think that if they own the requisite number of square miles they can qualify for this role. Eden hoped that the Poles would show moderation but did not expect it ‘for they are a light-headed people’. Only Cadogan thought that most of his colleagues were being too alarmist. The most alarmist suggestion of all (though for Poland, not Britain) came from Miss A.F.C. Gatehouse of the Foreign Office German Department; in the face of German irredentism Russia might ultimately flinch from a new war and partition the entire country yet again.48 So it was that, in response to a remarkable request from one of his officials for an assurance that he shared their views on the German-Polish frontier question, Eden wrote at the end of the year that their misgivings: ... are certainly shared by me and have been expressed 176

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

to the Prime Minister. It was as a result of Prime Minister [sic] that abortive Moscow agreement was only permissive and not mandatory so far as extension of territory to Oder was concerned. In conversation I was definitely at pains to show Russia my lack of enthusiasm for the boundary and exclaimed at any suggestion of further extension. This was once made, I think, by Stalin. Yet at the same time the Soviet Union was burning its bridges as far as second thoughts on giving Poland no less than a quarter of pre-war Germany were concerned by publicly pronouncing in favour of a frontier along the Oder and one of the Neisse rivers. The British were determined to oppose Stalin despite the probability that he would interpret their insistence on only small German-Polish frontier changes as evidence of an intention to use Germany against Russia in the future.49 On the last day of 1944 the Lublin Committee proclaimed itself the Provisional Government of Poland; the Soviet Union recognised it a few days later after ‘studying’ the matter. The Home Army and the other organs of the London Government became officially illegal in Soviet eyes, and their members liable to arrest and punishment. The Foreign Office were naturally unimpressed by these cynical manoeuvres. On 13 January Warner described as ‘nauseat¬ ing’ a report from The Times Moscow correspondent, Ralph Parker, because of its favourable remarks on the Lublin Government. Some days later he commented that the Lublin regime rested exclusively on the Soviet security police, the NKVD. However, the Foreign Office were from the first resigned to dealing with Lublin, painful as the prospect might be. At lunch on 22 January Eden tried gently to tell Mikolajczyk, no longer Prime Minister, that Stalin was not now prepared to consider admitting a broadened London Government back to Poland. The British already thought that the best which might be achieved would be a broaden¬ ing of Lublin to include some London elements. Meanwhile some thought was already being given to finding homes in 177

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the Dominions or the United States (but not in Britain itself) for the numerous Polish emigres who supported the London Government, on the assumption that post-war conditions in their country would be such that many of them would not wish to return. Cadogan sadly reflected that the London Poles, in the classic phrase, had ‘missed the bus’, and that any Soviet concessions to them would be temporary and cosmetic.50 All this made German-Polish frontier prospects less san¬ guine since any possibility of Lublin moderation on the subject could be discounted. (Early in February the BBC monitoring service reported the Communist Polish radio as saying that the future frontier should be thirty kilometres west of the Oder and Western Neisse rivers.) The Foreign Office began to think that they might have to accept at least Polish annexation of the two huge salients of German territory - Silesia in the south and Pomerania in the north which would have given Poland as short a frontier as the Oder-Neisse one while displacing millions fewer Germans.51 As in treatment of other aspects of their work, only a brief outline will be offered here of the Polish question at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences.52 At Yalta Stalin displayed enormous skill in argument, while playing from the strong hand which resulted from Soviet occupation of most of the country, to prevent the Conference from tying his hands over Poland. He agreed to ‘use his influence’ with the Lublin Poles to get them to agree to the admission of some ministers drawn from the London exiles. A committee of the British and American Ambassadors in Moscow and Molotov would monitor this process of broadening, and eventually consider the possibility of sending observers to the elections which Stalin promised for the near future. The Curzon Line was accepted, but, under instructions from the War Cabinet which the Foreign Office supported, Churchill would not agree to the Oder-Western Neisse frontier, though Poland was to receive ‘substantial accessions of territory in the north and west’. In March the Soviet authorities arrested sixteen members of the anti-German resistance, to whom they had given safe-conducts. Many, including Eden, were really shocked 178

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

by this infamy when it became known several weeks later, the more so as it coincided with opposition by Molotov, in the Moscow committee on Poland established under the Yalta provisions, to the admissiop of foreign observers, ostensibly because of exquisite Soviet concern for the rights and feelings of the Poles; they were a proud people, said Molotov, and it would ‘sting the national pride of the Poles to the quick’ to have foreigners watching what they were doing.53 Harriman made great efforts after Yalta to convince his President that Poland mattered to the United States efforts which were doomed while Roosevelt lived, but much more successful under Truman, who was receptive to the advice of the experienced Ambassador in Moscow and of others who urged a firm line with Russia. Truman’s famous meeting with Molotov in May, in which the President gave the Foreign Minister a severe dressing-down, was primarily intended to extract concessions beneficial to Poland. When this failed to produce any change in Soviet policy, Truman tried conciliation, sending Harry Hopkins, who had been associated with Roosevelt’s compliant attitude towards Soviet aspirations in eastern Europe, to Moscow to discuss, primarily, Poland. Stalin agreed to the inclusion of Mikolajczyk and five other non-Communists in the Polish Govern¬ ment, but refused to free the arrested resistance fighters. Mikolajczyk flew to Warsaw via Moscow, telling Harriman that he expected to be executed once he had served his purpose.54 Between Yalta and Potsdam, both before and during the phase of active American interest in Poland which followed Roosevelt’s death, Churchill made strenuous efforts of his own to make the Yalta provisos on Poland work. These efforts were by no means a case of going through motions which were expected to have no result. One reason which Churchill gave the Americans in his famous pleas against withdrawal to the zonal boundaries in Germany without getting something in return was that to do so ‘would place a broader gulf of territory between us and Poland, and practi¬ cally end our power to influence her fate’.55 At Potsdam, however, Churchill seemed resigned to a Communist Poland, and concentrated on seeking assurances that it 179

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would be tolerant and welcoming to members of the London Polish Government’s army who wished to return home. By that time his deeply-felt bitterness against the Oder-Neisse frontier may have soured his attitude towards all Poles, and not merely the Communists.56 While all this was going on the Foreign Office worried about an explosion of popular anger, which never actually came, alleging British ‘betrayal’ of Poland, and what could be done to counteract it;57 while trying to disengage from its close wartime association with Poles and the Polish problem. In July, for instance, they told the War Office that they had no interest in evidence of Soviet ‘atrocities’ against ‘indigen¬ ous civilians’ in Poland or elsewhere in eastern Europe.58 At Potsdam the British had little option but to profess to find the Stalin-Hopkins agreement on the composition of the Polish Government satisfactory. The chief Polish topic at the conference was the western frontier, which Truman virtually accepted; Britain still opposed it, but Attlee and Bevin were in no position to do anything to change it. Settling in as Foreign Secretary, Bevin’s initial public stand was that the Polish problem had been solved (with reservations about the western frontier), and that the Polish emigres should go home, though any idea of using the instrument of compul¬ sory repatriation was ruled out.59

II Czechoslovakia Poland and Czechoslovakia were both victims of German aggression. There the similarity ended, in the eyes of British officials. Whereas the Poles and Russians were traditionally, and as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact more than ever, hostile to one another, Russophile sentiments were strong in Czechoslovakia, at least among the dominant Czechs, and had been enhanced by the Soviet offer to stand by Czecho¬ slovakia in 1938 if France would do so. In addition, whereas the territorial debate in regard to Poland and Germany concerned how much of the latter Poland should be allowed to absorb, in the case of Czechoslovakia the question in British eyes was how much of pre-Munich Czechoslovakia

180

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post-war Germany should keep. There was little feeling that Britain owed the Czechs anything for their treatment at Munich, or for Britain’s inability to do anything when Hitler completed the destruc¬ tion of the state in March 1939, with its division into a nominally independent Slovak state and a German ‘Protec¬ torate’ of Bohemia and Moravia, comprising the Czech areas which remained after Munich. Not until 18 July 1941 did Britain recognise the Czech Government-in-exile of the former President, Benes, and then chiefly because the Soviet Union had done so, creating the danger that pro-Russian sentiment in Czechoslovakia would exceed all bounds. In January 1942 Roberts described this danger as ‘the decisive element in the decision of His Majesty’s Government to give full recognition to the Czech Government last July’. On the eve of recognition Makins described it as an insignificant step beside the question of who was to win the war in that part of eastern Europe and liberate the Czechs from Nazi rule. In the one east European country where support for them was strong and genuine, the Foreign Office never doubted that the Soviet Union would seek to maximise that support. In late June 1941 Roberts wondered whether the Czech Government itself, under Benes, might enter into the Soviet orbit, or whether the Soviet leaders might install ‘Communist puppets of their own’.60 The British had at best mixed feelings, not only for the Czech Government but also for the Czech people under German occupation. In August 1942 Strang quoted a description of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as ‘the Eldorado of the occupied territories’ before Heydrich’s assassination, and favourable German treatment of the Czechs was attributed to what was seen as the fact that most of them were working, if unenthusiastically, for the German war effort. German atrocities in the early summer of 1942 in revenge for the assassination of the Nazi ‘Protector’, Heydrich, of whom Hitler had been very fond, including the destruction of the village of Lidice and the annexation of yet more Czech territory to the German Reich, caused a momentary wave of sympathy for the Czechs. Cadogan wrote: ‘I hope Heydrich suffered during the days when he 181

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

was dying.’ This mood soon passed. In November 1942 Roberts noted that the food ration in the Protectorate, alone in occupied Europe, had recently been increased. There was a feeling that the Czechs had responded to German repres¬ sion not with defiance 'but with capitulation.61 With the Czech Government, the British found almost every conceivable fault except collaboration with Germany. Perhaps the greatest sin was their wish to develop a special relationship with the Soviet Union, and not with Poland, as Britain wanted (and as the Poles also wanted, though on Polish terms and under Polish leadership). The British wished ardently during this middle phase of the war for federations in eastern Europe (see above, pp. 98-9 and 105-7), and for none more than one between Poland and Czechoslovakia. On 19 January 1942 the two exile Govern¬ ments signed a preliminary agreement for a post-war confed¬ eration, which was at least a beginning. Four days later, presumably in response to a message from Moscow that the Soviet Government did not like this treaty, the Czech Foreign Minister, Hubert Ripka, said in a broadcast that the future of Czech-Polish relations would be dependent on Poland achieving good relations with the Soviet Union.62 The British were furious since few things could be more likely to make Stalin less ready to come to terms with the Polish Government than such a clear statement that Poland’s southern neighbour preferred Moscow to Warsaw. Indeed, although Eden had presented the idea of federations in eastern Europe to Stalin as a barrier against renewed German aggression, and though some adherence to this notion was paid in internal discussion, one purpose of a Polish-Czech federation was seen from the first as the containment of Soviet power. The British regarded Benes as well-intentioned but as ‘too clever by half (Sir John Wheeler-Bennett), thinking that he could adroitly extract verbal and paper guarantees from Stalin, which would restore Czech independence and democracy after the war. In fact, Benes seems to have been curiously naive in his readiness to trust Stalin, a trust which he did not extend to his own Czech Communists. That was not how the Foreign Office saw it; obsessed with his own infallibility, their 182

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

indictment continued, he did not realise that only unity and strength were at all likely to hold Stalin back. Besides being foolishly indifferent to the fate of his neighbours, Benes was held to have an unfortunate mannej. To quote Makins, ‘A man who repels the slightest hint of criticism, and who claims to have been invariably right is apt to weary his would-be allies.’63 Criticism of Benes and Ripka reached a shrill crescendo in the late spring of 1942 when, encouraged by some friendly words from Molotov during the latter’s visit to Britain, Benes started making unilateral approaches to Moscow for a treaty on the lines of the just-concluded Anglo-Soviet treaty. Again Benes may have been a little naive in not seeing how the British could really object to such an arrangement, and he seems to have been ill-informed in that for some time the British did not tell him about their informal agreement with Molotov against either country making bilateral agreements with other European states (see above pp. 98-9). On the other hand, he must have known that he was negating any hope of close co-operation with Poland, to which his British hosts attached so much importance. In June Makins pro¬ nounced Benes and Ripka guilty of ‘the purest folly’ in allowing relations with the Polish Government to decline to a point where Ripka was accusing Sikorski of being insane. (As Eden quickly reaffirmed, Sikorski, far from being insane, was ‘probably the best Poland can do’. In fairness to Ripka, it should be said that Sikorski seems to have been less balanced in his dealings with the Czechs than with the Russians.’)64 The two exile governments were locked in a bitter dispute about the possession of what to the British was a very remote and unimportant piece of territory, a town called Teschen and its surrounding area, which Poland had annexed from Czechoslovakia in late 1938 with German approval as, in effect, part of the Munich settlement. The exiled politicians behaved childishly. At a luncheon for Molotov during his British visit Benes and the Polish Foreign Minister distracted the other guests by telling them how very important it was that his own country should possess Teschen. Provocatively, the Polish Government was 183

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to couple a message of congratulation to the Czechs in August on the British repudiation of Munich with a state¬ ment that there was naturally no connection between Munich and their acquisition of Teschen. Characteristically, the Foreign Office were loath to admit that the Poles were sorely trying the Czechs’ patience.65 On the central issue of Soviet-Czech-Polish relations, some of Eden’s officials showed incipient signs of mental eccentricity towards Benes and the Czech Government. Makins found Benes ‘not above hinting at the use of a little political blackmail’ (for which statement Eden mildly rebuked him, not accepting that it was true); while Roberts wrote that the Czech Government thought that because they were, in their own opinion, a model democracy they were entitled to everything they wanted.66 The Foreign Secretary himself was to work hard and, for a time, with some success, to persuade Benes to keep the Russians at arm’s length. Perhaps his major asset was the importance which Benes attached to a complete British repudiation of the Munich Agreement and to British endorsement of his idea of expelling the bulk of the huge German minority from a restored Czechoslovakia. When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939 there had been no question of repudiating the Munich Agreement. At first, while British policy towards a negotiated peace with Germany had some flexibility, there was readiness to let Germany keep much of the territory annexed at Munich because its population was predominantly, and in some cases almost wholly, German. Even when the readiness to con¬ sider a negotiated peace waned their attitude to the future of the Sudetenland did not change with it. British recognition of the Czech Provisional Government in July 1941 con¬ tained no repudiation of Munich. In September the Foreign Office were annoyed when the Czechs congratulated Britain on the Churchill-Roosevelt Atlantic Declaration in terms which implied that it would entail the restoration of Czecho¬ slovakia to its full pre-Munich frontiers; the Foreign Office accepted nothing of the sort. Soon Stalin was to come to the Czechs’ assistance. In Moscow in December 1941 he had told Eden that it was unthinkable that Germany should be 184

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

allowed to retain any of its Munich gains. (Yet at the Comintern school in the Soviet Union which Wolfgang Leonhard attended in 1942 the Russians had set up separate sections for Germans, Sudeten Germans and Czechs. Pre¬ sumably Soviet thinking was that Czechoslovakia should be restored with its pre-Munich ethnic structure, as well as its pre-Munich frontiers. As is known, it was the ‘bourgeois’ Benes who conceived the idea of solving the country’s racial problems by expelling the German minority.)67 Stalin’s warning to Eden did not have any immediate effect. In fact, Stalin’s stated views were more pro-Czech than the Czechs themselves since Benes at this time did not dare to hope for a full restoration of the pre-Munich borders. Early in 1942 he told Roberts that he intended to press Britain as hard as he could to promise to restore the Sudetenland ‘with minor alterations in certain Sudeten districts’. Roberts said that Britain could agree to nothing except in consultation with the United States, and privately hoped that the Czechs would pester the State Department instead of the Foreign Office. In a conversation with Eden on 21 January Benes explained further his thinking: certain areas with 600-700,000 Germans would remain in Germany, though in return Czechoslovakia would expect some small strategic frontier rectifications in its favour. Czechoslovakia would also claim the right to expel two Germans for every one lost with territory (about 1.3 million). The country would still contain over a million Germans. ‘He would like to get rid of the whole lot if this were feasible, but it was not.’ For all his differences with the Poles Benes was in effect joining with them in forcing a very reluctant British Government to consider committing itself on east European frontiers and population shifts. In April Eden wrote: The truth is that as the war approaches its climax, pressure upon us to declare ourselves about the future map of Europe will increase. I do not advocate that we should yield to this pressure, but I hope that we are preparing our own views.68 The real problem was not that the officials had not deeply 185

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considered territorial problems, but that undertakings of the kind sought by the Soviet, Polish and Czech Governments would, if they became known, prolong German resistance and, if carried out, wouM presumably leave Germany smart¬ ing for revenge, as after Versailles, with the Soviet Union ready to take advantage of every problem. In June Roberts minuted that it would be foolish to ‘offer pieces of German territory to our Allies, e.g. East Prussia to the Poles, Sudetenland to the Czechs, etc. because this would strengthen German resistance’. Makins agreed that it was ‘essential that we should keep our hands free’. They were fighting a rearguard action since the Czech Government were using the German repression which followed the death of Heydrich on 4 June as a battering ram against British adherence to Munich. They succeeded. Eden urged the Cabinet to agree to repudiate it, ‘mainly for psychological reasons’, and ‘in view of the hard trials through which the Czech people have been passing since the death of Heyd¬ rich’. In that way, Eden overrode the objections of his officials, some of whom, according to Sir John WheelerBennett, an exponent of the Czech cause who was persona grata in Whitehall, had been ‘obstructive beyond belief against repudiation. Eden also set out views on Czecho¬ slovakia’s future frontiers which corresponded closely with what Benes had been urging: certain salients of land with 600-700,000 German inhabitants were to remain German; 300-400,000 Germans were to be expelled as war criminals; another million were simply to be expelled; one million would remain. The Cabinet approved on 6 July, though not until 5 August did Eden make an announcement in Parlia¬ ment. Even then the public repudiation merely created a vacuum, and did not promise to undo the whole of Neville Chamberlain’s handiwork.69 Even so, after August 1942 it was clear that most of that work would be undone, and that additionally many Sudeten Germans (or ‘Czechoslovak Germans’ as Benes preferred to call them, despite his wish to remove as many of them as possible from the country) would lose their homes. Some officials began looking for a formula of guilt which would protect anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans; curiously, they were 186

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readier to admit the existence of ‘good’ Sudeten Germans than of ‘good’ Germans in the Reich as a whole. Cadogan’s thinking was more ruthless. He opposed a formula for population transfers based on guilt not only because of the great difficulties of definition but also because ‘it might lead to the limitation of our right to make considerable transfers of population. We may want (and the Americans may propose) to use this remedy on a fairly large scale.’ Eden agreed with him. A paradox was appearing in British thinking about the post-war settlement in eastern Europe: Germany should not lose much of its 1937 territory (that is, before Hitler’s expansionist adventures began) and should even gain a little at the expense of Czechoslovakia, but what it did lose would not be merely lost in a traditional political sense but would also be de-Germanised, except to some extent in Czechoslovakia. It was assumed that, after their sufferings at German hands, the Poles would not tolerate any Germans on their soil. Some thought was also given to the German minorities elsewhere in eastern Europe (Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary), and it was felt that all of them should be sent to the Reich in view of their (allegedly) nearly unanimous support for Hitler. As early as July 1942 Eden was speaking to the War Cabinet of anything from 3 to 6.8 million Germans being uprooted with very few people being transferred the other way, given the homogeneity of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles.70 Even if while the war went on the German people could be kept in the dark about the prospect of territorial losses and an influx of millions of expellees from the east, there was little in recent history to suggest that afterwards they would be grateful to Britain for sparing them even bigger losses than the ones which they might actually suffer. Driven to make a choice between Germany and the Poles and Czechs, the British were now veering towards the latter, only partly because of the inherent difficulty of resisting claims made by allies against a common enemy, and also because if they were left too weak - with too mixed a population and too small an area - they would be easy prey to Soviet domination, or might become a centre of conflict between Russia and a revived Germany, perhaps leading to a new 187

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 war involving Britain. British policy was, therefore, by late 1942, aiming at a repetition of France’s post-First World War policy of the cordon sanitaire in eastern Europe: a bloc of strong states independent of both Russia and Germany and of no strategic or economic use to either. True, in September Roberts wrote specifically about the need to convince the Soviet Union that a federal system in eastern Europe ‘will not simply be a revival of the old Cordon Sanitaire of 1919’.71 There was the difference that the earlier system had been intended to keep Soviet Russia in a state of near-total isolation, whereas the Foreign Office positively welcomed normal, cordial relations between Russia and its neighbours. This was not unimportant, but, in the overriding purpose of confining Soviet power to the Soviet Union itself, it is difficult to see any difference between the system of the 1920s and what was now being proposed. The repudiation of Munich removed one trump card from the Foreign Office’s hand in trying to guide the Czechs towards an arrangement with Poland. Also tempers towards Benes and his colleagues became cooler in the last months of 1942. In December Roberts even conceded that the Czech insistence on Soviet consent for a Czech-Polish confedera¬ tion was ‘obvious common sense’, adding that, ‘We have committed ourselves to supporting the Czech approach to the problem of Polish-Czech collaboration.’72 The British accepted that it was up to them to take the initiative by trying to extract from Stalin consent - it could only be grudging - to a system of federations or confederations in eastern Europe. Such consent was, ultimately, not forthcom¬ ing. As noted above (pp. 106-10), the Russians, at British insistence, called off a trip which Benes was to make to Moscow in July 1943 to negotiate a treaty, and then proceeded to win Britain’s consent for such a treaty in the convivial atmosphere which greeted Eden when he went to Moscow in October. BeneS made his pilgrimage to Moscow, received and believed copious assurances from Stalin about Soviet non-interference in Czech affairs and signed his treaty in December. It contained provision for Poland to join later, though that, as Sargent remarked, was ‘eyewash’.73 Although the Czechs very much set the pace in wooing the 188

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Soviet leaders, the latter gave them much encouragement. This included full support for the expulsion of the German population, as well as the full pre-Munich frontiers, once Czech wishes on the former subject became known. As for territory, the Russians advised the Czechs to demand the salients of wholly German-speaking areas which Benes had been prepared to abandon, and were assured of Soviet support for the return of Teschen. They also said that Hungary’s gains from Czechoslovakia in 1938-9 should be returned in full. Those included the Ukrainian-speaking province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. The Soviet Govern¬ ment gave several assurances, culminating in a personal promise by Stalin to Bene§ in Moscow at the end of 1943, that they did not seek its annexation to the Soviet Ukraine. In contrast, Roberts was still writing in September 1943 that Britain remained wholly uncommitted on the future fron¬ tiers of Czechoslovakia, and that some wholly German and Hungarian areas should not be returned.74 Whether genuinely or merely to justify to the British his rejection of their cherished idea of Polish-Czech federation, the Czechs in London in the first half of 1943 made a concerted effort to make it clear that their attitude to the Poles was one of disdain, fear, even a touch of hatred. The Poles themselves gave the Czechs plenty of ammunition. When the Czechs went through the motions of discussing federation with them, the Poles discussed the respective roles of the two partners using statistics relating to postMunich Czechoslovakia and to Poland before the GermanRussian partition. Jebb recalled that ‘a prominent Pole told me in all seriousness that the new Polono-Czech federation ought to be called “Poland” or “Greater Poland”.’ The Czechs professed to believe that if eastern Europe was liberated by the Western Allies pushing up from the Bal¬ kans, the Polish contingent in the liberating forces might attempt to seize not only Teschen but part of Slovakia. Not that the Czechs were above being provocative: Ripka told Nichols, British Ambassador to the exile Government, that most Czechs in London sympathised wholly with the Russians in the Soviet-Polish break over the Katyn allega¬ tions. Perhaps the Poles heard about this since only a few 189

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

days later they formally suspended negotiations.75 The Soviet decision in July not to proceed with a treaty impaired, rather than improved, British-Czech relations. The British were very conscious that it was the Soviet side, and not Bene§, who had responded to their pleas. Eden’s not inconsiderable vanity was injured by Benes’s refusal to listen to him. In late June, when a treaty still seemed likely, Eden saw Benes: ‘I told him that he seemed to me to be in the position of a poker player who, holding a full house, nevertheless plays for a straight flush, but this analogy did little to move his Excellency.’ Benes was in fact by that time telling all and sundry that Czechoslovakia was determined to base its post-war foreign policy on ‘a close understanding and alliance with Russia’ rather than with Poland or within a Danubian federation, and that ‘no power on earth’ could alter that resolve.76 During the summer Benes and the Foreign Office annoyed one another by telling contradictory half-truths about the cancellation of his Moscow visit: Benes said that the British had compelled him not to go; disingenuously, the Foreign Office asserted that it had been a Soviet decision. By September Eden had lowered his estimate of the Czech President: ‘Mr Benes is behaving like a petty intriguer and shows no signs of statemanship ... Fie should be grateful to us for saving him from the position of an ignominious Muscovite vassal.’ The Czechs created another cause for irritation when they said that they wished to send their fighter pilots to the eastern front. The Royal Air Force had gone to great trouble to train these men, despite the fact that the small Czech community in Britain contained very few with a marked aptitude for flying.77 Though Eden s decision in Moscow to drop the informal British-Soviet ‘self-denying ordinance’ against bilateral treaties with small powers in relation to Czechoslovakia (after which it lost all its advantages to Britain and became if anything a danger) was only in part a response to the Czech view, British annoyance with the subsequent Soviet-Czech treaty was great. Harrison noted briefly that ‘Dr Benes had behaved very badly throughout this episode’. Roberts was more verbose and more scathing. Benes had chosen to 190

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

reverse T.G. Masaryk’s policy of orienting Czechoslovakia towards the West: It is also worth noting that although the Czechs have a great reputation for factual realism, in fact their socalled realism usually drives them to extremes. For example, they were so confident that theirs was an ideal democratic state and that their international position, based on their treaties with France and on the machin¬ ery of the League of Nations, was strong that Munich took them completely by surprise. This had stunned them so much that no real resistance movement had arisen, as even the Soviet media were hinting, no doubt to the amusement of the Poles. Time will show whether the new Czech realism, which seems to consist of an absolute faith in the unqualified support and good intentions of the U.S.S.R. (equalled only by their previous faith in France and the League of Nations) is in fact anything more than a facade of realism. Roberts concluded that Czechoslovakia would probably now press for a similar treaty with Britain, but that it was the last, rather than the first, country with which Britain would wish to conclude such an arrangement.78 If the Czechs had been able to study the Foreign Office papers their only consolation would have derived from knowing that British comments on American opposition to the treaty were almost as adverse as those on Benes because of their failure to give Britain any support in the struggle to keep Czechoslovakia out of the Russian orbit, now ended in failure. Eden wrote: ‘The Americans don’t help themselves, but are always ready to criticise the efforts of others.’ The Foreign Secretary was presumably harking back to the posture of higher moral righteousness which the United States had adopted while practising isolationism in the 1930s. In a bitter comment about the Czechs written in late January 1944, Roberts also mentioned that period. Noting again that there was ‘next to no resistance in Czecho191

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Slovakia’, and that most of what there was came in Slovakia, he continued: The Czech attitude is the sensible but not very heroic one that they made their contribution to the allied cause at Munich and to a much lesser extent at the time of Heydrich’s murder [sic] at Lidice. It is now up to the other United Nations to rescue them.79 The Foreign Office were also distressed by the fact that by 1944, no doubt due to Soviet encouragement, the Czechs seemed to have abandoned all restraint about the treatment of their German (and also Hungarian) minorities. They now said that Germany was to keep absolutely none of its Munich gains, and that every member of the ‘disloyal’ minorities was to be transferred. The Foreign Office did not feel by that stage that there was anything they could do about it. Harvey observed that since the Poles had been promised a ‘clean sweep’ of all Germans from within their new frontiers, the Czechs could not be denied the same if they insisted upon it. Roberts’s heart must have been moved even so when the Sudeten German Social Democrat leader, Jaksch, pathetically begged that if his supporters were to be expelled they should be allowed to go to Austria, with its supposed greater capacity for democracy, rather than to Germany.80 Yet by that time (autumn 1944), that lack of vindictiveness which Foreign Office officials often saw as an outstanding British characteristic had asserted itself among them so far as Czechoslovakia was concerned. The Slovak rising in late 1944 may have played a part, though that had very little to do with the Czechs in the ‘Protectorate’. More important was the modification by the Czech Government of its starry-eyed attitude to the Soviet Union. They admitted that they were very worried about Soviet intentions, and even expressed horror at Stalin’s refusal to aid the Warsaw insurgents. When the Red Army’s advance into their country became stuck in October 1944 after only the eastern province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia had been occupied, Benes decided not to go there and set up his government under Soviet protection. Perhaps he would not have been 192

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

allowed to do so in any case. Despite the most solemn assurances, including one from Stalin personally, a huge influx of NKVD (secret police) \yas softening up the pro¬ vince in preparation for annexation to the Soviet Union, which formally came about in 1945. (The Foreign Office had no wish to pick any sort of quarrel with Russia over the fate of this ‘Ukrainian Piedmont’, as Roberts called it.)81 The bitterness engendered by the British-Czech quarrels of 1942 and 1943 had proved temporary, and, for what that was worth, British interest in Czechoslovakia after the war was to be as great as for any other country in eastern Europe.

Ill South-east Europe The part of Europe where Foreign Office policy-makers were least sanguine about prospects for co-operation with the Soviet Union was the Balkan peninsula, especially Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania. Bulgaria and Romania, though Balkan countries, were in rather a different position. Romania was at war with the Soviet Union (and also with Britain). This put Stalin in an excellent position to impose his will if Soviet arms were victorious. Furthermore, in his talks with Eden he had shown the most marked favouritism for Romania over its traditional enemy and Hitler’s other central European ally, Hungary. Therefore, a Sovietdominated Romania seemed very likely from the end of 1941 onwards, though British officials were firmly con¬ vinced that most Romanians hated Russia so much that, while ‘hating and fearing the Germans’, they ‘infinitely preferred’ them to the Soviet Union.82 Bulgaria was another ally of Germany, at war with Britain but not with Russia. The Foreign Office feared that the traditional Russophile sentiment in the country might pro¬ duce a Communist regime there, which might spread like a plague, particularly into Yugoslavia. They consequently had some doubts whether much effort could be or should be made to rescue Bulgaria from Soviet domination unless there was a good prospect of a federation, including at least Greece as well as Yugoslavia, in which the Bulgarians would

193

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be so outnumbered that their influence could be contained. The readiness to see any idea of British-Soviet co¬ operation in the Balkans as absurd resulted partly from the personalities in the Southern Department, which handled relations with south-east Europe and Italy. The head, Douglas Howard, and Pierson Dixon and E.M. Rose, the chief officials in the section, all tended to think that to expect a regime like the Soviet to do anything except try to extend to the maximum its influence in an area like this where Russia had a traditional interest, and where the bitter conflicts between such unsophisticated peoples as those of the Balkan states positively invited outside intervention, would be extremely foolish. A Great Power would indeed have to help in working out the post-war pattern for these countries, but that power ought to be Britain, not Russia, they thought during the earlier part of the war. As Dixon wrote in October 1942, there was certain to be an ‘element of coercion’ in the peace settlement in south-east Europe: ‘Those countries will have to be lopped or stretched to fit the bed in which we decided, after taking their interests into account also, that the Balkans can easiest lie.’ That Russia wished to fulfil this necessary role was not doubted. Dixon’s colleague, Rose, had been shown by a Yugoslav politician an alleged Soviet map of 1940 in which the whole of Finland, northern Norway, the Baltic States and much of Poland and Romania were incorporated directly into the Soviet Union, while the rest of eastern Europe consisted of Soviet repub¬ lics. He found it credible.83 At the beginning of 1942, with the German armies barely repelled from the gates of Moscow, there was a flurry of minutes in the Southern Department almost suggesting that the Russians were poised for an invasion of the Balkans. Dixon wrote that Stalin had openly admitted his designs on Romania to Eden, and that it could safely be assumed that he had similar ambitions in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The exile Governments of Yugoslavia and Greece were at last showing some wisdom in the face of these dangers: ‘The fact that both the Greek and Yugoslav Governments are pre¬ pared to contemplate the inclusion of Bulgaria, their sworn enemy, in such a confederacy, indicates that they appreci194

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

ate the need for saving Bulgaria from Soviet Russia.’ He went on to note an acute contradiction between long- and short-term interests in Britain’s .relations with Turkey, a country whose European territory and proximity made it virtually a Balkan state. Britain was trying to dispel Turkish distrust of Russia in the hope of Turkish co-operation in the war, but it was undesirable, as well as unlikely, that these efforts would meet with full success. A British military expedition (which, ironically, though Dixon did not note the fact, Stalin had suggested to Eden in Moscow) might be the only real solution. He concluded: We are in fact faced by an unpleasant dilemma. On the one hand it is of vital interest to our present strategical needs that nothing should be done or said to impair Anglo-Soviet relations; on the other hand, it is to our ultimate interest to lay our plans to counter the expan¬ sionist moves on the part of the Soviet Union which are to be anticipated at the end of the war. Howard agreed that Stalin evidently had detailed plans for Romania so as to ‘have the country in his pocket. [Then] Bulgaria will, almost certainly, fall to him like a ripe plum; and the position of Yugoslavia and Greece will then be unenviable.’84 Sargent accepted that, politically, a British military exped¬ ition into the Balkans would be desirable to check Russian influence, but reminded his juniors in the Southern Depart¬ ment, who, he may have felt, were getting over-excited, that British policy had a more immediate string to its bow: federation.85 That very month of January 1942 the Greek and Yugoslav Governments signed an agreement for a form of political and economic union, including a common tariff. While Eden insisted that Britain should avoid public state¬ ments that this was the starting-point for a wider Balkan federation, if only because Greece and Yugoslavia were the victims of Bulgarian aggression, that and possibly more was what the British were hoping for. Rose noted with delight that the Yugoslav Government hoped that the proposed federation would also take in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hun¬ gary and Bulgaria (Romania was conspicuous by its absence 195

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

from the list). Yet Greece was not so keen; the Greeks, ‘outside the danger zone of Russian influence’, could not see that only such a vast grouping could hold Russia back.86 However, apart from the fact that the Greek-Yugoslav federation was only a paper pact between two governmentsin-exile, there was a multitude of obstacles to be overcome before it could really amount to anything. Apart from the matter of defeating Germany without the Red Army getting astride of the peninsula, there was, as Rose indicated, the unwillingness of even pro-British Greeks and Yugoslavs to think primarily in terms of the objective of their Great Power patron, in this case resisting Communism. Some Serbs in the Yugoslav Government started showing a pre¬ ference for federation with Bulgaria alone, as fellow Slavs, rather than with Greece, with possibly Macedonia, whose territory was divided between Yugoslavia, Greece and Bul¬ garia, as a third unit, thus solving one of the most .difficult problems of nationalism in Europe. To Sargent this was a ‘fantastic’ Serbian ‘imperialist dream’, whose achievement would be a disaster: It is precisely with the idea of setting up a counter¬ weight to any Russian scheme for turning Bulgaria ipto a Russian province that we encourage the idea that she should take her place in a confederation, and it seems to me that to advocate a Serbian-Bulgarian block would be playing straight into the Russians’ hands.87 Meanwhile, the Greek Government were producing gran¬ diose war aims which, while at least not directed against Yugoslavia, showed little sign of a realisation of the central danger of Communism. In April 1942 they informed Britain of their interest in annexing territory from Albania and Bulgaria, in absorbing the Dodecanese islands, and in being given a voice in the regimes of the Straits and the Danube. They also dropped a hint that they would like to have Cyrenaica!: ‘It has been amply proved by the present war that for obvious reasons the island of Crete should not constitute the southern frontier of Greece.’88 Such claims, affecting the territory or interests of Albania, Bulgaria^ Romania and Turkey, were not calculated to produce 196

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

amity and the federal spirit in the Balkans. The Greek claim to southern Albania (or Northern Epirus, as they called it) presented particular problems. In the first place, Albania, though small and primitive, did exist, and its incorporation as a separate unit into any Balkan federation or confederation was seen as desirable - an unrealistic proposition if the Albanians were full of hatred against the Greeks for taking away some of their already exiguous territory. In the second place, the Yugoslavs had stated that they would leave Albania alone if Greece did so, but would want part of the north of the country if Greece were given part of the south, so that there was even a danger of a Greek-Yugoslav war to annex as much of Albania as poss¬ ible. Even so, the Southern Department thought that Greece had strong ethnic and strategic grounds for its Albanian claim, reinforced by the possibility that all its other claims might fail, including that to the Dodecanese, where its ‘overwhelming moral claim’ might have to be set aside because of the need to offer Turkey a reward if it would enter the war. Nor was Britain prepared to offer Greece Cyprus under any circumstances. Against this, the Depart¬ ment were inclined to do something for Albania, partly to enhance the Foreign Office’s own reputation. In March 1942 Dixon recalled that Britain had never pronounced in favour of the restoration of Albanian independence at any time since its violent suppression by Mussolini in April 1939, and that this might be misconstrued as meaning that Britain favoured continued Italian rule after the war. A declaration would therefore put paid to the widespread belief that the British Government ‘intend to let Italy down lightly and that the Foreign Office in particular are actuated by a pro-Fascist policy’. In December 1942 Eden finally made a statement in Parliament in which he said that Britain favoured the restoration of Albanian independence, while making it clear that the country’s frontiers would not be decided until the peace conference.89 The declaration was at best a modest contribution to smoothing the way for Albanian participation in a Balkan federation. At the opposite extreme to Albania and its ‘Lilliputian’ problems was the attitude of Russia towards a 197

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Balkan federation, and the need, as Warner reminded his colleagues in November 1942, for at least grudging Soviet approval. This presented even more problems than a Polish-Czech federation, which could be presented plausibly as a bulwark against Germany. In the Central Department, as in the Northern, officials sought to curb the anti-Soviet zeal of their Southern colleagues. Roberts wrote in November: We do not of course want to abdicate our interests in that part of the world entirely to Russia, but nor do we wish to adopt a hands-off attitude or to encourage the countries concerned to regard Russia with more suspi¬ cion than is inevitable.90 During 1943 the Balkan federation idea was to die a natural death, a victim of its inherent fragility and of the needs of British-Soviet relations. The Greek and Yugoslav Govern¬ ments no longer seemed to believe in it; the British ceased to believe in the Greek and Yugoslav Governments; Russia would not support it and, once the Czechs had set their faces in favour of special arrangements with Moscow, not Poland, the British in late 1943 abandoned the idea of federations or confederations in eastern Europe (see above, pp. 105-13). Despite the demise of British plans for a Balkan federation the potential for later tension between Britain and Russia over south-east Europe was to increase during 1943. The main developments were in Greece and Yugoslavia, but the question of helping one or more of Germany’s Balkan Allies to leave the war also caused difficulties. Among these Balkan allies, Hungary was the one to which the Foreign Office attached most hope, both of winning it away from Hitler and of its transformation into a liberal democracy after the war. As noted above, Romania’s position appeared hopeless, while the British saw reasons for keeping Bulgaria at arm’s length. In April Sargent reiterated the danger that a Bulgaro-Yugoslav Union would be a spearhead for Russian penetration of the Balkans’.91 In the case of Hungary, Britain suggested to the Soviet and American Governments in March 1943 a propaganda 198

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

offensive to reinforce signs of a weakening war will. In particular, it might be hinted that Hungary could retain some of the territory which it had gained from Czecho¬ slovakia and Romania (though presumably not anything taken from Yugoslavia) where there was a good ethno¬ graphic case. The Russians took three months to reply and then, though not wholly negative, were unhelpful. They were ready to make contacts with Hungarian opposition elements, but the latter had to be told that the only terms which they could hope for were unconditional surrender, return to the frontiers of 1937 and a large reparations bill. They would also have to punish war criminals. The Foreign Office, who did not attach all that much importance to peace with Hungary, accepted the Soviet line with little grumbling. The basic principle had been laid down by Eden in Febru¬ ary: ‘There may be a case for modifying our attitude slightly, but if so we can only do it in agreement with the United States and Soviet Governments.’ Later the British gave a tentative blessing to Turkey making overtures to Hungary and Romania, but had to call that off when the Turks made it clear that they were intent on turning those countries into anti-Soviet buffers. ‘This may, of course, to some extent be what we are doing ourselves, but by using the Turks for this our aim would have become obvious both to themselves and the Russians’, wrote Douglas Howard in August.92 To the British Greece was in a very different position from Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria; they were very anxious indeed to prevent it from becoming Communist. Yugoslavia was in an intermediate position of concern. (Occasionally even staunchly anti-Communist officials could see good points in the prospect of Communist rule in the Balkans. For instance, in July D.S. Laskey of the Southern Department allowed himself to wonder whether Communist regimes might not be an improvement on a return to the traditional hatreds between the peoples of the Balkans. His comment that the ‘internationalist tendencies’ of Communism prom¬ ised some good is also evidence of the way in which Communism was seen as a monolith transcending national¬ ism.)93 Greece was regarded as the Balkan country whose salvation from Communism was most practicable as well as

199

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most necessary. While the Foreign Office did not know whether Britain would seek military bases in Greece after the war, nor whether a Greek government would emerge which offered such facilities, there was great readiness to use British power to install a pro-British regime when the German occupation ended. Leeper, the British Ambassador to the Greek Govern¬ ment in Cairo, pleaded for appropriate planning in the summer of 1943, arguing that if there was even a short interval between German departure and British arrival the Communists would probably be able to set up a Soviet republic. He sent a memorandum, obviously enjoying his approval, by E.K. Waterhouse, an Oxford art historian, doing wartime intelligence work in the Middle East, which concluded: We can do little with Rumania and it would be idle to try and wean Bulgaria from her Soviet sympathies, but Greece is a brand which can yet be plucked from the burning, and our post-war influence in the Eastern Mediterranean may depend very much on our success in doing so. But to do this we must pursue a somewhat reactionary policy. Laskey, having overcome his aberration that a Communist Balkans might present a pleasing vista of serenity, wrote in November: The policy of killing them [Greek Communists] by kindness has often been suggested, but our view has always been that it would be entirely ineffective. If we are really convinced that the EAM leaders are out for purely selfish ends it necessarily follows that we must fight them with all the weapons at our command.94 Churchill was, at this stage, a moderate on Greek matters compared with the Foreign Office. In September he pro¬ posed the sending of a force of 5,000 men to Athens if the Germans evacuated the city, whereas the Foreign Office would have preferred two or three divisions.95 The realities in Greece at this time were that the army, known as ELAS, of the main resistance movement, EAM, which was believed

200

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

- correctly - to be Communist-dominated, had 35-40,000 men compared with the 5,000 of the non-Communist resis¬ tance, EDES, and that the far Left also led in confidence, ability and perhaps even popular support. Non-Communist Greek parties remained side-tracked over whether the King, George II, should return to the throne unconditionally, only if approved by a plebiscite, or not at all. The British eventually struggled to induce the monarch himself to endorse the second of these possible solutions.96 The summer and autumn of 1943 were in fact a hard time for the Foreign Office in regard to Greece. On the one hand, it had become unmistakably clear that EAM-ELAS was Communist-dominated. On the other hand, the Greek resistance, meaning essentially ELAS, had shown its military worth through Operation Mincemeat, a deception enterprise to convince Hitler that the Allies would follow up their North African victories by an attack into the Balkans, not into Italy.97 Foreign Office thinking on how to respond to this dilemma had two sides. One has already been recorded: the dispatch of a British expeditionary force to Athens if the Germans evacuated it. That supposed that such evacuation would occur before the Red Army’s campaigns carried it into Greece; even in 1944 it was thought that the war might end with British troops in Bulgaria and Hungary, though not Romania.98 They also reluctantly accepted that unless Turkey entered the war, the British and still more the American military chiefs simply would not accede to Churchill’s and their dreams of a Balkans invasion designed partly or largely to contain Soviet power. Roosevelt’s attitude, though shrouded in mystery, made the prospect completely hopeless. He feared that acquiescence in Churchill’s Balkan plans might lead to the utter folly and catastrophe of British and American forces being tied down in Greece, while a sudden German collapse at the centre enabled Russia to take control in Germany itself.99 The expeditionary force idea made clear sense, given the aim which it was intended to serve. Of much more debatable wisdom was the political side to Foreign Office policy which centred on the restoration of the King to his throne. It was

201

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based on gratitude for the King’s role in not flinching when the Germans joined the despised Italians in attacking Greece in 1941, and on a general belief in the stabilising effects of monarchy. It contradicted the advice of the SOE officers in Greece that monarchist sentiment among the public was at a low ebb, and that the promise of a plebiscite on the monarchy was absolutely essential. The Foreign Office chose to believe that the SOE had invented the plebiscite clamour, rather than that they had merely passed it on.100 In August Leeper secured that Brigadier E.C.W. Myers, an especially troublesome SOE agent, should not be sent back to Greece. After this rather mean triumph the Foreign Office did embark on a long and frustrating effort to convince the King of the need to promise publicly a plebis¬ cite, while fuming and feeling frustrated that there was almost nothing that they could do to weaken EAM-ELAS who, unlike Tito’s Partisans, were not significantly depen¬ dent on British aid. (In their frustration they sometimes lost sight of the full position; in November Howard lamented that British military aid was doing the Soviet Union’s work for it in Yugoslavia and Greece - arguably true in the former but not in the latter.) In November the War Cabinet accepted a proposal from Eden that Britain should withdraw all support from EAM if the King would agree to a plebiscite, but that simply would not have threatened EAM’s position.101 Turning now to Yugoslavia, so much has been written about that country during the war, and not least about the British role, that one is tempted to feel that the entire subject has transcended history and passed into some other realm. The author of a recent study, after remarking on the large size of the existing literature, warns almost ominously, ‘It is certain that there is much more yet to come.’102 The feeling is not lessened by the fact that after so much ink has been spilled controversy, particularly on the role of General Drazha Mihailovich, continues. Even so, an outline of the situation in Yugoslavia by 1943 is essential to a study of Britain’s role in the origins of the Cold War. The least important factor in the Yugoslav equation was the Yugoslav Government-in-exile, including, though many on the British

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side were reluctant to admit it, the King, Peter II. The Government, based later in the war in Cairo, controlled no forces in the country, and by the end of 1942 the Foreign Office had come to the conclusion, as Armine Dew put it, that it ‘represented nothing’. Its members were seen as preferring to occupy themselves in senseless internal bicker¬ ing and in Arabian nights of fantasy about Yugoslav territor¬ ial expansion after the war.103 In Yugoslavia itself a German occupation of great savag¬ ery in some parts of the country, a more benign Italian regime in others and, in Croatia, a native fascist government with a policy of genocide against part of its own population which was not to be repeated in the world until the events in Cambodia in the late 1970s, were opposed by the Communist-led Partisans of Tito and the Chetniks, nomi¬ nally owing allegiance to the King, of Mihailovich. A consistent British policy was for a long time made difficult by inadequate information on the situation in Yugoslavia, and by the division of policy between two feuding departments, the Foreign Office and SOE, complicated by a further division between SOE in London and the East Mediterra¬ nean headquarters in Cairo, by the belated but ultimately decisive intervention of the Prime Minister and by the equally belated but also irresistible intervention of the British Middle East military command. British policy towards Yugoslavia became a matter of the first importance in 1943 when the strength of the Partisans began both to be realised and to be of great strategic importance: with Allied forces invading Italy, and plans proceeding for an invasion of France, it became important to tie down large German forces in the Balkans where no invasion was seriously contemplated. At an earlier stage, the British, the Germans and even the Soviet Union were at one in seeing the Chetniks as the decisive element in the Yugoslav resistance. The Partisans were known to exist, but, as Rose wrote in April 1942: ‘I have no idea who these “Communists” are, where they have sprung from, what ideas they hold, whether they are closely associated with the Soviet Government etc: and I think it might be useful if we could get some information on this 203

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

point.’104 During the latter part of that year it became clear that Mihailovich, who had British liaison officers with him, was doing little to resist the occupiers and that the Partisans were doing much. Mihailovich could make ready excuses, such as his unwillingness to subject the people to German reprisals and to repeat the experience of the First World War when nearly a third of the population of Serbia — he was very much a Serbian, not a Yugoslav, nationalist - had perished, and the fact that Britain was at that time unable to send him many supplies owing to the remoteness of the fastnesses in which his forces operated and the refusal of the RAF high command to commit even a few planes to operations over Yugoslavia. Until at least the summer of 1942 the Foreign Office were inclined to accept these arguments.105 By the start of 1943 Eden was certainly inclined to change this policy. He wrote that, ‘The position goes from bad to worse.’ Britain was still supporting Mihailovich, ‘tho’ he is not fighting our enemies and is being publicly denounced by our Soviet ally. I can see no sense in such a policy and every likelihood that we and the Russians will come to an open clash.’ Cadogan advised restraint since dropping Mihailovich would produce immediate problems, and ‘We have, of course, hitherto also been influenced by long-term con¬ siderations that it may be wise to support Mihailovich in order to prevent the break-up of Yugoslavia after the war into Soviet Republics under Russian domination.’ The Foreign Office officials, and even more so the Special Operations Executive, were influenced by their faulty analysis of Yugoslav society, that the Serbs, from whom Mihailovich obtained such support as he had, were both the state-maintaining and the warrior people of multi-racial Yugoslavia, and that the Serbs as a whole, including the peasant masses, were ‘still monarchists at heart’. Therefore support for Mihailovich was rational, whatever the apparent strength of Tito’s racially peripheral following. At the very least they hoped that Tito would keep out of Serbia. This entire analysis was redolent of wishful thinking and distaste at Tito’s Communism, as was Rose’s comment in March 1943 that most rank-and-file Partisans were primitive 204

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

people who had never heard of Marx or Communism irrelevant if, as there was every sign, their Communist leaders were fully in control.106 In view of the Foreign Office belief in a monolithic world Communist movement and in Soviet determination to expand their power in the Balkans, it is extraordinary that repeatedly they should have sought Soviet aid to achieve a union between Partisans and Chetniks under Mihailovich’s leadership. Repeated requests to the Russians met with the response - in this case probably honest enough - that the Soviet Union had no control over the Partisans. Eventually the Soviet Government ignored Foreign Office letters and the Foreign Office stopped sending them when the absurdity of expecting Tito, with ten times as many men as Mihailovich, to subordinate himself to his rival finally sank in. This curious side to British dealings with wartime Yugo¬ slavia can perhaps be seen as part of a tendency to clutch at straws in a country believed to be important for British interests, but in which Britain had few levers for exerting influence. Later the British were to take Moscow at its word, and assume that Tito was indeed not simply a minion of Stalin, with ultimately valuable rewards.107 Decisive was the failure of a German-aided Chetnik offensive in March 1943 to wipe out the Partisans in their strongholds in the Bosnian mountains. Apart from any moral qualms - which in themselves may have been cancel¬ led out by intelligence that the Partisans were negotiating for a truce with the Germans and that it was the latter who broke off these talks - the Foreign Office and both ends of SOE finally became convinced that Tito’s guerrillas were strong and the Chetniks virtually a spent force. A small British mission under F.W.D. Deakin was parachuted to Tito in May, and its reports confirmed previous impres¬ sions.108 While SOE, under the influence of its Cairo wing, gradually but totally moved to a policy of support for the Partisans, the Foreign Office fought a rearguard action to give Mihailovich time to mend his ways in the matter of collaboration with the enemy, if he would. In the words of his British liaison officer, Colonel W.S. Bailey, his response was ‘evasive-cooperative’, always promising action, seldom 205

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

giving it. Howard thought that the new-found enthusiasm of SOE to denounce Mihailovich was ‘typical SOE irresponsi¬ bility and unique talent for acting the bull in the China shop and breaking every hope we have of achieving unity in Yugoslavia’. The belief that the Serbs would never accept Tito remained.109 Churchill became dissatisfied with the handling of Yugo¬ slav matters, and in July sent out Fitzroy Maclean as his personal representative to the Partisans, having already ordered the dispatch to them of huge quantities of sup¬ plies.110 Maclean, a member of the Diplomatic Service who had extricated himself from that body because he preferred active war service by the drastic expedient of being elected a Member of Parliament, sought explicit guidance from the Prime Minister on whether British policy in Yugoslavia was to be based on existing military or post-war political object¬ ives. Churchill’s reply was that all that mattered was winning the war. Maclean’s appointment was vindicated not only by his reports on Partisan strength and Chetnik weakness equally good information was by then available from other sources - but also by the fact that at last the British Government were receiving information on the true situa¬ tion in Yugoslavia from someone whom they would believe. The Foreign Office in particular were unwilling to accept information that did not emanate from one of their own people, and spiritually Maclean, unlike Myers in Greece, and Maclean’s own predecessor with the Partisans, Deakin, still belonged to their charmed circle. Maclean conveyed his message both in a report and in meetings in Cairo in the autumn with Eden, Cadogan, Harvey and Strang, and with Churchill himself on his way back from the conference at Teheran.111 Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff became fully convinced of the Partisans’ military usefulness. The Prime Minister gave Maclean a personal letter for Tito. Maclean argued that there was no real conflict between political and military considerations because Partisan strength was so great that they were bound to dominate Yugoslavia after the war. It would therefore have been illogical not to aid them, but he also felt strongly the moral argument for such aid; its refusal

206

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would have been hard ‘to defend on any grounds, for we should have been abandoning to their fate on the basis of a long-term political calculation, brave men, who, whatever their motives, were fighting well and effectively on our side in a desperate struggle against a common enemy.’112 The Foreign Office had no choice but to alter their policy. The change was surprisingly wholehearted. Whereas a Southern Department memorandum in late September was still advocating patience in inducing Mihailovich to start resisting the enemy, three weeks later E.M. Rose was writing that in recent months the Partisan movement had made ‘immense strides’ and had ‘in fact emerged from the guerrilla stage and become a political movement with which we have simply got to reckon. King Peter and Mihailovich are very small fry beside it.’ The real change was, of course, not in the Partisans but in Foreign Office understanding of them. The conversation to reality, if belated, was more or less complete. In November the same man wrote, echoing Maclean, that the Partisans were almost certain to be ‘the decisive factor in Yugoslavia in the future’. Simultaneously, the officials embarked on a line of thought which they were to maintain for the next five years, and which was to pay some dividends after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948: that Yugoslav Communism was of a milder kind than the Soviet, and was one with which Britain could more easily get along. Rose commented hopefully on the Partisan leadership: ‘It seems, however, to be a kind of “Popular Front” govern¬ ment with, at present, complete political and religious toleration’, and generally more intent on equality and unity between Serbs, Croats and Slovenes than on the implemen¬ tation of classical Marxist-Leninist doctrine.113 Mihailovich’s status became that of an embarrassment. Rose wrote at the end of November that there was now ‘proof how perfectly hopeless it is to try to get Mihailovich to cooperate even in small matters, even in his own interest. He is so obsessed by the “Communist menace” that he has lost all sense of reason or proportion and regards anybody and everybody opposing the Partisans as friends and allies.’ Sargent agreed: ‘The only way we can put ourselves right is to free ourselves at once from our commitments in connex-

207

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ion with Mihailovich, for which we cannot possibly find any justification which we could put to the British public and the House of Commons, let alone the Soviet Government.’ On Christmas Eve Rose commented savagely that even if by some miracle Mihailovich suddenly embarked on all-out resistance, Britain would still have to wash its hands of him.114 News from Yugoslavia did cause a slight back-tracking on the new resolve. Information trickled in about a major Partisan political conference in November, at which the foundations of a reformed Yugoslav state were laid down, including the abolition of the monarchy unless the people expressed a positive preference for it. Instead of simply breaking all links with Mihailovich, the British now decided to make such a step conditional on the Partisans agreeing to the return of the King. In this way they laid themselves open to obvious criticisms of pinning not inconsiderable hopes on a powerless young man whose weakness of character and utter lack of charisma had become painfully apparent. However, the more realistic officials knew from Maclean’s reports that Tito was passionately anxious to obtain inter¬ national respectability and recognition, which neither the United States nor the Soviet Union showed any inclination to give him. Britain, as his principal patron for the supply of arms and as the third Great Power, was therefore strongly placed in his respect. It was still a gamble. In December Cadogan noted that the Partisans might simply refuse to have any dealings with King Peter: ‘If they won’t, we are left with a King (and Government) in our hands who have no backing whatever in Yugoslavia. What do we do then? Acclaim Tito as the Fuhrer of Yugoslavia?’ Not all officials were so capable at keeping abreast with the times. Howard, pathetically uncomprehending, was still insisting that ‘the greatest asset of a united Yugoslavia is the monarchy’.115 The sheer strength of Tito’s position, as well as his value in containing huge enemy forces, had compelled the British to resign themselves by the end of 1943 to a left-wing Yugo¬ slavia after the war, though possibly with a monarch at its head and with a Soviet Ambassador who would be some¬ thing less than a proconsul. (There was a similar process of 208

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

resignation in the immensely less important case of Albania where most effective resistance was also Communistdominated. Nostalgic Foreign Office references to the qual¬ ities of King Zog could be of no avail.)116 Turning to a more general survey of British policy intentions in south-east Europe during the last fifteen months or so of the war, one sees the Foreign Office wrestling with the problem of what military and political commitments they should urge the Chiefs of Staff and the Cabinet itself to endorse for the post-war period. The task was made more difficult by uncertainty over whether any help could be expected from the United States, and, for a time, by the American wish for the British zone of occupation in Germany to be in the south of the country. In late January Hood of the Foreign Office wrote that if the Americans finally agreed to a southern zone in Germany, they should also garrison Austria and Hungary, while Britain should move into Bulgaria. But this would be reversed if the British accepted south Germany; America should then occupy Bulgaria ‘if the Russians must be kept out at all costs’. Dew for the Southern Department and Harrison for Central answered that they did indeed want the Soviet Union to be excluded from Bulgaria and Hungary respectively.117 As the prospect of a relatively early end to the war appeared, Bulgaria came up in the world as far as the British were concerned. There was no longer talk of isolating it as a source of pro-Soviet contagion, no doubt partly because of the realisation that Yugoslavia was going to have a pre¬ dominantly Communist regime in any case. The idea was taking shape that if no American help at all would be forthcoming except in Germany itself, a choice might have to be made between Bulgaria and Hungary. Law said so in mid-March 1944, and added that when Germany was finally defeated the Chiefs of Staff must not be allowed to send so many troops to the Far East that British political aims in south-east Europe could not be realised. Ward thought that in a choice between Hungary and Bulgaria, the latter should have undoubted preference in view of the overriding need to keep the Russians well away from the Straits. Besides, the 209

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Red Army was more likely to be the first ‘Allied’ force in Hungary than in Bulgaria. His views were shared by the Post-Hostilities Planning Committee, which in February had noted with foreboding that: Should Russia obtain control of Bulgaria she would be in a position to establish airfields within 100 miles of the Straits. Moreover, the Russians have a traditional connection with Bulgaria, and occupation by them might lead to permanent control. Occupation by British forces would tend to strengthen British influence not only in Bulgaria, but also in Greece and Turkey. Moreover the Soviet Union is not at war with Bulgaria whereas the United Kingdom is. With Jebb adding the caveat that Bulgaria’s ‘black and treacherous’ record ruled out simply making peace without occupying the country, the inclusion of Bulgaria within Britain’s east Mediterranean sphere was taking shape as a definite war aim during the first half of 1944, though Law’s opinion was that Britain could occupy Bulgaria only in agreement with the Soviet Union, and that a joint occupa¬ tion might be possible.118 The fate of two countries remained chose jugee: there had to be enough British troops in Greece — Ward mentioned a curiously exact figure of 22,900 - to ensure installation of a ‘respectable’ government; while (Ward again) ‘Rumania would presumably not figure in our list of priorities as we have accepted the fact that the Russians would monopolise it.’ Although Jebb made a typically heretical suggestion that it might be sufficient to hold only Crete, it was Ward who had more nearly encapsulated feeling in the Foreign Office on south-east Europe.119 In this confident mood, the British also decided that they would definitely be the arbiters of the fate of the Dodecan¬ ese islands in the south-east Aegean, Greek in population but under Italian rule since their seizure from Turkey in 1912. All Greeks naturally sought the inclusion of the islands within the state. By early 1944 the British were no longer prepared to offer some or all of these islands to Turkey in return for entry into the war, while restoration of

210

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Italian rule was absolutely ruled out. However, the Foreign Office wished to carry out the transfer to Greece in a manner as least offensive to Turkey as possible, and perhaps to gain for Turkey the tiny Kastellorizon islands very close to the Turkish shore, because, as Laskey put it in April, ‘the maintenance of Graeco-Turkish friendship after the war will be as important to us as to the two countries themselves’. They were confident of Cabinet endorsement of this commitment in view of the small size of any occupation force, perhaps 2,400 men.120 Having gone so far to clarify their own minds, the Foreign Office were ready by late March to begin convincing minis¬ ters and military chiefs. For this purpose they resurrected the spectre of the German menace, which in reality they were inclined to regard as anachronistic for the foreseeable future in relation to the Balkans. They also made somewhat vague pleas about preventing ‘prolonged chaos’, and tried to nip in the bud any suggestion that Britain could no longer play the world policeman; south-east Europe was not simply any part of the world: Unrest in the Balkans may spread to adjacent areas which are of vital importance to the British Empire because of our lines of communication through the Mediterranean and Red Sea and the oil supplies in Iraq and Persia, while the effective domination of south-east Europe by a rival Great Power would constitute a direct threat to these vital interests. In internal debate Hood had been less coy: Sovietization might provide peace and prosperity; but a number of weak Soviet republics would not present an effective barrier to German aggression. If, on the other hand, the states were effectively wielded into the Soviet Union, the latter would present a menace even more serious than Germany.121 The Chiefs of Staff proved surprisingly co-operative. They told Jebb that they expected that three divisions would be available for south-east Europe after the war, one for Bulgaria, one for Greece, to be concentrated in the Salonika

211

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region rather than spread over the country, and one for north-east Italy in territory to which the Yugoslavs would lay claim. There would be no problem about a small additional force for the Dodecanese. They were even ready for British gunboats to patrol the Danube! Although the Foreign Office wanted Athens also to be occupied, this was not bad. There was also a glimmer of light from across the Atlantic. In April a delegation from the State Department led by Freeman Matthews told the Foreign Office that the United States, though unwilling to station troops in the Balkans, would not object to British troops there, and would play a full role in any control commissions which might be set up in Germany’s Balkan satellite states after their defeat.122 It was not until the late summer that the Armistice and Post-War Committee under Attlee’s chairmanship con¬ sidered a Foreign Office list of ‘inescapable commitments’ in south-east Europe presented by Law. These included a modest 10,000 men for Greece, plus 2,400 for the Dodecanese, and no less than 47,000 for Bulgaria. Law reminded the ministers that the Balkans were a gateway to the Middle East where Russia might seek to take advantage of the looming struggle for Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Attlee refused absolutely to accept any commitment in Bulgaria in which, he pronounced, ‘the Russians were certain to play the major role’. A week later Eden agreed that there should be no British occupation of Bulgaria, but hoped that in that case more men might be spared for Greece. Any unwillingness by Bulgaria to accept Allied peace terms, especially the return of territory to Yugoslavia and Greece, should be dealt with by bombing the country. On 9 August the Foreign Office could breathe a sigh of relief when the full War Cabinet agreed to the dispatch of British forces to Greece.123 With Greece potentially in the bag, the Foreign Office retained some hope of securing a British voice in post-war Bulgaria,124 but events were overtaking them. For some time there had been desultory peace feelers between Britain and important elements in Hungary, Romania and Finland, whose aim was extrication from the war through negotia¬ tions with the United States and Britain which would bypass

212

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the Soviet Union. The British were, as ever, scrupulous in reporting not only all these to the Russians, but in intending to consult fully with Moscow if any overtures were received from Bulgaria, despite the fact that it was not at war with the Soviet Union.125 At the end of 1943 the RAF was ordered to begin bombing the satellite capitals to weaken their war will. Yet the Foreign Office were conscious of playing a trick since the peace elements in the satellites assumed that the Western Allies would send troops if they staged successful coups, whereas British and American strategic plans ruled this out completely.126 The Foreign Office Research Department continued to produce papers on possible frontier changes and population transfers in south-east Europe, but there was a growing resignation that Britain would probably be unable to exert any significant influence in much of this region. Eden ‘took no exception’ when Stalin pronounced unilaterally in April 1944 on the biggest of the territorial disputes in the area: that between Romania and Hungary for possession of Transylvania. Two-thirds of the province had been ‘awarded’ by Hitler to Hungary in 1940, but the Soviet Union, seeing more prospect of winning Romania from the German camp than of winning Hungary, declared that most or all of the province should revert to Romania. Britain’s unceremonious exclusion from this bitter conflict, in which British interests were so little involved, was in many ways an agreeable prospect; on 1 May Allen declared it ‘happy for us’ that the Romanian-Hungarian dispute was likely ‘to become mainly a Russian baby’. Churchill was fulsome in praise of Stalin’s ‘admirable’ step, eliciting a curiously rude response from Molotov.127 This readiness to take a back seat was strictly confined to certain parts of the interior of Europe. Continuing concern with anywhere remotely adjacent to the ocean was evident in Churchill’s request to Eden during the ‘Imperial’ Con¬ ference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers in London in May, for an explanation ‘on one page’ of ‘the brute issues between us and the Soviet Government which are develop¬ ing in Italy, in Rumania, in Bulgaria, in Yugoslavia and above all in Greece’. The time had arrived to ask: ‘Are we 213

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

going to acquiesce in the Communisation of the Balkans and perhaps of Italy?’ If it was decided to resist ‘the Communist infusion and invasion, we should put it to them pretty plainly at the best moment that military events permit. We should, of course, have to consult the United States first.’ In another message the same day, he foresaw an early ‘showdown’ with Russia ‘about their Communist intrigues in Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece’, and wondered whether the British Ambas¬ sador should be withdrawn from Moscow. Eden replied that it would be difficult to make out much of a cause for complaint about Soviet conduct in the Balkans and still less in Italy where they were playing ‘a subtle game’ which required ‘careful watching’, especially the activities in the Italian Government of a ‘Russian-trained Communist in whose mouth butter is not melting at present’ - a reference to Togliatti. In Yugoslavia and Greece Britain had so far given more aid to the Communists because of the ‘unfortu¬ nate fact that Communists seem to make the best guerrilla leaders’. Churchill had to agree with the Foreign Secretary and cool down.128 The Foreign Office were encouraged by this prime minis¬ terial intervention to invite the Russians to agree on ‘leading roles’ for the two countries in some Balkan states, especially Greece and Romania, ostensibly only for the duration of the war. These efforts met with an initially favourable Soviet response, followed by rejection because they were opposed by the United States, including Cordell Hull, to whom they were ‘iniquitous’. Although the Americans later gave grudg¬ ing approval for a ‘trial period’ of three months, Stalin would not proceed without much fuller American support. Churchill found the United States’ attitude ‘a great disaster’ and baffling in view of Roosevelt’s recently-found enthusiasm for the King of Greece. Sargent thought that the Americans were now denying Britain diplomatic help in a country where they had already refused military aid. To Cadogan ‘the Americans have an astonishing phobia about “spheres of influence”.’129 While it had still been hoped to overcome the problems raised by the American attitude, the Foreign Office had produced a paper for the Cabinet which clearly showed the 214

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

disingenuousness of their claims to Washington that they were concerned only with making even smoother the co¬ operation between Britain and its trusted Soviet ally. The officials now urged ministers to be watchful and wary of Soviet ambitions in all the Balkan countries, especially since current Soviet policy there was a direct continuation of that of Tsarist Russia, but with the difference that Britain no longer had a powerful ally to counter it in the way that it had had Austria-Hungary in the nineteenth century. They argued against any idea of Britain and Russia agreeing simply to leave these countries alone as undesirable in the light of Britain’s Great Power interests in the area, even assuming that Russia’s word could be trusted; and advised in favour of working towards British predominance in Greece and Turkey, while using every opportunity short of pro¬ voking a direct clash with Moscow to win influence in the other Balkan states. This paper had not gone forward without provoking dissent within the Office. Christopher Warner, then at the height of his phase of goodwill towards the Soviet regime, condemned its assumptions as too doctrinaire and pessi¬ mistic, and saw great significance in Pravda and Izvestia articles on the second anniversary of the Anglo-Soviet treaty, praising it as ‘a corner-stone of Soviet policy’. He expressed an assumption of his own and made a suggestion. The former was that ‘If Communism will not be popular the Russians won’t back it.’ The latter was that Britain should offer Russia an ‘improved position in the Straits’ in return for greater British-Soviet co-operation in Romania and Bulgaria.130 Events on the ground took over shortly afterwards. In August British negotiations with the Bulgarian Government and Soviet with that of Antonescu in Romania were inter¬ rupted by a coup led by King Michael in Bucharest which brought the country over to Russia’s side before the Germans had time to react, and gave the Soviet Union its one piece of military good fortune during the war - its one victory which was secured on the cheap, rather than at a huge cost in Russian lives, though cheapness in lives lost in the Russo-German war had a relative meaning; the Red

215

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Army was to lose 69,000 men on Romanian soil. Acting from political motives, Russia declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September, coinciding with a Bulgarian war declaration on Germany, and sent troops into that country from southern Romania. They met with no resistance; Soviet accounts claim that not a single Bulgarian or Russian soldier was killed in this notional war. Within a few days an armistice provided for Soviet occupation and irrevocably sealed Bul¬ garia’s fate.131 These military events had their impact on the abortive but fascinating percentage deal which Churchill made with Stalin in Moscow in October. The 90:10 ratio in favour of the Soviet Union in Romania was in accordance with long-standing British thinking. However, the figures of 75:25 for Russia and Britain in Buigaria and 50:50 in Hungary might well have been changed round but for King Michael’s coup, which had been instrumental in taking the Red Army into Bulgaria, while the Germans, with some assistance from local fascists, still resisted in Hungary. Afterwards, Molotov induced Eden to reduce the ratio of British influence in Hungary. He would not do the same in Bulgaria, but the confusion in British leaders’ minds about whether the deal meant anything there was reflected in Eden’s own comment that Soviet control in Bulgaria was complete, ‘however disagreeable’ that might be.132 The agreement also, of course, included Greece and Yugoslavia. While Churchill regarded the 10 per cent British share in Romania and the 10 per cent Soviet share in Greece as meaning in effect no influence at all for the minority shareholder,133 the 50:50 division in Yugoslavia was intended to have real substance. In the previous May the British Government had finally and publicly ended all links with Mihailovich in view of the completely passive stance which his forces had adopted towards the Germans since the previous autumn. This was done without obtaining anything in return from Tito. In January Fitzroy Maclean had visited London and had discussed with the Prime Minister the possibility of extracting political concessions from the Yugo¬ slav leader in return for repudiating Mihailovich. Churchill had also embarked on a warm personal correspondence with 216

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Tito. He rejected any idea of threatening the Partisans’ chief. Pierson Dixon thought that Churchill was using psychologically wrong tactics with Tito, ‘an upstart Balkan politician still hardly able to credit that the British Prime Minister is ready to woo and flatter him’. There is, however, no doubt that Churchill’s way of handling Tito was wiser, as well as more generous, than that favoured by Dixon.134 Eden told the Cabinet in June that Tito was certain to rule Yugoslavia after the war. It is difficult to understand what Sargent had meant when he had told his State Department guests in April that the Yugoslav ‘problem’ might after the war become ‘a vast one calling for united action by the great powers’. The probability that the country would be firmly under the control of the Partisans was very clear. The Foreign Office had just decided that the country should be 'omitted from the list of priorities since it was not considered to be a sufficiently strong British interest to prevent disorder there or to supervise the distribution of relief supplies in the same way as was planned in Greece’. In other words, Britain would be unable to give much help even if such were requested. The British intended to seek their 50 per cent influence through other means: through King Peter, whom even Maclean seemed to regard as an asset that Tito could not easily do without; through the percentages deal with Stalin; by playing on Tito’s undoubted wish to be treated as an equal by Churchill; and by continuing to help him materially in the war. (Early in 1944 the British occupied the Dalmatian island of Vis to provide the Partisans with a base on Yugoslav soil safe from German attacks, which continued to be carried out ferociously against them well into 1944; Tito himself was taken to the island at one point by the RAF, possibly saving his life.)135 Churchill arranged a personal meeting with Tito at Naples in the summer to consolidate their relationship. He was to suffer a cruel blow when Stalin told him in October that Tito had just preceded him as a guest; the British had been un¬ aware of this visit and were angry and upset. Yet following the liberation of Belgrade at the end of that month Tito immediately began pressing Maclean for British recognition of his Government, which, coupled with the percentages

217

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

agreement, gave grounds for renewed hope for Western influence and ideas in Yugoslavia. (In June the Foreign Office had declared that any idea of British support for a purely Communist regime there would be ‘wholly dis¬ tasteful’ even if in return Tito did follow a foreign policy not subservient to the Soviet Union.) The British hoped that the agreement could be translated into concrete terms such as British help for the Yugoslav navy and air force while the Soviet Union helped with the country’s army, plus the return of the King and the admission of some non-Communists into the Government. Tito never showed the least sign of responding to these ideas.136 By early 1945 the British were becoming seriously wor¬ ried about the danger of a clash between Allied and Partisan forces at the points where the two would meet as the war drew to its end in the Italo-Yugoslav border country. Yugoslavia was certain to claim the Italian region known as Venezia Giulia, including the ports of Trieste and Fiume which Italy had acquired from Austria-Hungary after the First World War. While the Foreign Office were ready to let Yugoslavia annex the northern Dalmatian islands held by Italy, they were determined, as in the case of the Dodecan¬ ese, that British or American forces should be in at least partial control of the rest of the disputed region. Only then could the Western powers play a major part in laying down post-war frontiers which should be based largely on ethnic lines and which would therefore, it was hoped, stand a good chance of enduring. The Foreign Office felt that the Parti¬ sans had to be resisted if they tried to occupy the whole of the region.137 The hardening of Tito’s attitude may have owed something to British policy in Greece. The British intervention in Greece between 1944 and 1947 has been thoroughly described.138 Egged on by the fervently anti-Communist British Ambassador to the (powerless) Greek Government in Cairo, Sir Reginald Leeper, both Churchill and Eden had acquired by early 1944 a profound loathing for what Churchill called the ‘base and treacherous’ members of EAM-ELAS. While this had some justification in terms of 218

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

EAM’s inactivity towards the Germans, it was also a rationalisation for a belief that it would be disastrous to Britain for a Communist or pro-Communist regime to be installed in Greece. The historian of Greece in this period has written that their relative military inactivity was pre¬ cisely the key to EAM’s strength as the time for the Germans to leave Greece or be driven out drew near. It meant that they were not seriously dependent on such British aid as they received, and Left them with the physical strength to seize power without serious challenge.139 It may be that Stalin really did save Greece from the country’s own Communists. At the beginning of 1944 Dixon wrote in his diary: ‘Russia agrees to support us in our Greek policy — a heartening sign of grace.’ In September when Clark Kerr told Stalin that British troops would soon be landing in Greece, he replied, ‘By God, it is high time!’ Between these dates a Soviet mission had been sent to EAM headquarters in the Greek mountains, a move which initially annoyed the British until there were signs that it was urging caution on the Greek comrades who, slavish even by Communist standards to ‘the great Georgian, the Titan of Titans’, were obeying. Stalin already knew about the British preoccupation with Greece, and clearly regarded the Greek Communists as expendable. It was almost as if one of his celebrated spies in the British Establishment were reading Dixon’s diary in the summer of 1944 with its record of triumphant success in converting Eden to the notion that at all costs Greece must not become Communist. Dixon described 12 July as: ‘An exhilarating day, during which the plunge was taken which we ought to have taken long ago to support Papandreou and extirpate EAM in Greece.’ Nine days later: ‘AE fully feels the importance of Greece to us and of us to Greece and indeed makes no bones about admitting it to the Greeks.’140 At all events, EAM did not oppose the small British forces which were sent to Athens after the Germans left the city in October. On the whole, it was probably the British, espe¬ cially following a visit to Athens by Macmillan and Field Marshal Alexander early in December, who took the initia¬ tive in provoking the clashes between British troops and 219

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

ELAS which then broke out, and^which caused a furore against the British Government in left-wing circles at home and in the United States. The ruthless use of force was certainly favoured, and indeed insisted upon, by Churchill, who, having taken what he himself called a ‘very direct personal responsibility’ for the crushing of an EAM-inspired mutiny in the Greek forces in Egypt in April of that year, was now so preoccupied with Greece that at first he paid little attention to the German offensive in the Ardennes.141 Pierson Dixon thought that there would be a ‘lasting stain’ if British troops clashed with young Greeks who were the tools of ‘Communist-trained Commissars’, but that the Prime Minister ‘was in bloodthirsty mood and did not take kindly to suggestions that we should avoid bloodshed if possible though I couldn’t agree more that force must be used if required.’ A little earlier he had written that ‘Persia clearly is going to be in the twentieth century what the Straits have been for the past two centuries in Anglo-Russian rela¬ tions.’142 It made no essential difference that the Greek crisis brought British attention back to the Straits or at least to their close vicinity. British leaders and their advisers were wholly convinced that whether it was Greece, Turkey or Iran Britain would continue to play the Great Power rble in perpetuity. At Christmas Churchill himself, accompanied by an unwil¬ ling Eden who thought that the Prime Minister was taking over his job, descended on Athens, impelled to negotiate with EAM by the many criticisms of his Greek policy and perhaps even more by the fact that there were too few British troops in Greece to crush ELAS.143 The EAM leaders seemed grateful that so great a statesman should have deigned to visit them, and doubtless did not appreciate the weakness of Churchill’s hand. Conceivably, they were also receiving and obeying advice from Moscow to exercise the greatest restraint. When the French Foreign Minister, Bidault, asked Stalin in Moscow in that same month of December for his views on Greece, Stalin replied, ‘Ask Churchill.’ On 30 December the Soviet Union ostentatiously appointed an Ambassador to the official Greek Govern¬ ment. Overwhelmed with gratitude for what he took to be

220

Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Stalin’s role Churchill took to absurdly describing EAM as ‘Trotskyists’, which had they been they would scarcely have responded to Stalin’s commands.144 A regency was set up, ruling out any question of the King’s early return, and Britain was left with a firm foothold in Greece, even though ELAS still controlled most of the country. Churchill felt that he had achieved victory in a struggle which ‘stood at the nerve-centre of power, law and freedom in the Western world’. These events, like a whirlwind, passed by the officials in London. They could only express pious hopes that the agreement which Churchill had negotiated would give ‘the majority’ (that is, the anti-Communists) time to arm them¬ selves, and bewilderment about what the plethora of initials - SKE, ESKE, KKE as well as EAM-ELAS - emanating from Greece stood for.145

221

Bevin and Foreign Policy

Although Ernest Bevin seems to have been genuinely sur¬ prised both by his party’s victory at the 1945 general election and by his leader’s decision to appoint him Foreign Secretary, he took to the job with alacrity and, in all probability, with very few doubts about his ability to per¬ form its duties. No attempt will be made here, except incidentally, to relate Bevin’s career before his appointment as Foreign Secretary, nor to discuss his position within the Labour Party and the Governments of 1945-51 including his tussles with the Labour Left. Those subjects have been dealt with more than adequately by others.1 Instead a threefold task will be attempted: first, a discussion of his attitudes to foreign-policy problems during the war, which he was ready enough to modify in the light of experience, but which show his profound interest in the subject long before he became Foreign Secretary; secondly, and very briefly, his immensely strong position when it came to getting his own way as Foreign Secretary, which inevitably must touch on Labour Party history; and thirdly, the style in which he worked within the Office and his relations with the officials. To Bevin in the inter-war years one of the pleasures of being the leader of the largest British trade union, the Transport and General Workers, was the international dimension of the job. He frequently attended meetings of the International Labour Organisation, that child of the League of Nations which was to survive the parent body

222

Bevin and Foreign Policy

after the Second World War. At its meetings in Geneva he often glanced at the work of the League proper and in particular at the British delegation where he saw little of which he could approve. That impression and ideas about Britain’s international position after the war and the re¬ organisation of the Foreign Service were set down in a num¬ ber of wartime memoranda and letters which now form part of the collection of Bevin papers at Churchill College, Cambridge. In August 1940 R.A. Butler, then the Foreign Office junior minister, invited Bevin to talks with himself and Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary, following Bevin’s suggestion to Butler ‘that the trade unions very often had valuable information and contacts useful to the forma¬ tion of our foreign policy’. Such talks duly took place. Bevin called for closer liaison between the Foreign Office and ‘the growing forces of Labour, Trade Unionism and the socialist organisations of the world’, so that foreign policy might take into account the needs and wishes of ordinary people throughout the world. He suggested a number of reforms, including a wider base for the recruiting of members of the Foreign Service and also a unified service of the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic and Consular staffs, all of which were to be proclaimed as government policy in 1943. He was instrumental during the war in securing the appointment of the first labour attaches (referred to in the paper embodying his thoughts as ‘industrial attaches’). However, as Foreign Secretary he seems to have taken no interest in his two further proposals of 1940 for Foreign Service recruits to serve a probationary period in home departments to gain industrial experience and for a regular interchange of staff between home and overseas departments.2 With regard to the nature of British foreign policy, as opposed to the instruments for carrying it out, Bevin waxed enthusiastic about various schemes for world-wide political co-operation to achieve increased well-being which were to influence his conduct of British foreign policy after 1945 and which some commentators - too ingenious - have dismissed as mere verbiage while he relentlessly and stealthily guided Britain and the West towards confrontation with the expanded Communist world. In December 1942 he wrote to 223

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Eden of his conviction that regional organisations, including the Commonwealth, to which he attached immense impor¬ tance, and the world organisation above them really would be able to concentrate.on the ‘cohesive force’ provided by economics, relegating ‘international police forces’ to a sub¬ ordinate place. To Lord Cranborne, just over a year later, he expounded his vision of Britain’s leading role in this new international constellation. Besides leading the Common¬ wealth, Britain would also lead Western Europe, if only because ‘France, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium and prob¬ ably the Balkans and southern Europe’ would demand it of Britain, ‘while the Eastern States would lean towards Russia’. A division of Europe into two mutually hostile camps was clearly far from his thoughts since, ‘It seems likely that in a few years Europe will not present the same difficult problems that it has done hitherto.’ Only in the Far East, where the ‘three great imperialisms’ of Russia, the United States and the British Commonwealth (in which he felt that the Netherlands East Indies would be included for practical purposes) met, would there be political dangers of a familiar kind. To face them, he urged a thorough pooling of Commonwealth defence forces which, it was to be hoped, would have beneficial general effects in fostering Common¬ wealth solidarity. For instance, in South Africa ‘the old controversy of Boer versus Briton’ might be forgotten. Marriages should be ‘encouraged’ between soldiers training in a different part of the Commonwealth from their own and local women. Bevin regarded the idea of a foreign policy without force to back it up as an absurdity and, in remarks to a Cabinet committee in March 1945, was to elevate military service into sacred duty: ‘His personal opinion was that as the State had now undertaken so many commitments to the citizen, i.e., the Full Employment policy, Social Security, etc., it would be right for the citizen, in return, to accept the obligation of Military Service.’3 Bevin was rather silent in these general schemes about the most obvious problem of the war - what to do with Germany. On that he fully shared the pessimism outside circles of people such as left-wing intellectuals, some Roman Catholics and pacifists, all of whom he despised, about the 224

Bevin and Foreign Policy

prospects for integrating Germany into a peaceful inter¬ national order. In a newspaper article in late 1941 he endorsed the view that Hitler was the symptom, not the cause, of German wrong-doing.4 His views on the German problem would certainly have been regarded as unenlight¬ ened and unhelpful by the wartime Foreign Office. In 1944 he advocated the Churchillian idea of the dismemberment of Germany with part of south Germany possibly being linked with Austria. He thought that preserving German unity ‘would be to prepare the way for another war’, whereas the Germany specialists in the Foreign Office were inclined to think the same about dismemberment. He took the view, which the Foreign Office specialists considered utterly obso¬ lete, that the landowning Junker class in Prussia was the aggressive class in Germany and should be rooted out. In July 1944 he wrote that if three million families were settled on Junker lands - the Foreign Office estimated that no more than 285,000 could be so settled (see above, p. 57) - they would forrii ‘a conservative and peace-loving element in the population of the Reich-Rump’. (The favourable reference to a conservative peasantry was interesting; in 1945 he wondered whether the great mistake of the Allies at the end of the First World War had been to allow the Germans to abolish the monarchy.)5 Only on two German issues would the Foreign Office have found him helpful. The first was his insistence on the revival of a free trade union movement as soon as possible after unconditional surrender, though they might well have thought that the hopes which he pinned on that were exaggerated. The second was his fear by mid-1944, which they fully shared and which Bevin presumably got from reading Foreign Office papers, that the Nazis were intent on ‘throwing Germany into a state of anarchy with no adminis¬ trative machine at all’ before their defeat was complete. No doubt, he wrote to Eden, the Nazis wished to make an occupation regime impossible to run, but his view was that the Allies should respond by committing whatever numbers of troops and administrators, whose training should begin at once, as were necessary to thwart that design and prevent ‘mass anarchy’ and ‘a civil strife unprecedented’. The 225

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Foreign Office would certainly have agreed with all that (see above, pp. 51 and 60).6 Bevin’s hostile and suspicious attitude towards the Soviet Union in War Cabinet discussions probably gave an exagg¬ erated impression of his true feelings.7 His intention in part may have been to support Attlee, whose anti-Sovietism was very profound indeed. Before the war his attitude to the Soviet Union was one of some sympathy with their ‘superhuman effort to rebuild a state on socialistic lines’, while deploring their manipulation of foreign Communist Parties and rigidly opposing the influence of Communists in British trade unions precisely because they took their instructions from outside. In July 1939 he had described Soviet Russia as a country which could be worked with.8 In November 1941 he asked in a memorandum: ‘Are we going to work on the basis we have worked on in the last twenty years that Communism is a great danger to Europe and must be suppressed?’ He supplied no answer, but if he had done presumably it would have been a negative one in view of the confidence which he expressed elsewhere that co-operation with Russia, especially in European affairs, could be antici¬ pated with confidence. He called for Soviet membership of his beloved International Labour Organisation - not an immense step but one which indicated goodwill towards that country. Further evidence of goodwill and of a belief that mutually satisfactory compromises, which would please Brit¬ ain, Russia and America alike, were possible was evident in a suggestion which Bevin made to Eden in February 1942 that the Finnish Arctic port of Petsamo should be made a free port. Petsamo had been left in Finnish possession after the Winter War of 1939-40, but Stalin had told Eden during his recent Moscow visit that the Soviet Union would annex it at the end of the war as an addition to the general demand for restoration of its acquisitions in 1939 and 1940. Officials thought the idea impractical and ill judged and Eden, agreeing, asked Bevin to withdraw it. He did so, while explaining that he had supposed that it would appeal to the Americans and would have many other merits: In making the suggestion, I did not regard this as a

226

Bevin and Foreign Policy

bargaining point so much as a settlement which would remove what would otherwise be a permanent cause of difficulty. It would prevent Russia from asking for Narvik [in northern Norway], and at the same time would provide an outlet for Russia, Sweden and Fin¬ land. I thought that the international aspect of the suggestion might appeal to all parties, but in view of what you say I will wait for you.9 At an early meeting of the Armistice and Post-War Commit¬ tee in April 1944 Bevin reacted strongly against any notion that Britain might ever use Germany against Russia: MR BEVIN said that this was a position which he could

not possibly accept. It was essential to make a really great effort to secure a system of world security without which we should merely head straight for another war. He was not, however, prepared to subscribe to any system of world security which did not have force behind it. He had attended many of the proceedings of the League of Nations at Geneva, and he had seen clearly in what an impossible position we had been placed by the absence of force to back up the decisions of the League. Therefore each of the three Great Powers should assign permanently a quota of its armed forces to ‘a scheme of world security’ whose main purpose would be in perpetuity to keep in check German aggressive instincts.10 There were two final points of importance concerning Bevin’s attitude to foreign-policy problems during the war. In 1944 he opposed Churchill’s treatment of de Gaulle and its presupposition that the United States were more impor¬ tant to Britain than was France; and he fully supported Churchill’s suppression of the Communist-dominated EAM movement in Greece towards the end of that year, despite a flood of protests, many of them from trade union branches. In a speech to a Labour Party audience he uttered the Churchillian sentiment, ‘The British Empire cannot aban¬ don the position in the Mediterranean.’11 Neither Bevin’s support for the crushing of EAM nor his claim during the 227

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

1945 election campaign that a ‘left’ (Labour) government in Britain would be better able to negotiate with the ‘left’ (Communist) government of Russia than would a Con¬ servative government was the least bit surprising in view of his past attitudes.12 He was convinced that the Soviet Union could be worked with, and equally convinced that when Communists, whether Greek rebels or members of his own union, overstepped the mark they would have to be suppressed. In the words of a recent essay on Bevin as Foreign Secretary, ‘In evaluating Bevin’s overall record as Foreign Secretary, one need not dwell on the domestic political setting in which it was formulated, because this played a minimal role in influencing the evolution of his policy.’ The quantity, and indeed quality, of the literature on Bevin’s left-wing critics within his party has been in inverse ratio to the effect which those critics had on his conduct of foreign policy. The Government’s decision in April 1947 to reduce the prop¬ osed term of conscription from eighteen to twelve months was the sole concession of any consequence which it made in the overseas and defence field to backbench criticisms at^ny time between 1945 and 1951, and that was short-lived since the eighteen-month term was to be restored in late 1948. Strang, a close adviser, was convinced that Bevin was not influenced by public opinion, Cabinet colleagues (except Attlee) and above all the press until the 1950 election.13 The key to Bevin’s immensely strong position as Foreign Secretary was the trust and confidence reposed in him by the Prime Minister, Attlee, who preferred to leave foreign policy very much in his hands. This was all the more remarkable in view of the extremely influential position in relation to foreign policy which Attlee had carved out for himself in the War Cabinet, chiefly because he regarded Churchill’s judgments on the subject as highly erratic. Translated to the supreme office, which gave him an undoubted right to intervene in foreign policy, he chose to exercise less authority than before. Nor was this because his and Bevin’s preferences in foreign affairs were identical. If Attlee had chosen to control the foreign policy of his 228

Bevin and Foreign Policy

Government closely, presumably with someone more com¬ pliant than Bevin as Foreign Secretary, it is likely that the patience which was displayed towards the Soviet Union, despite occasional outbursts by Bevin, would have been much more short-lived (see below, p. 259). Attlee obviously did not know in advance that Bevin would master his new job so well. He did have reason to suppose that Bevin would be readier to withstand Soviet demands than the other obvious aspirant to the Foreign Office, Hugh Dalton. Once Bevin was installed, no doubt Attlee also needed, to quote Roy Jenkins, ‘a working class sheet anchor’ for his govern¬ ment. When all is said, the decision to appoint him must be regarded, however inadequate it may sound as an explana¬ tion, as a brilliant example of inspired judgment.14 There was no standing Cabinet committee on foreign policy, and in Cabinet discussions Bevin, invariably sup¬ ported by Attlee, almost always got his way. This was further facilitated by the indifference of many ministers, like many backbench MPs, to foreign affairs, which Bevin found annoying, though he often resented criticism when it did come and many junior ministers were undoubtedly afraid to ‘trespass’. Bevin, it might be added, did not hesitate to make known his views on domestic topics, particularly financial ones, arguing in the Cabinet for instance against wage controls in March 1946.15 He had more problems when dealing with departments of state other than his own, notably the Service ministries and the Treasury, though there were others as well including even the Colonial Office. Above all, Bevin had immense stature in the country and in the Labour Party, or at least much of it, with a solid bedrock of somewhat unthinking support in the trade union movement which had been his life until 1940. He became a living legend, the memory of which could still be used after his death. We are, for example, told that a former Cabinet colleague of Bevin’s who disliked or even hated him praised him publicly and described him as a personal friend some years after his death, presumably seeing political advantage for himself in such hypocrisy.16 The friendship between Bevin and Eden, which at one point 229

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

in 1944 caused Churchill to remark, caustically that he was prepared to step down in favour of either of them at any time, and the feelings of respect and affection which Bevin inspired in a great many of his officials at the Foreign Office - in some of them even before he became Foreign Secretary - are yet again subjects too familiar to need recapitulation here.17 It cannot be argued seriously that Bevin was a puppet in the hands of his officials, but neither would it be correct simply to say that he listened to their advice, made up his own mind and that that was all there was to it. Bevin brought to the Foreign Office a passionate interest in foreign policy, great knowledge (he had a prodigious memory), a definite vision in broad terms of the policy which he wanted to pursue and exalted self-confidence. The last was reinforced by the rapt attention which the words of any British Foreign Secretary, whoever he might be, commanded on the world stage in those times; foreign journalists besieged the press gallery of the Flouse of Commons for seats whenever he was due to speak, and there were often not enough places for all of them.18 His lack of inverted snobbery about the social background of nearly all his staff, and his keen human interest in them and readiness to treat them as friends, on first-name terms in some cases, naturally appealed to them. It soon became clear that he could make the necessary changes to apply his experience of trade union negotiations to international relations, and that he had a truly remarkable ability for someone of his non-cosmopolitan background to say and do the right thing when meeting almost any national¬ ity or type of foreigner from heads of state to trade unionists, though in the case of Soviet representatives these abilities did not, and could not, count for anything.19 He had one or two characteristics which were certain to find extreme favour with his officials but a more mixed reception in the wider world. One of these was a veritable obsession with secrecy. No Cabinet minister of the last fifty years can have been less of a believer in open government, though his admittedly vague public statements were, so far as they went, a more truthful guide to his policy than his critics have supposed. This could produce quite comical results, as when in September 1946 he seems to have

230

Bevin and Foreign Policy

experienced paroxysms of apprehension and ordered a full-scale inquiry when the briefcase of a British official in Berlin containing official documents was stolen.20 In the larger field of diplomatic negotiation it was also in Sep¬ tember 1946 that one of his officials wrote, no doubt approvingly, that the Secretary of State ‘dislikes on principle the practice of issuing diplomatic notes to the Press’. Dip¬ lomatic notes were for issuing to other foreign ministries.21 The next month Bevin told a meeting of colleagues and officials that negotiations with the United States about Germany should be conducted wholly in secret. If a delega¬ tion were sent to Washington its existence should not be disclosed to the press.22 Over a year later in December 1947 he proposed to the French Foreign Minister, Bidault, the setting up of an Anglo-French committee to plan closer economic and military collaboration between the two coun¬ tries, and added that it should be kept as secret as possible: ‘The Russians did that sort of thing very well and we could learn something from them.’23 If Bevin felt that he could only do his job effectively away from the public gaze whenever matters of substance arose, nothing was more likely to infuriate him against his officials than failure by them to keep him fully informed. In October 1947 the officials failed to tell him about a possible plot by the Communist Government in Romania to depose King Michael and replace him with his father, the discredited former King Carol, which the Foreign Office was actively combating (see below pp. 380-1). Bevin learned about the matter only from his own King, George VI. He wrote: ‘What is very annoying is that this business can go on with [sic] my ever being told and I learn it from the King do not let it occur again.’ Most of Bevin’s minutes were followed by an ‘elucidation’, a rendering by an official in easily legible handwriting but with no attempt to revise the syntax. This one was not. The responsible officials may have felt a little like whipped curs.24 Bevin’s method of working was unremarkable except perhaps for his practice of starting work between 4 and 5 a.m. and spending three hours studying papers and thinking before breakfast. Discussions with officials played a big part

231

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

in his day after he arrived at his office about 10 a.m. There seems to be some doubt about his reading ability. According to Duff Cooper he read slowly. According to Roderick Barclay, who was betterjplaced to know, and also Cadogan, he read quite fast and copiously. What seems clear is that his personal assistants felt that they could not burden him with too many of the minutes which leading members of the Office wrote. In November 1946 the Permanent Under¬ secretary, Sargent, wrote that some recent minutes on policy in Germany were so important that the Foreign Secretary ought to ‘hear’ them. Nine months earlier Troutbeck of the German Department had himself thought that some recently written-down opinions of his were so important that the necessary special steps should be taken to ensure that the Foreign Secretary read them. Sargent obligingly wrote to Bevin asking him to read them. Bevin undoubtedly pre¬ ferred a verbal method of transacting business.25 What is crystal clear is Bevin’s utter inadequacy with the written word, about which he himself could joke. It requires a certain effort to remember that the same man who wrote the short, semi-legible or almost illegible, syntactically anarchic minutes which were those of the British Foreign Secretary between 1945 and 1951 was also the man who could dazzle Pierson Dixon with an exposition of the histori¬ cal strengths and weaknesses of British policy in Tibet one afternoon after the day’s work at the Office had been completed. As Roy Jenkins wrote, Bevin’s combination of advantages and disadvantages was such that he could only have held no position at all in the Foreign Office or the highest position.26 The nature of the relationship between Bevin and his officials, at least until the end of 1947, will, it is hoped, emerge from the chapters which follow. There was a con¬ stant interplay. At one extreme Bevin quite often made specific proposals for settling specific problems - the case of Petsamo in 1942 was an example from long before he became Foreign Secretary - which officials were able to show beyond refutation to be impracticable. Bevin always accepted correction with good grace in these cases. In matters of larger policy he was not nearly so easily moved. 232

Bevin and Foreign Policy

His ideal conception of the function of officials was that they should ‘put clothes on his ideas’ to use his own phrase. It was the nature of events working on his existing hopes and suppositions which caused him to change the broad outlines of his policy, but officials could speed the process by reasoned argument. That process will be traced in relation to Bevin’s policy towards the Soviet Union. The ‘special’ nature of that country in international relations became more apparent than ever once the war had ended. It became even more difficult than before to cultivate normal relations with official representatives of Russia, who had to live in constant fear of falling foul of the apparatus of police-terror which flowered again in full bloom after a very limited wartime respite. Soviet embassies in the last years of Stalin’s life have been described as ‘morbid tombs’ whose terrified occupants could perform few of the normal duties of diplomats.27 For Bevin and the Foreign Office the Soviet Union came to be symbolised less by the remote figure of Stalin than by that of the Foreign Minister, Molotov, constantly repeating with intransigence his master’s demands. Bevin’s determination for so long to keep the door open to improved relations with Russia becomes all the more heroic when set against his personal antipathy to the Soviet Union’s leading repre¬ sentative in international affairs, even though it did involve him in occasional displays of hypocrisy. For example, in March 1946 he expatiated to the House of Commons on the excellent nature of his relations with the Soviet leaders: ‘After all, those who make up the Soviet Union are members of the proletariat and so am I. We are used to hard hitting but our friendship remains.’28 Yet according to Attlee, Bevin hated his meetings with Molotov because he regarded him as the murderer of many thousands of peasants. They fre¬ quently taunted one another, with Molotov giving as good as he got except once when Bevin showed him his calloused hand, that of a true workman, and mocked Molotov for never having done a day’s manual work in his life. According to the American diplomat Charles Bohlen, Bevin had to be restrained from physically attacking Molotov at one of the 233

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

sessions of the Paris Peace Conference in 1946. So much for proletarian friendship. At other times, Bevin expressed puzzled regret that Molotov responded in exactly the same way when Bevin was trying to be reasonable and friendly as he did when Bevin was being as nasty as possible.29 Stanislaw Kot and Averell Harriman, diplomats of the London Polish Government and of the United States respec¬ tively, found Molotov, above all, stupid.30 He was certainly a dogged defender of Stalin’s policies, and it seems amazing, even with Stalin’s paranoid personality, that in the last years of his life he became convinced that Molotov had somehow betrayed him during his visit to the United States in 1942. He ceased to be Foreign Minister in 1949 and his wife was arrested — a sure sign that his own doom might be impend¬ ing.31 Stalin’s death may therefore have saved him, and certainly brought him back to the Foreign Ministry for three years. It was during that time, between his rehabilitation and his final consignment to political oblivion by Khruschev in 1957, that a Russian former princess, married to a Western diplomat, met him and penned the following description: Molotov was a pathetic figure; small, wiry, reserved, almost inhuman in his abstraction, he was the saint and ascetic of the Party. He had given it everything, had sacrificed even his personality. A martyr of devoted Communist obedience, he had accepted the massacre of his friends without a murmur. He had bowed to circumstances when the so-called anti-Jewish trials had compelled him to separate from his Hebrew wife. He had taken her back when de-Stalinisation came, since she was still in circulation, performing a kind of marital rehabilitation which matched that on the political level. He was the man who was employed, without any thought for his pride, to plead contradictory arguments in Geneva and elsewhere, and he had listened with indifference while Western statesmen quoted his own arguments against him. I saw him that day as a robot untouched by honours or humiliations, an empty envelope with a constantly changing address.32 Much in that description would have applied to the Molotov 234

Bevin and Foreign Policy

of the period of the post-war Foreign Ministers’ conferences covered in this book. It is to the post-war relations of Britain and the Soviet Union, aptly symbolised by these two men, that attention may now be turne^.

235

5 Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

I From London to Moscow, September—December 1945 The most dismaying episode of 1945 in British-Soviet rela¬ tions was the first meeting of the foreign ministers of the major powers in London in September. Bevin in effect adopted the tactics favoured by the Truman Administration, of interference in Russia’s ‘backyard’, singling out Bulgaria and Romania, the latter a country in the past usually regarded as lost by the British, and telling Molotov that ‘the chief difficulty’ in relations with Russia lay there. He sug¬ gested an independent inquiry into whether democratic liberties were being fully maintained in those countries.1 It may have been a Soviet variant of Sargent’s doctrine of diplomatic attack being the best form of defence which led Molotov to challenge Bevin on what the Russians must have noted at Yalta was Britain’s most sensitive European con¬ cern - the Great Power status of France. Whereas at Yalta American policy under Roosevelt had been the main obsta¬ cle to French advancement, the Soviet Union now assumed that role. American policy had in fact completely reversed itself since Roosevelt’s death, and the Americans had pri¬ vately told the British as early as Potsdam that they wanted France to have complete equality with the three big powers, and attached more importance to France than to China.11 What Molotov actually did, after the conference had been running for eleven days, was to reverse the Soviet position by demanding that discussion of the peace treaties with Nazi

236

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

Germany’s former allies should be confined to the Big Three of Potsdam, plus the countries actually at war with each individual enemy. By this formula France would have been allowed a voice in the treaty only with Italy. Bevin asked sardonically whether the French delegation was to be asked periodically to depart from the conference chamber. At their final meeting of the Soviet Foreign Minister’s visit to London, which took place at the Soviet embassy, Bevin announced his aim as being to end the conference ‘decently and to put things on a more stable basis and with better understanding’. Despite his remarks about Soviet policy in Bulgaria and Romania noted above, he hinted at a cessation of British criticism there in return for full equality for France. The most Molotov would say was that France would have to earn such equality and atone for what he described as French failure to play any part in the defeat of Germany and Italy.3 Molotov’s lack of responsiveness stemmed from the fact that not only was Bevin following an American lead over Romania and Bulgaria, but that in another matter, too, Britain appeared the principal obstacle to Soviet ambitions. This was the Soviet demand for a ten-year trusteeship over Tripolitania, the western half of the former Italian colony of Libya, the whole of which (except for some desert oases in the south which had been entrusted to France) was under British military occupation, as were the other former Italian colonies in East Africa and the Dodecanese islands. Soviet thinking, permeated by Lenin’s theories about inter¬ imperialist rivalries, seems to have been that the United States and France would not wish for a settlement of the former Italian colonies which left Britain in virtually exclu¬ sive control, and that Britain could also be persuaded by Soviet support for British claims in Cyrenaica or eastern Libya, and for the transfer of the Dodecanese to Britain’s Greek client-state. Bevin’s opposition to the Tripoli claim was inflexible, and he was assisted by the fact that the United States and France, despite Lenin, felt nothing but pure horror at the thought of a Soviet colony in North Africa. (Everyone at the conference took this claim seri¬ ously and not, like some later commentators, as a mere 237

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

bargaining-counter.) Content that he had resisted both this claim and the self-evident Soviet intention to drive a wedge between Britain and France, which would have made their coming-together in a West European regional grouping impossible, Bevin took with him to his final meeting with Molotov a memorandum by Clark Kerr, still British Ambas¬ sador in Moscow, which contained ‘compromise’ proposals on south-east Europe - elections would be held in Romania and Bulgaria ‘on the same lines as Finland’, where elections had been free from Soviet interference - and in return for this Britain would recognise the governments which the Soviet Union had set up in Austria and Hungary; Stalin might have been pardoned for thinking that this was not a good compromise from his point of view. Also, Britain would insist on full equality for France in drawing up the satellite peace treaties, though they were prepared to make concessions to the Soviet standpoint regarding the participa¬ tion of smaller allies in those treaties. Bevin had fully recovered his confidence from his terrible gaffe of the previous day when he had accused Molotov of behaving like a Nazi, during full conference session, and had had to apologise to him. Averell Harriman had explained to him afterwards in a friendly way that the one thing which one could not do in talks with the Soviet leaders was to compare their country in any way with Hitler’s Germany. Only a day later Molotov must have had a profound sense of failure, which may have accounted for the ‘incomprehensible noise’ with which he took his leave of Bevin after the latter had made a conciliatory general remark.4 The total failure of the conference caused real dismay in the Foreign Office. As Dixon noted in his diary, the only consolation was that Soviet foreign policy seemed to be opportunistic, rather than hell bent on war like Germany in 1939. The Russians knew that in the aftermath of war bases and territory were ‘up for grabs’, but might soon not be. Even so: ‘The depressing thing is the utterly realistic and selfish approach of the Russians and complete absence of any wider consideration of the interests of peace for the best benefit of all.’ An important question was whether to announce their true feelings about the conference failure to 238

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

the British public, or whether to paper over the cracks in the hope of better times to come. Bevin’s first inclination was in the former direction, and he did go so far as to ask Dixon to give Eden a full and frank account of the conference. However, to quote Dixon again, Bevin was persuaded not to reveal to Parliament that ‘the real reason for the breakdown was our refusal to meet Russian ambitions in the Mediterra¬ nean. This seemed to me a mistake, as we do not want to conduct our diplomacy with Russia through the press and Parliament.’ The attractions of secret diplomacy proved in this way irresistible, and Bevin’s public statement described the inconclusive outcome of the conference as the result primarily of a disagreement over procedure, though in a long and mellifluous House of Commons speech in November he was to allow himself an oblique reference to the Soviet claim to Tripoli (‘One cannot help being a little suspicious if a Great Power wants to come right across, shall I say, the throat of the British Commonwealth’). It is worth noting that at this time Eden let the Foreign Office know that he favoured another meeting of the heads of government of the Great Powers. When Byrnes forced something considerably less on the British - another meeting of the Foreign Minis¬ ters, this time in Moscow, in December - the Foreign Office including Bevin were angry and dismayed; an interesting indication of how quickly a politician could be divorced from feeling within his own ministry within a very short time of leaving it.5 More immediately after the end of the conference, Bevin sent ‘particularly secret’ instructions to the embassy in Washington for polemics against the Soviet Union to be avoided if possible and for British spokesmen to keep a low profile generally, ‘giving time for things to simmer down and for the Soviet Government to show its hand more clearly’. However, if anti-Soviet polemics were still to be avoided, pro-Soviet ones which could, however mistakenly, be associ¬ ated with the British Government now became unendurable. This applied above all to the editorial outpourings in The Times of that renegade from the Foreign Office referred to as ‘Professor’ E.H. Carr. The Office felt that his ‘dogmatic and over-bearing’ leaders, with their intention of ‘sabotaging 239

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the policy of the Labour Government and of its predecessors on all matters where Russia and her Eastern Bloc are concerned’ were so dangerous that the Prime Minister spoke strongly to the paper’s-editor, Barrington-Ward.6 The debate within the Office walls after the conference’s failure was fast and furious. A telegram from Roberts in Moscow which was open to interpretation as urging a British-Soviet agreement on spheres of influence in place of the abortive one negotiated by Churchill in October of the previous year was seen by Ward as impossible in view of the importance which world public opinion and the American Government attached to the United Nations. Besides, Russia’s appetite showed every sign of being insatiable: The Russian agitation against any idea of a regional association of Western Europe, their demand for the trusteeship of Tripolitania and their suggestion that they should acquire a formal stake in the security of the Western Mediterranean by stationing a warship at Tangier, all suggest that the day has gone by when we could buy the Russians off by handing over to them the countries of central Europe and the Balkans. Brimelow thought that another idea sometimes suggested at that time and ever since as a solution to the problem of East-West relations - large-scale American economic help to Russia — would achieve nothing since aid would attract only contempt and ingratitude from the Soviet rulers: If the USA send help to Russia, they will have been represented [sic] as doing so out of purely selfish motives, to avoid their own economic difficulties. If they deny help, their decision will have been due to the influence of insidious reactionaries.7 There was an increase in concern about the steadfastness of Britain’s main potential partners against the Soviet Union. Ward thought that the French Government (exclud¬ ing its Communist component) seemed hearteningly realistic in its attitude to Russia. But the attitude of the United States was what really mattered. With towering condescension, 240

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

Ward wrote in mid-October: ‘The United States Delegation at Big Power meetings has greatly improved in efficiency since I first saw them at the Moscow Conference in October 1943. But they are still often very naif and confused.’ In particular, he, like many in the Office, mistrusted one American, the Secretary of State, James Byrnes, whom he referred to as ‘the slippery Mr Byrnes’; Byrnes was sus¬ pected of being as appeasement-minded towards Stalin as ever Neville Chamberlain had been to Hitler. Also, they were deeply offended by his habit of not consulting them.8 The Foreign Office thought that it might be necessary to bypass Byrnes and appeal directly to the President. Ward drew up a long telegram for Halifax, arguing against any spheres-of-influence deal with Moscow as worse than futile since everything indicated that Stalin wanted an exclusively Soviet sphere in eastern Europe without being prepared to concede British or American spheres anywhere else. On the contrary, his demands for a trusteeship in Tripoli and for a share in the occupation of Japan were almost certainly intended to provide springboards for ‘a general campaign to establish Russian influence in every quarter of the globe’. To encourage the Americans to resist this campaign they should be urged to set up permanent bases in the Atlantic and Pacific, ‘and it may well pay us a handsome dividend to sacrifice for this purpose a few otherwise unimportant islands or pieces thereof. Similar considerations could not in any way apply to encroachments by the Russians upon British territory or vital interests.’ Britain would seek no compensation for such losses or reward for its war effort, ‘with one small exception ... we are determined to have strategic safeguards to prevent Cyrenaica being used again as a base for an attack upon Egypt and our life line through the Suez Canal.’9 Halifax probably did not put such an appeal directly to Truman. In late October he had a conversation with the President in which what the latter said was agreeable enough without his being asked to join in an anti-Soviet alliance. Truman said that he increasingly doubted whether America’s disagreements with Russia stemmed simply from a failure in communications. He suspected something more

241

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

sinister, though that did not stop ,him from going on to attribute the success of British-American relations to their common language. American policy was seen as moving slowly in the right direction, a process facilitated by the sheer outrageousness of Soviet actions.10 The one American manifestation at this time of what the Foreign Office saw as appeasement came not from Byrnes, but from a man whose views on the Secretary of State were as adverse as those of the Foreign Office, Averell Harriman. In late October he requested and, uniquely, was granted an interview with Stalin not in the Kremlin but while the dictator was on holiday at a villa on the Black Sea near Sochi. The Foreign Office learned details of this meeting only from Frank Roberts, whose information came unoffi¬ cially from Flarriman himself. Whether through lack of interest in Harriman’s initiative or through his usual unwil¬ lingness to consult with Britain, Byrnes did not send official word of the meeting through the State Department. Roberts was ‘unhappy’ about the principle of travelling to the Black Sea to visit Stalin (still in the year of the great conference at the Black Sea resort of Yalta!), which he characterised as an ‘apparent going to Canossa’ in reference to the selfabasement of the medieval Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV before Pope Gregory VII. Warner was worried that Harri¬ man might be too anxious to score a personal success before his imminent departure from the Moscow embassy.11 Confirming the impression that he was an opportunist on the look-out for cheap gains, Stalin’s remarks dwelt heavily on a matter of which Molotov had complained in London: that Russia was being denied its rightful voice in the occupation regime in Japan, from which Stalin had just withdrawn the general representing the Soviet Union in view of MacArthur, the American governor of Japan, treating him as a ‘piece of furniture’. (Visiting Japan later, Harriman took this up with MacArthur, who vigorously denied the accusation. He said that he frequently tried to consult with the Soviet general, who had responded with a wooden silence. Harriman had to explain that under the Soviet system if the general had said anything which deviated even slightly from Stalinist orthodoxy he would probably have 242

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

been shot.12) Stalin depicted this exclusion as unjust in view of America’s claim to a voice in countries like Romania where the Soviet Union alone had defeated the enemy, and doubly unjust in view of the fact, £s he saw it, that Russia had made a major contribution to the defeat of Japan by keeping fifty divisions in the Far East throughout the war and finally launching seventy divisions against Japan three months previously. Stalin expressed ‘bruised pride’ at the ‘ingratitude’ of the Americans in refusing to consent to Soviet occupation of part of Japan, preferably Hokkaido, the northernmost of its four great islands, and declared that the Soviet Union would still be ready to help the common cause by undertaking such an occupation. Russia had to be given a real, though not equal, part in the occupation regime in Japan. If his country was denied this, it might have to abandon co-operation with the United States everywhere and settle down to a form of isolation in which ‘each of the victors could then run its own sphere in its own way’.13 The stay on the Black Sea had certainly renewed Stalin’s talent for theatre. He professed ignorance about the diffi¬ culties which the American and British representatives on the control bodies in eastern Europe were experiencing, and which Harriman cited as a reason for not setting up another such body in Japan. According to Roberts: Harriman came away with the firm impression that Stalin has no idea of what has really been going on in the Balkans and genuinely believes that we have had a fair deal and are now shuffling out of our obligations in the Far East towards Russia. There can be no doubt, however, that in this case Stalin was telling barefaced lies.14 Stalin requested bilateral talks with the United States on Japan - fresh evidence of his unease at being swamped in international discussions by a large number of countries, most of which would always side with Britain and America against Russia. Turning away from the Far East and repeating what Molotov had clearly been instructed to say at London, Stalin insisted that drawing up the satellite peace treaties had to be 243

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 rigidly confined to countries which had played a fighting part against the former enemies taken individually. Brazil, Yugo¬ slavia and Greece were entitled to a voice in the Italian treaty but Norway, Belgium and Poland were not. The Foreign Office were not sure whether the specific exclusion of Poland was an insult against the former exile Government in London, whose troops had fought with great distinction in Italy between 1943 and 1945, or whether it was meant as a concession since Polish foreign policy had become totally subservient to Moscow.15 More clearly insulting was the manner in which Stalin went out of his way to insist that India could not attend the peace conference on Italy despite the service which Indian troops had seen there, on the grounds that the country was a ‘colony’. Stalin seemed to be serving notice that Russia would denounce British moves to take India to independence as fraudulent. Stalin repeated at the end of the interview that satisfaction for Russia in Japan was an absolute sine qua non for co-operation any¬ where. The Foreign Office were not alarmed by this attempt at blackmail, being convinced that MacArthur from his vice¬ regal eminence in Tokyo would be able to prevent Truman and Byrnes from making more than token concessions to Russia in Japan. In fact, Truman himself was absolutely determined not to make concessions to Stalin over Japan. Byrnes, whatever his private inclinations, could only give way on small and inessential points to the Soviet Union over the occupation regime there. Japan was to be saved from becoming a focal-point in the Cold War by the combination of American firmness in keeping out the Russians and, as Ulam suggests, the sheer weight of evidence that the American effort to reshape Japan, with its heavy accent on democracy and demilitarisation, could not be construed as an effort to build up the country as a threat to the Soviet Union.16 As the shocked feelings in the immediate wake of the London failure died down, the Foreign Office wondered how to restore some spark of life to the wartime alliance, peace-making with Germany’s former allies being at the centre of concern. In mid-November Hood wondered 244

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

whether peace conferences for Germany and Austria would ever be held, and wrote that, if not, a conference for the other ex-enemies ‘may well be the only gathering of nations comparable to the Paris Conference of 1919’. Every effort, he continued, should be made to get the Soviet Union to a peace conference on terms which the West could accept. The alternative was a peace conference for Italy confined to the Western powers, and one in Moscow for the Balkan states and Finland. That would amount to ‘a clear cut division of Europe into Eastern and Western halves’. Hood’s conclu¬ sion that such an outcome would carry the particular danger of leaving the situation in Trieste suspended in the air struck rather a note of anti-climax. Pierson Dixon feared that the alternative to co-operation might not be merely stalemate; some ‘untoward incident’ ‘might start the business [presum¬ ably a new war] up again’.17 While the Foreign Office were musing, Byrnes sprang an unwelcome surprise on them. Deeply worried about the growing tension with Russia and convinced that AmericanSoviet differences were in essence limited, impelled also by the impatience which was one of his most prominent charac¬ teristics, he succeeded in obtaining an invitation from Stalin to an almost immediate conference in Moscow in December. Besides believing that it all smacked of appeasement, the British were angry at not being consulted, though at least they were invited, unlike the French and the Chinese. The perceptive George Kennan noted Bevin’s anger and suspi¬ cion against Byrnes, both of which he considered justified. In Moscow, at one point Dixon spent ‘two hours after dinner with Bohlen and then Harriman on the subject of Mr Byrnes’; it would be easy to speculate on what was said since the gathering was devoid of admirers of the Secretary of State. On Christmas Eve, Dixon, intensely loyal to his chief, was infuriated that at dinner the ever-impatient Byrnes was not prepared to wait a matter of seconds for Bevin so that all three Foreign Ministers could enter the dining-room together.18 Perhaps the very existence of tension between the British and American Foreign Ministers contributed to the relative success of the conference, though it was more important that

245

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

all three participants wanted to avoid a showdown, and indulged in an orgy of inessential concessions. The Soviet side agreed that the other two could send a high-ranking team to investigate any unfortunate undemocratic irregularities in Romania. At the last minute, they also agreed to the replacement of the Far Eastern Advisory Committee in Japan by a Far Eastern Commission of the United States, the Soviet Union, the British Commonwealth and China - which, needless to say, would in practice have no more authority than its powerless predecessor. Another powerless body, the United Nations Atomic Energy Com¬ mission, was to be set up. The deadlock over the status of countries other than those present at Moscow at a peace conference for the lesser defeated states was broken, very much along lines favoured by the British. A peace con¬ ference could now actually meet, and the choice of Paris as its site, for which the French were almost embarrassingly grateful to Bevin, provided a fair guarantee for their equal¬ ity. Only over Iran were there heated debates and continued deadlock. Yet, paradoxically, it was not to be long before Stalin abandoned the Soviet position there completely. The British delegation left Moscow in a happier frame of mind than the one in which they had arrived. Byrnes’s mood was euphoric, but he had done much to pave the way for his own downfall. The mood in Washington was becoming adverse to even cosmetic concessions to Russia. Truman shared it, and felt little inclination to protect a Secretary of State whose manner towards him was as condescending and almost rude as towards Bevin. The President obliged Byrnes to subordi¬ nate himself to the White House, and he was to resign a vear later.19 J Bevin believed that the most valuable feature of the conference for him had been the opportunity for a long talk with Stalin in which, as Roberts was to write, the Foreign Secretary had sought to impress on the Soviet leader the peaceful and (in the Middle East and India) progressive nature of British policy, the need to respect the indepen¬ dence of Turkey, and the fact that ‘there was a limit beyond which we could not tolerate continued Soviet infiltration and undermining of our position’.20

246

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

II British assessments of Soviet intentions in 1946 During 1946 there was much serious pondering of Soviet policy motives in the Foreign Office and in the British embassy in Moscow, whence Frank Roberts sent home a stream of analyses of Soviet policy which almost entitle him to be called a British equivalent of George Kennan, whose much more famous reports made such an impact in American official circles. Kennan, indeed, knew Roberts well as ‘my opposite number in the British embassy’ and praised him highly. To the American Ambassador himself, Walter Bedell Smith, who had succeeded Harriman, Roberts and his wife ‘came to be regarded almost as members of our family’.21 Roberts and Kennan held similar views. Early in March Roberts sent Warner a precis of the memorandum by Kennan which was to have such an epochal effect on East-West relations. He might have been setting out his own thoughts when he wrote that Kennan’s ... general conclusion was that the Soviet Union is, and must be, fundamentally hostile to the outside capitalist world and, in particular, to America and to a social democratic Britain. This fundamental fact should be faced squarely, and our policy framed realistically. But, although the Soviet Union would neglect no opportun¬ ity to weaken us, she was not, like Hitler, out to destroy us, and provided we put our own house in order and maintained our strength there was no reason why we should not live in peace in the same world with the Soviet Union.22 Roberts had one source of inspiration which was unavoid¬ ably denied to Kennan in that British-Russian relations had been of great importance to both countries for at least a hundred and fifty years, whereas Soviet-American relations had been of secondary, even trivial, importance before 1941 except for one or two brief episodes such as President Woodrow Wilson’s keen interest in Russian affairs in 1918-19. Roberts invariably wrote his analyses within this historical context. (This propensity was shared by Brimelow who wrote in February 1946 that Soviet leaders, ‘addicted to 247

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the study of history’, seemed to have a real sense that the rivalry with Britain of the nineteenth century was being repeated.23 There was, of course, the soothing thought that in that period war between the two countries had been avoided several times, and that the one time when it was resorted to - 1854-6 - it had brought little benefit to either country.) In Roberts’s case this led him to underrate Europe and possibly to overstate the importance of the Middle East. An awareness of the increased power of the Soviet Union as a result of the war was not combined with a readiness to concede that British world-power was seriously in decline. In his first dispatch of 1946, in January, Roberts warned that with the Soviet Union claiming a legitimate interest in places as distant as Argentina and Indonesia, it was bound to be active in countries on its borders but not yet under Communist control. This included the entire vast area between the Balkans and the Far East, in both of which Russia might for the time at least feel content with its wartime gains: an area where the sole obstacle to Soviet expansion was Britain - ‘a world empire whose main lines of communication run through the Mediterranean and the Middle East to India and Australasia, and an empire which can be accused in Soviet propaganda of all the crimes of imperialist and colonial exploitation.’ The Soviet Union simply had all the old Tsarist ambitions in the Middle East in a heightened form, coupling the urge for security with a genuine sense of liberating mission, as was already clear from its Central Asian republics: Under Soviet rule there is an even stronger sense of mission in bringing Western civilisation and material progress to the backward peoples in Central Asia. There, in contrast to Europe, there is no doubt that Soviet civilisation has much to offer. It can bring material benefits and, above all, the raising of the standard of living, as has been shown already in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Soviet rule, which, despite its democratic facade, is in essence a despotism, is also more familiar and probably more popular with such 248

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

peoples than any attempts to establish democratic institutions on western models. Already Russia was using the ‘Sudeten’ technique of posing as the protector of minorities in Turkey, Iran and Afghanis¬ tan. This applied especially to the Azerbaijanis of north-west Iran, where Russia was actually trying to set up a puppet state, but also to the Armenians, with the Soviet regime trying to compensate for the expulsion or extermination of virtually the whole Armenian population of eastern Turkey during the First World War by encouraging the scattered Armenian communities in the Middle East and North America to return to Soviet Armenia, which could then claim to be over-populated and in need of the return of former Turkish Armenia. As for Afghanistan, Russia might have a ‘rod in pickle’ for the British position there in the persons of the Afghan exiles who had fallen into Soviet hands when the Red Army took Berlin and who had been transferred to Moscow, where they continued to live in the luxurious style to which they had become accustomed under the Third Reich. The Russians were showing fine impartial¬ ity in wooing Moslems and the Orthodox, Armenian and Georgian Churches. However, they were showing oddly little interest in India, were hesitant and embarrassed about taking propaganda advantage of the Palestine situation, where they were urging Arabs and Jews to unite against the British as their common enemy, and knew that there was no way in which they could win significant popular support in Turkey. Roberts recommended a resolute British determination to keep Russia out of Turkey and Iran, which would be twice as effective if, as seemed possible, it could obtain full American support. Otherwise: The temptation to penetrate an area divided by local, class and dynastic jealousies and to supplant a weakened and humiliated Britain might, in such cir¬ cumstances, prove irresistible, more particularly as just beyond the now debated territories of Persian Azerbai¬ jan, Turkish Armenia and Kurdistan are to be found 249

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the Kirkuk oilfields and beyond them the oilfields of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrein and Saudi Arabia.24 In another major dispatch two months later Roberts painted a bleaker picture. He saw evidence of mounting Soviet subversion in the Middle East, and also now in India, and noted that Russia had carried its policy of claiming a voice in areas of no legitimate concern to itself to the ‘brazen’ extent of suggesting a Soviet base in the Dodecan¬ ese islands - a threat to Greece, to Turkey and to British interests in the eastern Mediterranean. The process of excluding all Western influence from eastern Europe con¬ tinued relentlessly, and there were signs of Soviet ambition to control the whole of Germany. It was impossible to be certain whether the Soviet rulers thought Britain too weak (and the United States unwilling) to offer any resistance to Soviet advances. It was more likely that Soviet policy was being its usual opportunist self, and that it would draw back from any risk of a full-scale clash, especially if there was any chance of the Americans siding with Britain. But the Russians were ‘desperately’ anxious to gain every ‘advanced position’ they could before international relations became less fluid. Happily for Britain, they were acting with such clumsiness and greed (at the time most notably towards Turkey and Iran) as to arouse America’s deepest suspicions. Internally, the regime had embarked on a huge propa¬ ganda campaign, partly to instil in its subjects awareness of the need to continue working hard after the end of the war, but also to give them a Messianic conception of a Soviet world mission: ‘The campaign also included a tremendous revival of orthodox Marxist ideology, which left the impres¬ sion that the Soviet peoples were a chosen people, and that they were surrounded by a hostile world composed largely of reactionary capitalists and their willing tools in the social democratic movement.’ The hope of the Soviet Union ‘gradually settling down to a more normal and friendly relationship with its allies’, than, Roberts presumably meant, the one which had prevailed before the wartime alliance,’ had faded, so that: ‘The present state of Soviet relations with the outside world, and more particularly with Britain, is very 250

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

different from what we had hoped for on the morrow of our joint victory, and after we have made so many concessions to meet Soviet security requirements.’ Soviet foreign policy was so ‘abnormal’ that, y It may even be asked whether the world is not now faced with the danger of a modern equivalent of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, in which Soviet Communism will struggle with Western social democ¬ racy and the American version of capitalism for domi¬ nation of the world ... we may even ask ourselves whether the Soviet rulers are not preparing some military adventure in the spring - for example against Turkey. He concluded that it was not clear whether this reckless and even war-mongering mood was ‘purely tactical’ and how far it ‘represented the first steps in a carefully considered long-term offensive strategy’. One had to guard against the ‘extreme of pessimism’. That was certainly what Roberts himself did in his practical recommendations a few days later. There was no talk of preparing for war. Tactically, Britain should insist on reciprocity and ‘adherence to con¬ ventions of diplomatic intercourse’. Cultural and (on a fair basis) trade links should be developed. There should be ‘friendship with the United States and strength without ostentation’. Strategically, Roberts recommended what in the jargon of a later age would have been called a ‘thinktank’ on Soviet policy within the Foreign Office. The British public should be educated to shed the last of their illusions about the Soviet Union, while Britain pressed on ‘with democratic programmes in this country and other countries under our influence’.25 Roberts’s dispatches were very well-received in the Foreign Office. Bevin ordered them to be shown to the Cabinet. Warner wrote that they were ‘extremely well done’, and were basic to the policy which the Foreign Office would wish to pursue towards Russia. He went on to dwell sadly on the contrast between the many excellent characteristics of the Russians and the other peoples of the Soviet Union, and the ability of a modern totalitarian state to poison the minds 251

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

of its citizens with lies which bred hatred against those whom the rulers of the country regarded as enemies. Brimelow thought that it would be difficult to pursue Roberts’s idea of more research on the Soviet Union in the Office since even within it much material had to be extremely restricted in its circulation. The needs of official secrecy would therefore preclude showing such researchers most of the documents which they would need to see. He saw more scope for setting up ‘proper machinery for ensuring that decisions on topics which at first sight do not concern the Soviet Union are considered in advance from the standpoint of the oppor¬ tunities they afford to Communist-inspired anti-British propaganda’.26 Roberts and Brimelow had touched on a matter of great importance. By early 1946 the Soviet media were pouring out a torrent of specifically anti-British propaganda which the Foreign Office saw as a fundamental obstacle to the continuation of such wartime amity as .there had been. British-Soviet relations were entering another phase like that of the 1920s when the anti-British propaganda of the Comintern, for which British Governments held the Soviet responsible, had been a main obstacle to the establishment of diplomatic relations. The question of propaganda merged with that of actual Soviet policy. Basing himself on Vyshinsky’s remarks at the special assembly of the United Nations Security Council which was held in London early in 1946, Dixon wrote that there was: Hardly any doubt any longer that Russia is intent on the destruction of the British Empire. This is definitely a claim to a stake in south-east Asia and the area of the British and Dutch. Came away gloomy and more suspicious of Russia than ever. Likewise, in regard to eastern Europe, Bevin at a meeting in April complained that: Our press should be paying more attention to the fact that Russia had already created an Eastern bloc and was trying to form a Central bloc rather than to the 252

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

suggestion that we were countering these Russian blocs by creating a Western bloc of our own. The question of a Western bloc is discussed elsewhere (see chapter 8). What is interesting in this context is Bevin’s complaint that the British press were listening to Soviet propaganda while ignoring what Russia was actually doing in its ‘sphere’. Besides propaganda there was also concern about outright Soviet subversion in developed democracies as well as in such backward countries as Iran. Dugald Malcolm saw the discovery of a Soviet spy-ring in Canada in the late summer as providing ‘some interesting thoughts’ on what Russia might attempt in western Germany: ‘The spy ring disclosed was apparently only part of a machine intended to upset the organised Government of Canada.’27 The British were not easily conciliated. During his visit to London in January, mentioned above, the Soviet deputy Foreign Minister, Vyshinsky, had a number of private meetings with British leaders in which he tried to persuade his listeners to disregard Soviet public pronouncements as evidence not of Soviet aggression but of an inferiority complex. He drew a blank at a meeting with Bevin on the 26th, in which the Foreign Secretary refused to be placated by any private explanations of Soviet propaganda attacks against British policies in the British zone of Germany and refusals to repeat even the most irrefutable British denials. Bevin said that he had expected a change after his talks with Stalin in Moscow the previous month but had so far been disappointed. Warner and Brimelow, two of the officials most closely concerned with policy to Russia at this time, added their suspicious reflections. Brimelow thought that the ultimate purpose of the propaganda was to drive a wedge between Britain and the United States and to convince the east European peoples that only Britain, which was too weak by itself, wished to help them. Reflecting the exalted mood of national morale in Britain just after the war, Warner added: And there is another reason for Soviet attacks on His Majesty’s Government. Our present Government gives the lead to social democracy, Communism’s rival for

253

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the allegiance of the working classes all over Europe, and this country is the birthplace of ‘western’ demo¬ cracy and the strongest supporter of western civilisa¬ tion.28 Shortly afterwards, the Foreign Office received a memorandum from Cripps of a talk which he had had with Vyshinsky before the latter’s return to Moscow. Vyshinsky asked Cripps to understand that it was historically imposs¬ ible for Russian policy to accord with British ideas of democracy and human rights: ‘Perhaps in 50-100 years they would have reached the stage when they could hold our views. They could understand what our views were but they could not share them or practise them.’ Having thus created a historical, or pseudo-historical, context, Vyshinsky pro¬ ceeded to argue that the Soviet Union had at least as much cause for complaint as had Britain. For instance, turning to the incomplete repatriation of war prisoners, he referred to the ‘White Russian and reactionary elements’ in Germany, Austria and Italy who had not been repatriated as the source of ‘a lot of trouble and irritation’ which was made worse by Britain subjecting them to ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’. Some British generals continued to be outspokenly anti-Soviet in public - a favourite Soviet accusation, which was usually without foundation, though it did reflect an accurate sense of what many of them privately felt about the Soviet regime. Neither Britain nor America seemed to realise that Russia was being conciliatory in Romania and Bulgaria. The British might complain about hostile Soviet propaganda, but should appreciate that that was only a fraction of what would have been uttered were not the Soviet Union exercising great restraint in this field; ‘they could not suppress all criticism, especially if they considered it legitimate’. Soviet restraint in words was matched by restraint in action: ‘If they had really wanted to make trouble they would have done so in India which was our Achilles heel but they had strictly refrained from any such action.’ This entire performance cut no ice with Brimelow, nor with Warner, who described the refer¬ ence to India as ‘blackmail’ and the rest as ‘special pleading’. The facts, as the Foreign Office saw them, may have made 254

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

Vyshinsky’s task hopeless, but this was reinforced by the exceptional odiousness of his character - he had been the chief prosecutor at the major purge trials in the late 1930s though during the war Harold Macmillan had wondered at the contrast between his ‘Pickwickian appearance’ and sparkling conversation at the dinner-table, and his undoubted recent past as a mass-murderer.29 The officials in London were moving to a stage where they would believe only the worst about Soviet policy. When in late February Roberts reported that he had been treated with great cordiality at a Kremlin party by Molotov and other Soviet officials including Vyshinsky (though not by the visiting Prime Minister of the Mongolian People’s Republic, who had appeared terrified at the prospect of being seen talking to a British diplomat), Brimelow wrote suspiciously: ‘I wonder if this personal friendliness in Moscow is designed to confuse the question of Soviet intentions - to have the man on the spot reporting Soviet geniality while the outside world sees only dark designs.’ Robin Hankey commented cautiously: ‘It is all too obvious the Treaty of Alliance [i.e. of 1942] does not correspond to the present situation in spite of our ardent desire that it should.’ Dixon, in the privacy of his diary, had concluded by that time that there could be much hope of avoiding war only if Britain and the United States formed an alliance whose strength would be ‘overwhelming’, and seen to be so by the Russians. Otherwise war was almost certain, ‘since Russia will grab and push, relying on our temporary weakness and America’s instability’. Despite all this, Britain had just turned down a Turkish request for a formal alliance, partly because, as Geoffrey McDermott wrote, the Turks would want it to be openly directed against Russia, ‘with which presumably we could hardly agree’. The Government, and not least Bevin, were still unwilling to throw down the gauntlet to Russia.30 However, early in April Warner, as chief of the Russian section in the Foreign Office, produced a long memorandum on ‘The Soviet Campaign against this Country and our Response to it’, which, if it had been adopted as official policy and — admittedly an unthinkable step in British officialdom - publicised, might have ranked as a British 255

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

equivalent to the Truman Doctrine a year later. For Warner personally, it was in a sense an apologia for his relatively favourable stance towards Soviet Russia of the later war years. He argued that recent Soviet policy steps and propa¬ ganda meant that: ... the Soviet Union has announced to the world that it proposed to play an aggressive political role, while making an intensive drive to increase its own military and industrial strength. We should be very unwise not to take the Russians at their word, just as we should have been wise to take Mein Kampf at its face value. All Russia’s activities in the past few months confirm this picture. In Eastern Europe, in the Balkans, in Persia, in Manchuria, in Korea, in her zone of Germany, and in the Security Council; in her support of Communist parties in foreign countries and Communist efforts to infiltrate Socialist parties and to combine left wing parties under Communist leadership; in the Soviet Union’s foreign economic policy (her refusal to co¬ operate in international efforts at reconstruction and rehabilitation, while despoiling foreign countries in her sphere, harnessing them to the Soviet system, and at the same time posing as their only benefactor); in every word on foreign affairs that appears in the Soviet press and broadcasts ... the Soviet Union’s acts bear out the declarations of policy referred to above. Continuing, Warner recorded the paradox that Russia was war-weary and needed peace more than any other country, while at the same time ‘practising the most vicious power politics’. It was no longer possible to believe that ‘Russia’s acquisitive policy everywhere’ was really the product of Soviet suspicions of the Western powers. Without any real conviction of that type of justification the Soviet Union had singled out Britain as its enemy, partly as the weaker of the only two countries which could offer effective resistance to Soviet ambitions, and partly because Britain was now led by those whom the Soviet rulers hated most, social democrats. Russia would make full use of the world Communist move¬ ment:

256

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

And Communism in this connexion must be viewed not merely as a political creed but as a religious dogma and faith which can inspire such fanaticism and self sacrifice as we associate with the early Christians and the rise of Islam and which in the minds of the believers tran¬ scends all lesser loyalties towards family, class or even country. As a useful adjunct to the Communist movement, the Soviet Union could also be relied upon to champion nationalist movements in British colonies and those of any countries which took Britain’s side. Stalin and his colleagues were unlikely to seek war, but war might still come by misjudgment: As regards Russia’s use of the military weapon, it is to be assumed that the Russians do not wish to get involved in another war for at least the next few years. It is relevant however to the political problems which concern the Foreign Office to remark that in their use of military pressure, in areas affecting our vital interests or those of the Americans, the Russians will, of course, have to rely on their own appreciation to judge how far they can go without making war inevitable. As in the case of Hitler and Poland, they may miscalculate. In their anxiety to justify themselves to the British people and the world His Majesty’s Government may have misled Hitler. We should always keep this in mind in dealing with the Russian problem now. The time might, indeed, come when they were actually ready to consider war as a deliberate aim, and perhaps at no distant date given ruthless Soviet exploitation of the economic resources of conquered areas ‘from Germany and the Adriatic right across to Manchuria’. There was a fore¬ shadowing of British support for the Marshall Aid Plan in Warner’s recommendation that it was absolutely essential for economics and foreign policy concerns in the traditional sense to be co-ordinated. Warner’s remark that one of the things which Britain had to guard against was ‘Soviet blocking of schemes for restor257

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

ing settled conditions in countries outside her own sphere’ (my italics) implied that if only Russia would rest content with a sphere, presumably confined to eastern Europe, it would not be necessary to sound the alarm so loudly, if at all. It was the ‘Soviet ideological war’ against ‘liberal, demo¬ cratic and Western conceptions’ which compelled Britain and, it was to be hoped, other liberal democracies not only to defend themselves but also to ‘conduct a defensiveoffensive’. That should be done^by ‘directing our campaign against Communism, as such, which we should frankly expose as totalitarianism, rather than against the policy of the Soviet Government.’ In that way Communist control of such international bodies as the World Federation of Trade Unions could be challenged. It is also important to attack and expose the myths which the Soviet Government are trying to create in justification of their policy, i.e. the myth that a new Germany is to be built up for use against Russia, the myth that Russia alone gives disinterested support to subject races against their continued enslavement and exploitation by the ‘colonial and capitalist’ powers, the myth which Stalin tried to establish in his answer to Mr. Churchill that bad relations between the two countries are due to British aggressive designs against Russia, the Russian mis-interpretation of ‘democracy’, ‘cordon sanitaire', ‘collaboration’ etc, the fallacious distinction drawn between the idea of a ‘Western bloc’ and the very real Russian eastern bloc, the Russian habit of calling all non-Communists and non-Communist par¬ ties, reactionaries, right-wing parties, collaborationists, anti-democrats, etc, etc. In addition, we could, in every country, where social democrats, ‘liberals’, progressive agrarian parties etc are fighting a battle against Communism, give our friends all such moral and material support as is poss¬ ible, without going so far as actually to endanger their lives or organisation. The extent of our support would, naturally, vary in each country according to circum¬ stances and according to the importance of the particu258

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

lar country from the point of view of British interests. (We have, of course, done this in certain cases and on special occasions, but it has not been accepted as a principle that we should do so and our representatives abroad are in many cases in doubt whether it is not still the policy of His Majesty’s Government in their attempt to live up to the spirit of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty and for the sake of good relations with the Russians, to refrain from intervention even when Russian pressure on behalf of Communists is rapidly leading to complete Communist domination.) Warner concluded with the virtual truism that very much indeed would depend on ‘how far the United States Government would be likely to take part in the general, world-wide anti-Communist campaign’. He expressed a general belief in the Foreign Office that there was still great reluctance in America to ‘gang up’ with Britain. Therefore the Soviet Union should be allowed to continue doing the Office’s work for it by conducting its aggressive policies with such clumsiness that United States policy would continue to move in the right direction, as it was doing already, aided by the wise advice which the State Department was receiving from Kennan in Moscow. British and American diplomats in the various countries threatened by Communism were already frequently co-operating and Britain should work for still more of that.31 The ‘Warner memorandum’ was very influential. An interesting indication of how far the views embodied in it were shared by the highest in the land was provided in July by the Prime Minister, who addressed a query to the Foreign Office clearly based on the assumption of a Soviet masterplan to strike at Western interests everywhere: ‘As Russian tactics in Europe and Asia follow the same pattern, it would be useful if our representatives in the East could be given early notice of tactics followed in the West and vice versa so that they would be forewarned.’32 Warner had referred to Stalin’s answer to Churchill. This was to the former Prime Minister’s famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, the previous month about Russia’s alleged parti259

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

tion of Europe, with an ‘iron curtain’ being imposed between the west and its zone of control in the east. The speech was unwelcome to most of the Foreign Office as being premature, though Churchill cabled Attlee that he had shown the text beforehand to Truman who had pronounced it admirable. Stalin and his advisers appear to have felt genuine dismay about the speech, and asked the British Government to repudiate it. That Bevin refused to do, though the speech in no way served his purposes, and probably made him more determined than ever to practise the greatest patience towards the Soviet Union. Fulton was the most notable of several occasions when the Labour Government were to be embarrassed by the foreign policy pronouncements of Churchill and even Eden, despite the latter’s friendship with Bevin.33 Warner had concluded favourably on the tendency of American policy. However, many members of the Office continued to worry about American firmness or the lack of it. In late April Roberts expressed disquiet from Moscow that some American diplomats believed that the Soviet leadership was divided into two groups on relations with the West, and that it would pay to make unilateral concessions to strengthen the hand of the more moderate group. Roberts expressed his scepticism about ‘the theory of two schools of thought here, except in regard to tactics’, and his conviction that nothing but harm could come from relaxing firmness: ‘When they show themselves ready to make some concrete concessions themselves we can meet them half-way.’ Warner suspected that it was all a trick to divide the United States from Britain. The relief in the Foreign Office can therefore be imagined when Roger Allen of the embassy in Moscow was able to write to Warner in June about ‘... the prevalent anti-American campaign in the Soviet press, which has now pushed the anti-British campaign, virulent though it remains, into second place’.34 Further good news came from John Balfour of the Washington embassy who thought that if there was any truth in reports that the State Department had told the embassy staff in Moscow never to ‘gang up’ with Britain, that referred to the appearance, not the reality, of United States foreign

260

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policy. The Americans had no wish to give evidence which the Russians could present as proof of an Anglo-American bloc based on anti-Sovietism: Secondly, however free American officials themselves may be from any complex about being outsmarted by the British, they know full well that, unless their actions can be represented to the American public as the fruit of an independent American policy, they will inevitably expose themselves to the charge of subservience to the British on the part of all those elements at home which, whether we like it or not, entertain a traditional inferiority complex about the capabilities of their own diplomatic representatives when pitted against those of His Majesty’s Government. Balfour concluded that in the past few months the ‘average American’ had come to regard his country, and not Britain, as the leader in showing firmness towards Russia. Matters could hardly be proceeding more smoothly and the ‘average American’ might soon share the attitude of enlightened officials towards Britain.35 Some later reports breathed caution as to how quickly and how far members of the American public would adopt the desired views on relations with Britain and the Soviet Union. George Kennan, returning to Moscow in October after a lecture tour in the United States, told a friend at the British embassy of the sharp distinction in attitude which he had found between, on the one hand, officials and academics and, on the other, well-to-do women who dabbled in politics and who had a stubborn guilty conscience about American treatment of the Soviet Union over the years. (Though anxious not to worry the British with to many fears about revived isolationism in the United States, Kennan was also fearful that a mood of thinking war with Russia was inevit¬ able might be rising there, despite his wealthy ladies.) Officials in London were understandably not closely in touch with public opinion in the United States. Hankey could still write: ‘I wish the failure to recognise the need for “patient firmness” was confined to well-to-do American women who dabble in politics. Unfortunately, this is not the

261

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case. But I think under Molotov’s able and truly remarkable tuition we are all learning a thing or two this year.’36 There was indeed a grave fear that American opinion was exceptionally volatile, and that isolationism might easily come back into vogue. This partially explains Bevin’s deter¬ mination to continue to seek what he might have agreed with a later academic commentator in calling the ‘unpromising alternative’ of normal relations with Stalin’s Russia until he was absolutely convinced that the quest was hopeless.37 Accordingly, advantage was taken of the dispatch to Moscow of a new British Ambassador, Sir Maurice Peter¬ son, in May 1946 to make another effort to cut some ice with Stalin. Peterson, when admitted to the dictator’s presence, at the usual very short notice and at the usual hour approach¬ ing midnight, brought with him a letter from Attlee to Stalin as Soviet Prime Minister, containing protestations of good¬ will. The Ambassador went on to say that Britain was still prepared to replace the wartime treaty with a new fifty-year alliance, and that to give this reality his Government would like agreement on certain points. The first was Soviet acceptance of a more or less exclusive British sphere of influence in the Middle East, which Peterson defined nar¬ rowly as the area from Tripolitania to Syria, including the Suez Canal and the Red Sea region: ... the Middle East was a dangerous magnet which had attracted the Germans. Now that their attempt to break into that region had been defeated we were anxious not to have further friction. Could not the Russians realise that this was our area, that we had done and were doing great work in it and that frankly, as regards the Arab countries, we knew a great deal about them while the Russians knew nothing at all? Secondly, Peterson had to say that his ‘sincere gratitude for the cordial reception which he had so far met in Moscow’ had been marred by the ‘attitude of the Soviet press’, which consistently showed ‘a deep underlying hostility towards his country . Thirdly, Russia was using its influence over governments in the area of the Danubian basin to frustrate British efforts to ‘stimulate normal trade’, with Molotov 262

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

making a speech alleging ‘not very fairly’ that Britain and the United States sought economic domination over the countries there. A fourth source of misfortune would, said Peterson, exist if, as sometimes seepied to be the case, Soviet leaders felt a ‘certain mistrust’ of Bevin personally. This would be utterly misplaced since Bevin’s main aim in foreign policy was ‘the raising of the standard of living of the masses in all countries, but particularly in those countries in which Britain possessed any special influence. This was an aim with which the Soviet Government could surely sympathise.’ Fifthly, at the Paris Peace Conference, the Soviet delegation showed an unfortunate disposition to indulge in bargaining. In Bevin’s view, ‘the right way to handle these problems was to seek the best possible solution for each as it arose and not to try to set them off one against another’. It had to be said that if the conference had so far failed it was because of the Soviet Union. ‘On the other hand I did not think that if either the American or the British or the French delegation had been absent the result of the Conference would have been in any way better than it was.’ Peterson concluded by echoing the words of his predecessor, Clark Kerr, during his early meetings with Stalin: it was of ‘real importance’ that ‘wider contacts than had previously existed with Soviet circles should be allowed the British representative in Moscow’. Stalin’s reply was polemical and made ‘without any sort of consultation with Molotov’, who was present and pre¬ sumably would have been left to do much of the tough talking if Stalin had wished to appear at all conciliatory, in accordance with their normal practice together (see below, pp. 266-8) Stalin ‘saw no good in prolonging the Treaty if account were taken of our present attitude towards Russia’. He ‘did not seek to dispute’ Britain’s position in the Middle East, but did not see why Russia should not have a base on the Mediterranean. He recalled that Churchill had once said to him that he would welcome a Soviet fleet in that sea. Now the Labour Government were for all practical purposes reneging on that offer, and thereby ‘denying Russia equality as an ally’ since a fleet without a base would be useless. Stalin professed to be unable to see how anyone could object 263

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

to the tone of the Soviet press towards Britain in the light of Churchill’s Fulton speech. When Peterson put in the inevit¬ able argument that Churchill was simply a private individual, Stalin replied that there were no such private individuals in the Soviet Union. Perhaps thinking of Leninist theory about contradictions within the capitalist-imperialist countries, Stalin argued that the Western countries at the Paris Peace Conference had united against Russia as a means of obscur¬ ing differences among themselves. ‘Antagonisms would have sprung up which the presence of the Russians had restrained’, for which Britain should presumably be grateful. Stalin professed to know of no obstacles other than ‘broken bridges’ in the literal sense which stood in the way of the resumption of British trade with the Danubian countries, and he assured the Ambassador that ‘if he found his contacts [with Soviet citizens] were limited, he had only to ask for what he wanted’. He concluded the interview by saying, ‘We have had a good talk.’38 (A bizarre account of another Stalin interview with a British personality - how authentic is impossible to say - was published in The Times in 1977, quoting a political refugee from Czechoslovakia who claimed to have seen secret Kremlin documents. In August 1946 a Labour Party delega¬ tion visited Russia. It included the Party’s intellectual guru, Harold Laski, who, although not an uncritical admirer of Soviet Russia, had the reputation of believing that the country kept its word in international affairs. Stalin sup¬ posedly had Laski brought out of a darkened hall for a secret meeting while the delegation were watching a film. He urged on Laski the wisdom of Britain concentrating on the development of its own type of socialism on its own island and leaving the continent to the Soviet Union. A continent composed wholly of Communist states would then leave Britain in peace. Stalin added that Molotov was opposed to treating Britain with so much generosity, but that he felt sure that he could overcome the Foreign Minister’s objections. Laski was then returned to the still darkened projection room!)39 Faced by such intransigence as that which Stalin had displayed to Peterson, and only dimly aware of the mood of 264

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

anti-Soviet obsession with national security which was rapidly taking a grip in the United States, the Foreign Office became more and more worried as the months went by. Early in August Brimelow had still been ready to regard Stalin as a ‘canny’ person whose ‘marked reluctance to indulge in dangerous adventures’ made ‘open warfare’ unlikely unless Britain and the United States were mad enough to embark on a policy of appeasement.40 By the autumn some officials were no longer so sure. At the end of September Roberts reported that he was no longer con¬ vinced that the Soviet leaders gave overriding priority to reconstruction. Their attitude was ‘so rigid’ and their demands ‘so ridiculously high’ that he felt deeply worried. A few weeks later one of his colleagues at the embassy in Moscow reported that some Soviet propaganda was now saying that war with the Western powers was inevitable as British and American ruling circles were identical with Nazism. This produced real anguish in the Foreign Office. Hankey wrote that the best that could be hoped for was the ‘indefinite continuance of the present state of tension and propaganda aggression’. Bevin himself wrote despairingly to Attlee at the end of September about Soviet behaviour at the Paris Conference and at the Security Council, where they were ‘attacking without notice or reason’. Britain and the United States had been utterly conciliatory; ‘all reply we’d had till now only a war of nerves all over the world’.41 The Foreign Secretary nevertheless kept his officials on a tight rein. They were allowed to consider Warner’s ‘defensive-offensive’ only in the propaganda field. In late September Sargent wrote that: ‘A possible counter attack at present under consideration would be to indict the Soviet Government at the Assembly of the United Nations for establishing a reign of terror in Poland, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria.’42 There was, even so, a hardening of attitudes which was to have an impact far outside the area of mere propaganda in British policy towards Germany and the security organisation of western Europe, as will be discussed in later chapters. To round off this discussion of changing attitudes to the Soviet Union in 1946 on a slightly lighter note, one signifi265

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

cant development was official Britain’s final disenchantment with the person of Stalin. This followed fairly inescapably from the beliefs that Soviet policy was pursuing an aggres¬ sive course without a shred of justification and that it was monolithic, so that Stalin could not be regarded as a moderating influence. The conviction of Britain’s wartime leaders that personal meetings at the summit of power could make a decisive difference was now discredited to a great extent, at least in the eyes of the successors of those wartime leaders. (Churchill was to wage the 1950 general election campaign calling for a new summit.) In July 1946 the British Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Philip Nichols, wrote to Hankey about a report which Jan Masaryk, the Foreign Minister, had made about his recent visit to Moscow, where the Czech delegation had ‘seen a lot of Stalin’. Junior members of the Czech group had been arguing with Soviet officials about how much Czechoslovakia should pay for a synthetic petrol plant which the Russians were holding as war booty. The Czech offer was £2 million, the Soviet demand £20 million. Finally, Stalin had intervened person¬ ally to say that the Czechs could have the works at their price. Peterson in Moscow, after seeing Nichols’s report, wrote scathingly: You will, of course, be aware that the arrangement whereby Stalin’s henchmen refuse visiting negotiators certain concessions, which are then made by the great man in person, is a familiar piece of Soviet stagecraft. The classic examples were when the Ministers of the three Baltic States came here at the beginning of the war to discuss the numbers of the Soviet armies of occupation; figures were first demanded which none of the Baltic delegations could accept, and these figures were finally cut in half by Stalin himself. The trick was so often repeated that during the Far Eastern negotia¬ tions in 1945 Harriman practically came to assume that the mere fact of his being granted an interview with Stalin meant that the Soviet Government had decided to make a concession. There was also the frequent double-act of a generous Stalin 266

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

and a stem and unbending Molotov, which never ceased to deceive Byrnes while he remained Secretary of State.43 In November Stalin gave an interview to an American corres¬ pondent, which coincided with a speech by Molotov at the United Nations in which he talked about an ‘intensification’ of tensions. Warner was convinced that the double-act was being performed on two continents, rather like a pair of acrobats attempting a daring new trick: It may be that Stalin is not kept very fully informed in detail on foreign affairs. But I find it hard to believe that on so important a matter as his answers to these questions his action was not coordinated carefully with Molotov’s. I think therefore that, as on many previous occasions, Stalin’s role was to make a good and reassur¬ ing impression on the broad masses of public opinion abroad (counteracting the efforts of Mr Churchill and Mr Byrnes and making them seem the ‘aggressors’), while Molotov deals with each specific matter ‘realisti¬ cally’ in accordance with the Soviet Government’s real aims. The Soviet authorities, like Hitler, know that only a comparatively small number of people in the world follow the day-to-day handling of individual questions of foreign policy, and will observe that Molotov is not quite so unaggressive, reassuring and innocent as Stalin. Peterson in Moscow and officials in London saw the purpose of Stalin’s mellow remarks as being to provide ‘talking points’ for Soviet sympathisers in the United States and western Europe, especially in furtherance of the current Soviet propaganda campaign for the withdrawal of British and American troops from the continent, and, generally, to produce a false sense of security. A.E. Lambert wrote: An anxiety to deny that the situation is so grave as to call for special toughness towards Russia, the holding out of a vague prospect of improvement, the old criticisms of foreign warmongers, a disavowal of those aspects of Russian policy towards Germany that have been most criticised, evasive or non-committal answers

267

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to awkward questions, and a general laconic tone, which suggests that Soviet policy is not as lurid as either its propagandists or its opponents make out - these seem to be the underlying features of the ‘interview’.44 The Foreign Office were equally unimpressed by the real progress which was being made at the Peace Conference in Paris on treaties with Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Dixon was no more moved by Molotov’s willing¬ ness to crack a joke or two - on one occasion that Dixon’s red boxes must be full of revolutionary projects - than his colleagues were by Stalin’s efforts to appear genial. Substan¬ tive Soviet concessions equally failed to please Dixon. His comment on the fact that they were no longer attempting to accord a lesser status to France was that as always they ‘showed no trace of shame or even amusement at a volteface however violent’. Two months later, when Byrnes said as a joke that the conference should immediately settle the fate of the Dodecanese islands and Molotov agreed, leading to fulfilment of the Anglo-American wish for their incorpo¬ ration into Greece, it merely seemed another example of bizarre Russian behaviour.45

Ill The abandonment of the quest for co-operation with Russia At the beginning of 1947 the Foreign Office produced a new guide to replace Sargent’s memorandum on ‘Stock-Taking after VE-Day’ of the summer of 1945 (see above, pp. 144-7). It was appropriate that the new document, appar¬ ently chiefly the work of Warner, should have been pro¬ duced in the middle of winter since the fond hopes in the earlier paper were now seen as illusory, and nothing was held to remain of them except the bare hope that ‘disaster’ a new world war - could still be avoided. The paper set encouraging developments in American policy (discussed below, see especially chapter 8) against adverse ones in both Russian policy and British strength. It was declared that: ‘Russian policy had become unambiguously isolationist’; and that ‘the balance of military strength, particularly in 268

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

Europe, has altered to the advantage of the Soviet Union’, which had shown itself determined to weaken the United Nations as much as possible, short of totally destroying it. Economic weakness was affecting-British policy very seri¬ ously: ‘We have seldom been able to give sufficient economic backing to our policy; the present condition of the British zone in Germany is an obvious example of this, and the economic troubles of Greece are another.’ Looking back, the writer thought that: ‘On VE-Day it might have been possible, though it was already difficult, to believe that the Soviet Government intended to make a reality of Three-Power collaboration. This is now no longer possible.’ It was admittedly still unlikely that the Soviet regime sought a war within the next few years, but it was clearly bent on using Soviet power and the ‘fifth column’ of a world Communist movement completely subservient to Moscow ‘to undermine British and American influence in all parts of the world, and where possible to supplant it’. Determined to be pessimistic, the writer discounted any idea that the atomic bomb might be any real deterrent: ‘Stalin may have some uneasy feelings about the atom bomb, but he is probably fairly confident that it would not be used against him as things now stand.’46 As in his memorandum of the previous year (see above, pp. 255-9), Warner remained deeply fearful of war by accident: The knowledge of their military superiority may make the Soviet leaders careless, and there remains the persistent danger that they may misjudge what meas¬ ures can safely be taken without producing a serious crisis. For instance, in certain circumstances an extra bit of clumsiness and an outburst of mass emotion in America, coinciding with a sudden spasm of suspicion or display of truculence in Russia, might produce results which would get beyond control and lead to disaster. Even short of this, the consciousness of the present military impotence of the Anglo-Saxon powers tends to weaken their hands in negotiation. The view that the atomic bomb would be useless in an 269

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

all-out conflict, as well as in diplomatic wrangles is, it must be said, hard to understand. The writer concluded by discussing what modifications were needed in the policy recommendations which Sargent had made in his paper. The first, that British foreign policy should be based on three-power co-operation, had become ‘somewhat unreal’ - a vast understatement in the light of the rest of the memorandum - ‘if only because it is impossible to cooperate with two powers which are not cooperating with each other’. Sargent’s second principle, the need for an independent British foreign policy, ‘is no doubt still valid’, but, in the light of British weakness and Soviet threats, ‘too great independence of the United States would be a danger¬ ous luxury’. Thirdly, the need for British foreign policy not to be repugnant to public opinion in its own country or in the United States ‘appears to require no alteration’. Fourthly, an active British role in solving European economic problems ‘is all right, with the reservation that we do not seem to have any economic resources available for political purposes’. Sargent’s fifth proposal, a British-organised bloc of colonial powers in the Far East (Britain, France, the Netherlands and Australia) would be dependent on a much greater degree of Anglo-French collaboration than existed at the time (and would presumably be out of the question without American approval).47 While these gloomy words were being written, a futile, though interesting and in a sense noble episode in BritishRussian relations was being enacted: the visit to the Soviet Union in early January 1947 of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and British war leader, second only in popular esteem to Churchill himself, Field-Marshal Bernard Mont¬ gomery. In a lecture to British officers after his return home, Montgomery explained that it was he himself who had ‘laid the “bird-seed” carefully in a certain quarter’ to secure the renewal of an invitation which Stalin had made at the Potsdam Conference, probably in a casual spirit. His motive was a hope and belief that Soviet leaders would respond if ‘the hand of friendship’ was held out to them, especially if it was accompanied by assurances that British military leaders appreciated the magnitude of the Soviet war effort, about 270

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

which Russian opinion was known to have its doubts. Montgomery had been given a bulky file of papers on how British policy in almost every current area of controversy might be defended in conversations.with the Russians. Some of these are interesting, such as the bitter complaint of the Foreign Office that Stalin had done nothing to keep his undertaking of the previous May to Peterson (see above, pp. 262-3) that Russia would respect Britain’s special position in the Middle-East; anti-British propaganda to that region had continued unabated. From Montgomery’s own War Office came a warning that he should not argue that the range of modern weapons made it necessary for major powers to control wide areas beyond their frontiers to ensure their security; that would be ‘a two-edged weapon’ which Russia could use against the British position in a number of places, including Palestine. How much attention Montgomery gave to this written advice is not clear. It may not have been much. Peterson reported him as having committed in Moscow what from anyone else would have been some dreadful faux pas: he had, for instance, made some very uncomplimentary remarks about staff officers, as compared with field com¬ manders, to his Soviet counterpart, Marshal Vassilevsky, on the mistaken assumption that Vassilevsky, like himself, had commanded an army in the field during the war. He also left the Kremlin banquet in his honour at 10 o’clock, when in normal practice the night’s events had hardly begun. Mont¬ gomery believed in retiring early and rising early, and was no more prepared to let Stalin tamper with this regime than he had been to let Rommel. Yet his friendliness and force of personality had more than made up for all this, reported Peterson. If Montgomery did his homework badly, many of his remarks about the Soviet Union were very shrewd, and even put to shame some academic experts on Soviet affairs of the time. His view that Stalin was the absolute dictator of the country, whose ‘slightest word is law’, was wholly correct, but conflicted with the view of some specialists, supported by Peterson, who considered Stalin ‘a failing force’, real power resting with a ‘narrow but determined’ group in the 271

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Politburo, and he merely primus inter pares. Montgomery was more impressed by what he had seen with his own eyes: The Marshals, the leading Ministers like Molotov and others, and the members of the Politburo, are all in the greatest awe of Stalin. They are talkative and affable when he is not present. The moment Stalin enters the room they become silent and he completely dominates the scene. Montgomery was more embarrassed than anything else by the twelve-course banquets which were lavished upon him, but they did not blind him to the condition of the country after thirty spartan years of Soviet rule and the recent supreme ordeal of the war with Germany: ‘The whole Russian nation is thoroughly tired and worn out. It is not just a war weariness; the whole nation is tired.’ All this led him to a conclusion about Soviet policy which may have been nearer the mark than that which Warner and his colleagues were simultaneously drawing up within the walls of the Foreign Office: the Soviet Union was immensely acquisitive and would respond to concessions with contempt, but its need for a long period of peace was absolute, so that there was very little danger that its regime would ‘overstep the mark anywhere by careless diplomacy and thus start another war; a very tight central control will ensure that there is no danger of this; she cannot afford to allow it to happen’. Montgomery urged his readers to show friendship without weakness to the Soviet Union.48 Montgomery’s journey had been well worth making and, had he been dealing with a regime not headed by a misan¬ thropic autocrat, might have achieved beneficial results. However, just after he returned home, Pravda published a vitriolic personal attack on Bevin as if to say that the visit had changed nothing. Hankey found the attack unsurprising ‘since the Secretary of State had been instrumental in the international discussions so far in standing up to the Soviet attempt to wear us all down’. He was also extremely suspicious of Stalin’s suggestion to Montgomery of an Anglo-Soviet military alliance, which he saw as partly designed to bypass Montgomery’s proposal for an exchange 272

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

of staff officers, and partly intended to sow discord between Britain and the United States. The Soviet record simply did not inspire confidence that even a formal alliance would have any real effect in promoting good relations: The present treaty [1942] is treated by the Soviet Government in spirit at any rate as a dead letter and we should clearly be extremely ill-advised to exchange our very confident and cordial relations with the Americans for a purely paper understanding with the Russians. If the Russians showed some signs of behaving in accor¬ dance with the real spirit of the Treaty of Alliance, it might be different. From Moscow Peterson confirmed that in the official Soviet view there was no reason why Soviet people should consort with foreigners merely because they were allies.49 By this time the Foreign Office were intent on amassing and analysing information on Soviet policy and specifically on the intentions and personality of Stalin in a manner unmistakably reminiscent of that in which a country might study an enemy with whom it might soon be at war. Although Brimelow in February could declare that it was essential ‘to get an accurate picture across to the Soviet public’ of British foreign policy, using the BBC Russian service, no one was in any doubt that ‘public opinion’ in Russia counted for a great deal less than in a democracy like Britain, though Brimelow at least clearly thought that it had some importance. Although the officials in London might have been more pessimistic than Montgomery about the chances of avoiding war, they shared his conviction that Stalin v/as the absolute dictator of Russia, and therefore worthy of the closest attention. Hankey, who must have done much reading on Soviet history and especially on the rise of Stalin, described him in February as a ruthless opportunist whose thinking was inculcated with Leninist teaching, even though he had no theoretical sense of duty to the official ideology of his own regime. Lenin, as Hankey saw it, had advocated three main principles in foreign policy: tactical flexibility, a belief that the Soviet and capitalist systems could not coexist, and efforts to work on the 273

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

antagonisms between capitalist states: The whole history of Stalin’s rise to power was the story of the selective distortion of Leninism by him in order that he might manoeuvre his opponents into false positions and outvote them at Party conferences. On the other hand, the first and third of the principles of Lenin’s foreign policy set out above have been taken over by Stalin without reserve and were incorporated by him in the Short History of the Communist Party. The only one he had disavowed in public is that of the ultimate incompatibility of the Soviet and capitalist systems. His view on this is that they may be able to live side by side, but that there will be constant danger of war so long as capitalism exists. There is only one safe conclusion, namely that the Soviet Government may do almost anything however ruthless or inconsistent, if it happens to suit their book.50 The Office went on to ask the embassy in Moscow for a detailed analysis of Stalin’s public statements on foreign affairs. Although this was slow to come, it won high praise when it was finally received in October. Commenting on it, Brimelow, while dismissing the notion of Stalin ‘as a bluff man of his word, an impression he loves to convey to visiting foreigners’, saw the dictator as more than a pure opportunist like Mussolini. Brimelow was more inclined than Hankey to accord an important place in Stalin’s mind to MarxistLeninist theory, with its doctrines of the inevitable decline of capitalism and the incompatibility of capitalism and Com¬ munism. He made no effort to analyse Stalin’s personal psychology. Yet the ideological and psychological approaches both pointed to the same conclusion, that with Russia under the rule of such a man the risk of war was considerable. It was ‘hard to believe that the Russians can really believe the Americans or still less ourselves, have any power or intention to attack them’. Unfortunately, some evidence indicated that that was precisely what Stalin did think. For instance, he was on record as recently saying that there was no difference between the American and German economic systems, which might mean that he thought that 274

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

the United States were just as ready to attack the Soviet Union as Nazi Germany had been in 1941.51 Against this background, the negotiations which took place between British and Soviet diplomats during the first half of 1947 for a revision of the Anglo-Soviet treaty of 1942 appear Kafkaesque. Bevin was, even so, unwilling to dis¬ continue what many of his officials must have seen as a distasteful farce. Admittedly, some action had to be taken since the clauses in the treaty relating to the period after the defeat of Germany stated that it would remain in force for twenty years or until a world organisation had come into existence. Such a body did, of course, exist after 1945 in the form of the United Nations. The treaty also stated that in that case it was not simply to be deemed to have lapsed. Bevin refused to end this condition of limbo by formally proclaiming the treaty null and void; he insisted on negotia¬ tions for a new treaty, perhaps of fifty years duration. Warner wrote in February that the Soviet purpose in the treaty negotiations was to drive a wedge between Britain and America, to deflect Britain away from agreements involving other countries - bilateral treaties had also been a favourite device of Hitler’s - such as the four-power treaty proposed by Byrnes, and generally to weaken Bevin’s posi¬ tion. Moscow might be preparing the ground for an accusa¬ tion that British ties with the United States amounted to a breach of the treaty: ‘Simultaneously, the accusation that we are not acting in the spirit of the treaty is an attempt, in the classic Soviet and Hitlerian way, to put us in the wrong where they know they are in the wrong themselves.’ The Foreign Office made sure that the United States were kept fully informed about the treaty negotiations with Russia. Many officials were undoubtedly hoping for the failure of these negotiations, success in which, wrote Jebb in a private letter to Dixon, would be ‘a little incongruous and perhaps even dangerous’ if East-West relations in every other respect continued to go from bad to worse. The negotiations drag¬ ged on through the spring, with Russia trying to secure a clause, whose purpose was utterly transparent, that neither party would join a coalition directed against the other. On the eve of the conference in Paris at mid-year to consider

275

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Marshall’s offer of aid to Europe,' the officials were still trying to persuade Bevin that the possibility of securing the treaty was not worth any concessions. In the worsening of relations after the Soviet rejection of Marshall Aid the negotiations finally lapsed.52 By that time they were inclined to advise against any concessions anywhere. As Hankey pithily put it in October: ‘Appeasement of Russia is useless. Concessions just go into a bottomless pit of demands.’53 For some time prominent officials had been doing mis¬ sionary work to convince members of the official class less intimately concerned than themselves with relations with the Soviet Union of the soundness of their views. One of the most remarkable products of this was a lecture which Brimelow wrote in March, though it was not delivered until July, to officers at the Staff College at Camberley on the invitation of the College’s Commandant. The lecture was perhaps most interesting of all for the light which it sheds on Brimelow’s prominent role in the forcible repatriation of Soviet prisoners (see above, p. 19). It may simply be mentioned here that to Brimelow the repatriation policy, by this time at least, was part of a general readiness to take account of Soviet susceptibilities where that could be done without compromising important British interests, as defined by the officials themselves, obviously. Brimelow told his listeners that the Soviet Union did want to ‘avoid entanglement’ in a new war, at least until their economic and military position had become very much stronger. Soviet Communism thought that its methods of economic development guaranteed high growth. In addition, touching on a matter which had more relevance to his own ministry than he can have supposed: ‘The facilities for espionage which it enjoys through the Communist Parties of other countries may do much to reduce the present lead of the Anglo-Saxon powers in the field of science.’ More generally, these parties were a source of great strength because of their complete subservience to Russia: ‘They can be relied upon to come to heel at a word of command, and it is then that their strength will tell.’ Russia did not feel satisfied with its current round of empire-building in eastern Europe, and in particular sought 276

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

a Communist Greece ‘to round off the Soviet protective belt in the Balkans’. With the word protection, Brimelow touched on his belief that the Soviet rulers were really afraid of attack by the United States and Britain: ‘The Soviet Government does not believe that the rulers of the United Kingdom and the United States are well disposed towards the Soviet Union, and is not concerned to obtain their goodwill.’ On the contrary, the aim was to disrupt the alliance of Britain and America and to weaken them inter¬ nally. Part of this was a campaign against particular per¬ sonalities: ‘Thus a cardinal aim of Soviet policy towards this country is to get rid of the present Foreign Secretary, and a minor aim is to discredit Mr Churchill.’ Soviet propaganda went to great lengths to discredit British and American foreign policy; in Soviet propaganda: The whole of our conduct of foreign affairs is warped by the evil influence of big business and the permanent officials of the Foreign Office ... The resulting picture of America and Britain is absurd, but some of the poison sinks in and does us harm. The Soviet Union was therefore combining a policy of avoiding war with one of trying to ensure that should war nevertheless come its own position would be as favourable as possible: This policy is being carried out logically and consistent¬ ly. It makes nonsense of any hope on our side that we shall be able to follow a policy of genuine good will and cooperation. Soviet ideology denies the very possibility of such good will between Soviet and non-Soviet Governments. If we were to pursue a policy of appeasement, our concessions would be accepted with¬ out gratitude and used against us. We must therefore be firm. On the other hand, if we are actively hostile, we merely confirm the rulers of the Soviet Union in their belief that we hate and fear them, and we accelerate the deterioration of relations. Hence the policy of patient firmness which we and the Americans have been trying to follow for some time past. 277

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

The Soviet rulers had made an enemy of America: ‘Eighteen months ago the Americans were thinking of acting as mediators between the Soviet Union and ourselves. That policy has been abandoned, and America had now taken the lead in opposing Soviet ambitions.’ Russia' showed no sign of backing down in the face of this Anglo-American front against aggression. This raised the spectre of war by ‘mis¬ judgement’: So long as the Soviet Union is suffering from its present difficulties, there is no likelihood of its deliberately engineering a break, nor for our part have we any intention of doing so. But the Russians have a habit of forcing things to a crisis before they will budge, and the general tension increases the risk of misjudgement. If we do not stick firmly to our present policy, the odds are that we shall be jockeyed out of one position after another. If we do hold firm to our policy, we are probably in for a period of friction and political press¬ ure which may at times assume threatening propor¬ tions. Neither the duration nor the outcome of such a period can at present be foreseen. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union maintains that time is on its side. Whether it is right only the future will show. In the privacy of his own office Brimelow agonised over the relative weight to be attached to the fact that the Soviet regime had abandoned the ‘tactical departure’ of the 1941-5 period of professing not to regard the Western democracies as potential enemies, and to the consistent efforts of Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s to ‘avoid becoming entangled in armed conflicts’. He thought that the second of these facts might be the more important.54 Brimelow and other officials were absolutely sincere in wishing to avoid war, but they also had the Foreign Secre¬ tary to keep them in line. Publicly, Bevin urged patience in dealing with Russia; privately, he castigated any loose talk about ‘anti-Soviet groupings’. In a speech to the Labour Party Conference in May 1947, he emphasised the need for continued wariness towards the Germans and made not even the mildest criticism of Soviet policy. Instead, he told his 278

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

audience that he had ‘cultivated for the first time in my life, as all my colleagues will agree, a quite remarkable patience. I must have been born again’. At the same time, officials were writing minutes critical of Wiqston Churchill’s current campaign for a United States of Europe, for a number of reasons, one of which was that the Soviet Union was expressly excluded from the scheme. John Wilson wrote in May that British support for a grouping which was to include as much of Europe as possible but not Russia was impossible without a major change in British foreign policy. R.C. Hope-Jones commented that the case against Churchill’s scheme was ‘unanswerable’ in the light of policy towards Russia, though both added that the policy could not be continued indefinitely if existing disagreements on Germany and other problems persisted. Important British embassies were informed by circular that they were not to support the Churchill agitation, and to say that Britain favoured a regional grouping confined to western Europe with the purpose of guarding against renewed German aggression, and also a United Nations Economic Commission for Europe of which Russia would be a full member. 55 Then came the historic offer of aid to Europe by George Marshall, who had succeeded Byrnes as Secretary of State in January, in a speech at Harvard on 5 June. His only explicit condition was that the countries of Europe must co-ordinate their aid requests, presumably setting up an organisation to do so; at a meeting which was held immediately in the Foreign Office to consider the offer, between Troutbeck, Makins, Hankey and another official: Mr Hankey argued, and nobody disagreed, that the Russians would certainly not cooperate honestly in the preparation of any plan, as their object is not the reconstruction but rather the disintegration of Europe. He did not think that the Russians would actually refuse to cooperate; their line would more likely be to take part in the work but see that it achieved nothing. The idea of a ‘plan’ was nothing more ‘than eyewash designed to extract dollars from a reluctant Congress’. However, much public opinion in Britain as well as in France 279

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

and the Scandinavian countries would be appalled if a serious effort was not made to produce a plan including the Soviet Union and its satellites. For this purpose the estab¬ lishment of the proposed UN Economic Commission for Europe might have to be attempted. If Russia proved difficult that might be a blessing: ‘It might even be desirable that Russia should obstruct and so incur the blame for failure to produce a serious plan.’56 Bevin concentrated his immediate attention on ensuring a favourable French response to the proposals - not some¬ thing to be taken for granted in view of the power of the French Communist Party, which, mercifully however, had just been expelled from the Government. In the middle of June he flew to Paris on his own initiative, a ‘gesture’ which, according to Dixon, ‘was deeply appreciated by the French and helped the shaky non-Communist Government’. The British party found the French ministers determined to give Russia ‘a chance of coming in’. Dixon commented: ‘We do not disagree, except that we are determined to go ahead without the Russians if they frustrate or stall us.’ In a speech in Parliament upon his return to London Bevin for once openly criticised the Soviet Government. Dixon wrote: ‘The whole House was soberly anti-Russian and EB made a vigorous denunciation of their methods and policy. This is tougher and more unanimous than ever before.’ Bevin was unequivocally warning Moscow that his desire not to be needlessly provocative to them would stop short of refusing the American offer in order to please them.57 The Soviet Government agreed to attend a conference in Paris at the end of the month on the aid offer. As the time for it drew close, Peterson in Moscow suggested that the time had come to launch actively Warner’s proposal of the previous year for ‘political warfare against Communism’ hardly likely to help the conference to attain success. Warner responded that it was ‘very hard’ to agree with the Ambassador: However much we in the Foreign Office may be convinced that the Soviet agreement to participate in consideration of the Marshall proposals has been given

280

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merely in order to sabotage them, we and the Americans can surely not adopt a policy of unrestricted political warfare (whatever that may mean), against the Russians and Communism, at Jhe moment we are embarking with the Russians on consideration of the Marshall proposals. This would seem extremely odd to public opinion and provide the Russians with the most admirable excuse for sabotaging the discussions on the Marshall proposals. The correct order of priorities would be to get the economic aid first, and only then, if at all, to launch open political warfare against ‘the spread of Communism’: Without the economic help which only the Americans can give, there is little that either we or the Americans can do to strengthen the hands of the non-Communist Governments in Europe, e.g. in France and Italy, against the Communist policy of promoting civil strife. British diplomacy should concentrate its efforts on ... exposing as soon as possible the real attitude of Russia and her satellites to the Marshall proposals, in order that if they are not cooperative, we may go ahead as fast as possible with those countries that are in preparing a common plan for submission to the Americans by September. If we can succeed in this the countries of Europe will be clearly divided into economic cooperators and a Soviet Communistcontrolled bloc, and the former would have some chance of getting assistance from the U.S.A. The cooperators might then also be prepared to cooperate in common measures to withstand the spread of Communism. In any case, open political warfare should be avoided at least until the Conference of Foreign Ministers due in London in November. This latter was already being seen as a makeor-break affair in relations with the Soviet Union. Besides its main purpose of discussing aid the forthcoming Paris Con¬ ference might also provide a guide to what could be

281

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expected in London in the late autumn. Bevin had the final word. Hankey wrote on 25 June that there had been a meeting whose outcome ‘was a decision by the Secretary of State that it would be undesirable to pursue a policy of more active counteraction to Communism just when the Marshall plan is coming under discussion with the French and Soviet Governments’.58 The conference in Paris began on 27 June, and it soon became clear that Russia, represented by Molotov, was going to be difficult in the extreme. Fascinating details are provided by the diaries of Pierson Dixon, who was Bevin’s right-hand man at the conference in the most literal sense, sitting beside him at plenary meetings. Dixon noted that Molotov was ‘obviously irritated’ by the argument with which Bidault, as Foreign Minister of the host country, opened the conference: that the European countries, as the recipients of American largesse, could not refuse to comply with Marshall’s minimal conditions for the grant of aid, especially the drawing up of a co-ordinated scheme. To the accompaniment of ‘thunderstorm-lightning’ outside, it became clear that Molotov wanted each country to put its individual request, and to use the aid received without any supervision of any kind. Anything else, he declared, would amount to an unacceptable infringement of national sovereignty. Dixon wrote on 2 July: This last meeting was grim and on the Russian side vicious under the surface. Molotov is a fool to think that he could intimidate us, or even the French. He was evidently uncomfortable, and even flagged a little when Bidault as well as S of S showed they were not in the least intimidated by his threat. He said he would report to his Government, implying the last word had not been said. Judging by Dixon’s own evidence, however, Molotov’s ‘intimidating’ tactics might have worked but for Dixon himself. Twice his arguments, whispered in Bevin’s ear, deterred the Foreign Secretary from referring back to the Cabinet, and so delaying the conference, which: 282

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

. . . would have been seized on by the Russians as weakness. I said surely he was covered by the P.M.’s message of last night (which I had asked Duff to elicit for this very purpose) and we could safely go on. [The reference was to Duff Cooper, Ambassador in Paris. When Bevin reverted to the theme of consulting the Cabinet, Dixon warned against] ... a dangerous ambiguity if the Conference ended on this note, and suggested to the S of S that he should add that it must be clearly understood that we are going on alone. This he did, and on this note the Conference ended. In this way, acting in what he saw as the interests of the state, Dixon achieved a signal success in overcoming in this case what he and many other officials saw as Bevin’s excessive caution in standing up to Soviet threats. The Soviet delegation went home, and the conference was able to proceed in a constructive spirit which was to lead the following year to the setting up of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation to distribute the aid. Dixon jotted down some reflections in his diary: It was obvious to us from the beginning that the Russians could not come into any honest plan for European recovery. They don’t want it. They want to keep Europe, and G.B., in a state of economic disorder for the next few years, with the double object of disrupting the British Empire, communising Europe, and getting their own economy on Communist methods [s/c] into shape - the final objective being a Europe run politically and economically on Communist methods. The effect of an all-European programme based on American help would be, not only to put Europe on its feet which the Soviets do not want, but also to introduce Western methods and ideas into the East European systems, and thus undermine Soviet influ¬ ence. It might even undermine the Soviet regime itself. The whole idea, furthermore, is shocking to Soviet theories. To them it is an attempt by the USA to make something happen (i.e. recovery of Europe) which otherwise would not happen. It is thus power politics 283

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

under an umbrella of benevolence. Since capitalism contains the seeds of disintegration, it would in fact lead to the disintegration and not the recovery of Europe. Above all, the rulers of the Kremlin fear for their own position and the regime if Europe under American water-cans handled by British gardeners blossoms into a happy western garden of Eden. On the next day Bevin reached complete agreement with Bidault in two hours of talk on a joint approach. Dixon commented: ‘It is impossible not to contrast this with the fruitless hours and months of discussions with the Russians.’59 Bevin was anxious that Britain should do all it could to help itself instead of merely receiving aid. While still in Paris, he arranged for TUC representatives, with nonCommunist mining leaders strongly represented, to be flown there by special plane, without passports or French currency, to impress upon Marshall that the British working man would play his part. In the same vein, on his return he carried out a personal campaign to induce the miners to increase coal output. In late July he attended the traditional miners’ galas in Northumberland and Durham to preach the message, accompanied by Dixon who felt intensely uncom¬ fortable at these functions.60 In terms of more conventional activities for a Foreign Secretary, he made speeches praising the United States in the most laudatory terms. Yet he indulged in no direct criticisms of the Soviet Union, only implicit ones, apart from the open criticism in his parliamen¬ tary speech on 19 June in the tense days before the Paris Conference; implied criticism was still a change. When a colleague asked Hankey whether British policy towards Russia had changed, he replied that it had and it had not: ‘No. It is Russian policy which has been accentuated, and caused an accentuation of ours.’61 Hankey’s answer was not really disingenuous. In August Roberts, nearing the end of his stint in Moscow, reported a conversation between Vyshinsky and General Catroux, the French Ambassador. Catroux told Roberts that when he had tried to reassure Vyshinsky that there was nothing anti284

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

Soviet in France’s acceptance of Marshall Aid, the deputy Foreign Minister had launched into a diatribe: ‘ . that the world was now divided into two camps, the Soviet Union and her friends on one side, and the Anglo-Saxon bloc, led by America, on the other. France had chosen to join the anti-Soviet camp.’ The evidence that Soviet policy was becoming even more extreme seemed clear. At the same time, the monthly ‘Summary of Soviet Tactics’ noted that the Russians showed every sign of pleasure and delight at Britain’s mounting economic difficulties, which they saw as part of ‘the general depression they are obviously hoping for in the West’.62 Britain was in fact going through great economic diffi¬ culties in the summer of 1947, but Bevin was character¬ istically determined not to let them impede his foreign policy. Under the terms of the Anglo-American loan agree¬ ment of 1946 Britain had promised to make sterling con¬ vertible in 1947. The undertaking was carried out, resulting in a wild rush by foreign holders of the currency to convert into dollars. The prospect seemed desperate. In late July Dixon asked Bevin what he would do when Britain ran out of dollars, as was expected by October: ‘He replied that the U.S. will see us through. I replied that none of us thought this. He said, leave it to me and Lew Douglas’ [American Ambassador in London]. Bevin’s confidence did not prove misplaced. The United States, anxious for a strong Britain as an ally, agreed to waive the convertibility rule. Also, Mar¬ shall Aid was clearly in prospect.63 At the end of September Hankey wrote that in the ‘contradiction between the Soviet Union’s need of peace and its irreconcilable antagonism towards the outside world’, the latter tendency might triumph: It is becoming increasingly difficult to believe in [the peaceful intentions of the Soviet Union] in view of the violent aggressiveness of Soviet tactics at UNO and elsewhere. The Soviets have taught us all too clearly that they attribute to others intentions which they have themselves, and I do not think we should place con¬ fidence in them any longer.64 285

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

The foundation of a new international Communist organisa¬ tion in October, the Cominform, whose membership was restricted to Communist Parties in full power (excluding Albania), plus those of France, Italy and Czechoslovakia, could be seen as a sign that Moscow repented of its disbanding of the Comintern in 1943. Just as the Foreign Office had been unimpressed by the latter action, the new one did not greatly add to their alarm, though it was still rather dismaying. Foreign Office records of the post-war years abound with references to the alleged complete sub¬ servience of foreign Parties to the Soviet Union. Brimelow was convinced that any apparent manifestations of ‘local initiative’ were carried out only with the consent of Moscow. (Balfour in Washington added an interesting postcript in a letter to Warner in March 1947: ‘China was probably the one country in which the leaders of the local Communists could not be regarded as mere instruments of Kremlin policy.’)65 Analysing the available information about the Cominform founding conference in Poland, Roberts thought that the anti-Western diatribes were too familiar to be worthy of much note, but that the presence of two of the highest men in Russia, Malenkov and Zhdanov, constituted ‘a direct public challenge to America and the West’. For reasons best known to themselves, the Soviet leaders were now forcing a stark choice on France and other west European countries. Perhaps that fitted into ‘the pattern of a carefully prepared Soviet counter offensive to the Truman doctrine’. Roberts supposed that the new body would be a good deal less important than the Comintern had been, and would serve an essentially propagandist purpose, demonstrating that Russia had ‘powerful friends’ and ‘trusty Soviet supporters’, and so was a power ‘which would not be forced into making any concessions’: It amounts to Soviet acceptance of the division of the world into two. My first impression is, that while there is clearly a defensive element in all this, so challenging a gesture is mainly based upon Soviet confidence that she can turn

286

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

the present world situation to her advantage. The Kremlin with a good harvest in hand are, I think, counting confidently upon the economic crisis in the West growing worse and even ^extending to America and upon the development in Europe of a potential revolutionary situation from which the Communist Parties now rallied and encouraged, profit. This is in line with orthodox Marxist-Leninist tenets and duly repeated in the declaration on the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism and the weakening of capitalist strength and on the tendency of the imperial¬ ists and especially America to resort to aggressive activities. A few days later, Roberts added that the Soviet Union had used the Comintern to establish its control over foreign Parties. That control had long been so complete that the new body simply was not needed for such a purpose.66 Yet for once Roberts had something agreeable to report. Domestic Soviet propaganda was promising the longsuffering population some respite in a purely material sense, advising them to expect more consumer goods. This could not be consistent with a policy of preparing them for war. This was only a crumb of comfort. Hankey wrote that whereas previously Russia had at least claimed to be in favour of unanimity among the Great Powers, ‘Now for the first time the theory of two worlds irreconcilably opposed is proclaimed to the outside world with Marxian intransig¬ ence.’ Presumably the fact that the French and Italian Parties had been singled out from non-ruling ones for the honour of Cominform membership meant that there would be a major effort to induce those countries to renounce Marshall Aid. He thought that ominous importance attached to the role of Zhdanov, The third personality in the Soviet Union. He is essen¬ tially the ideological spearhead of the Politbureau and has been singled out for special tasks before. It was Zhdanov whose attacks on France and Britain pre¬ ceded the breakdown of our negotiations with the Soviet Government in 1939.

287

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Warner wearily noted that the world Communist movement had ended another ‘Popular Front’ phase, and had openly embarked on one of ‘Communism versus the rest’ as in the ‘Third Period’ of the early 1930s.67 For three weeks, in late November and the first half of December, the Foreign Ministers of the four major powers met in London in what the British, including by now Bevin, regarded as a last attempt to restore co-operation. Marshall and Bidault were impatient to have done with the pretence of co-operation with Russia. Bidault was probably still smarting from the insults which he had endured at Soviet hands at the Moscow Conference in March and April, when Molotov had contemptuously refused to accede to French proposals to detach the Saar from Germany unless the Western powers would accede to Soviet demands for a voice in the Ruhr. Before the conference began, he told Bevin that it was certain to be a waste of time, and that as far as he was concerned the serious part of his business in London would consist in his informal talks with Bevin.68 Bevin was still intolerant of this kind of attitude among his own officials. On the eve of the conference he misread a minute by P.M. Crosthwaite of the West European Depart¬ ment about the French army Chief of Staff, an extreme right-wing general, who was stated to be intent on ‘building up an anti-Russian bloc in western Europe’. Bevin thought that Crosthwaite was himself urging such a course, and wrote a petulant minute of his own: ‘The words AntiRussian bloc is [sic] most unfortunate we have to have regard to a German recovery. Like Duff Cooper I am concerned about that. What we must get into the heads of our people is Western security and less anti-attitude.’69 In private talk before the formal negotiations, Bevin sought to persuade both Molotov and Bidault to take the conference seriously. He extracted from Molotov a promise, which was to be flagrantly broken, that he would be reason¬ able about the agenda, and not follow the tactic of wrecking the conference before it had begun by being obstructive about what it should discuss: 288

Britain and the Soviet Union After the War

M. Molotov had added that the Soviet Union was being threatened. The Secretary of State said that he had asked what power was threatening the Soviet Union and that it was certainly not the British people, who had undergone ten years and four months of war out of the last thirty years. He had also told M. Molotov that he had made great sacrifices for the sake of liberty and human rights and that he hoped that he would not be called upon to do this again. The Secretary of State added that M. Molotov’s general attitude had been much as usual.70 Dixon’s diary notes as Bevin’s assistant, performing this type of task for the last time before being consigned to what was by comparison the outer darkness of the British embassy in Prague, again provide an invaluable guide to the final disillusioning experience of this conference.71 The first session on 25 November was marked by the sort of pro¬ cedural wrangle which Molotov had promised to avoid. While the main topic was to be Germany, the Western powers also wanted to discuss Austria. Marshall pointed out the obvious relationship between the two issues, and that the four powers were already much nearer agreement on Austria than on Germany - ‘really a challenge cum olive branch’, Dixon thought. Molotov accused the others of ganging up against him. The next day he made a ‘mocking and insolent’ speech, accusing the Western powers of wishing to evade the German question, and ignoring their compromise suggestion that Austria should be referred to their deputies. He went on to express ‘utter claptrap’ about the virtues of Soviet demo¬ cracy and the contrasting evils of American capitalism. To Dixon, ‘It is really astonishing that Russia should use pure propaganda in a vital political discussion between plenipotentiaries.’ Dixon could only suppose that the Soviet Union very much wanted the conference to break down. Whereas in Paris at mid-year Dixon had sought to stiffen his chief’s resolve, now he must have feared an explosion of wrath, and passed Bevin a note urging him merely to ridicule Molotov’s words. Bevin took the advice, or perhaps 289

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

intended to respond in that way in any case. He professed to accept that the Soviet leaders were saints and that everybody else, ‘down below’, was not. Dixon noticed that Molotov himself actually grinned when Bevin said that the Soviet Foreign Minister’s speech could only be intended as a joke. He suggested that besides Germany and Austria the con¬ ference urgently needed working parties to define the words democracy, imperialism and sovereignty. ‘Russians invariably take one by surprise’, wrote Dixon; ‘Molotov, in his best chairman’s manner (which is very good)’ responded to Bevin’s banter by accepting the Western proposal to refer Austria to their deputies. How¬ ever, the concession proved to be only apparent. The Russians were infuriatingly evasive about what they them¬ selves wanted in Austria. They did at least table proposals on Germany, but these merely led to the Foreign Ministers exchanging insults over such mundane matters as the free transit of goods within Germany as well as over reparations, with Molotov also accusing the West of violating the Pots¬ dam agreement. (‘S of S easily exposes this dishonesty’, wrote Dixon on 4 December.) Molotov would offer no concessions of substance what¬ ever: Britain and the United States had to dissolve the Bizone in Germany, pay Russia reparations from it, and, for good measure, the British themselves had to stop their alleged ‘plundering’ of the British zone for their own benefit. On 12 December Bevin complained of: ‘Constant accusa¬ tions always answered by us. Molotov might at least have thanked us for courtesy in staying to listen to them for the nth time.’ Despite everything, Bevin could not readily bring himself to agree that the West should terminate these fruitless arguments. It was Marshall who insisted that the conference should end, to the intense relief of Bidault and with Bevin’s reluctant support. Molotov ‘turned visibly waxier’ when he learnt the news. Dixon had a feeling, probably not devoid of wishful thinking, that there would be no more conferences of the four Foreign Ministers.72 Bevin by then accepted the need for a new strategy, which will be discussed in relation to the organisation of west European security (see below, chapter 8). 290

6 Germany: The Main Battleground

I The German problem after victory During the war the Foreign Office had pinned most of their hopes for post-war co-operation with the Soviet Union on the bond of continuing mutual fear of Germany. Instead, Germany was to prove the main dividing force. Unexpected and mostly welcome tendencies among the German people played an important part in this. The view that they had evil instincts in their blood naturally took time to become unfashionable. In July 1945, Troutbeck, head of the German Department, thought that the wretched condition of the country and the harsh policies which the Allies were enunciating at Potsdam made it Utopian to imagine a successful liberal regime in Germany, without any need to philosophise about the dark side of the German soul: Only well-fed, prosperous countries can afford liberal regimes. In a country in Germany’s condition dictator¬ ship is the only possible form of government, whether it be the dictatorship of Allied military government or a German government. And this condition will continue for years if we proceed with our present economic policies of maximum reparation, transfer of popula¬ tions, etc. I know we are talking now about encouraging the formation of political parties, trade unions, etc. But that is all window-dressing. The fundamental fact is that if 60 or 70 million people have to live in a condition of

291

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semi-starvation, without a roof to their heads, only dictatorship can stop utter disintegration. Since Germany was fit only for dictatorship, British policy should encourage the right sort of dictatorship, one of ‘middle elements’, neither Communist nor Nazi, preferably in the entire country, or, ‘best of a bad job’, in the West only. This would be hopeless without a drastic change in economic policy, which would probably be in the best interests of the rest of Europe also - the familiar echo of Keynes’s con¬ demnation of the economic clauses of the Treaty of Vers¬ ailles. Troutbeck thus retreated from his curious attitude of four months earlier that the Germans were most dangerous when prosperous (see above, pp. 67-8).1 In the spring and summer of 1945 the system for the government of Germany by Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union in zones of occupation was established. Much of the country was devastated, but recon¬ struction was hampered by directives issued at the Potsdam Conference, most notably that German living-standards should not exceed the average of the standards of European countries , which implied an effort to hold them down, as well as by a myriad of practical problems. Thus, for instance, the Red Cross was not allowed to function in Germany just after the war.2 Not surprisingly, the advantages of minimal cordiality in working relations with their new subjects soon suggested themselves to some of the leaders in the British zone, including the military governor, Field-Marshal Mont¬ gomery, and some of his generals. For some time the Foreign Office felt that they might be going too far in this direction, fears which were prompted not only by the need to try to achieve solidarity with Russia and Britain’s west European allies, but also by apprehension that generosity to the Germans would prove futile, especially outside the purely economic field. Therefore officials were disturbed by a newspaper report in August that one of Montgomery’s generals, Sir Brian Horrocks, had been organising teaparties for German children, explaining to the paper’s reporter that, ‘If we are to bring democracy to the Germans we must begin with the children.’ While one official thought 292

Germany: The Main Battleground

that it was ‘difficult to believe that it is really very wicked’, another, B.A.B. Burrows, took the view that Horrocks was ‘going rather far’.3 Horrocks would presumably have had Montgomery’s support. As early as 5 June he had written to his ministerial chief, Grigg, the Secretary of State for War, seeking permis¬ sion to relax the rather ferocious non-fraternisation orders which had been distributed to British troops in Germany: ‘We have now won the war and the problem is changed’, wrote Montgomery almost naively. Not setting his sights too high, he concentrated on seeking a relaxation of the orders in respect of children: ‘We cannot expect the soldier to go on snubbing little children; he must be allowed to give full play to his natural kindly instincts. We do not want the German children to regard the British soldier as a kind of queer ogre.’ He asked that his troops should be allowed to talk and play with children under eight years old.4 As so often, this correspondence brought out the difference between the man on the spot and the one in the home base, reluctant to abandon established views. Grigg had never been a Germanophobe in the mould of Vansittart or Dalton, but he responded with caution to Montgomery’s wish to erect a stone memorial on Luneburg Heath, on the spot where the German forces in north-west Germany and the Netherlands had surrendered to him. Grigg did not object, but recommended the use of cheap local stone, not Portland stone as Montgomery suggested, because ‘the memorial may not last long after the last Allied troops have left Germany’.5 William Strang, the Foreign Office representative in Germany and political adviser to the Military Government, was one man on the spot who was not so ready to change his outlook on the Germans overnight, especially as his own observations gave him scant reason for doing so. Touring the British zone in the late spring of 1945, he noted the purposefulness of the Germans in seeking to earn some sort of living, often amidst great devastation, but also the appar¬ ent absence of any feelings of shame or repentance, beyond an occasional acknowledgment that Germany had been guilt of ‘folly’.6 To revert to Montgomery, it was not his desire for 293

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

kindness to German children which primarily worried the Foreign Office, but some other aspects of the zeal with which he was tackling his high responsibilities, notably his public statements, some alleged and others undoubted. In June 1945 he denied telling journalists that in 1941 Britain had been ‘finished’, and that only American aid had allowed it to continue the war. Grigg warned him that he had ‘infuriated’ the Prime Minister.7 By August it was the turn of the Foreign Office to be critical, particularly of Mont¬ gomery’s numerous ‘messages’ to the German people, in which the first person singular occurred with great fre¬ quency. Troutbeck wrote that it was beside the point if the Germans liked such messages: ‘This is probably true. Having been addressed for so long by one Fuhrer they expect now to be addressed by another. But I think they ought to get out of that habit.’ They should not be fed false hopes: Their way of life is going to be very hard, and talking it over among themselves won’t do them much good. There is a danger that as time goes on and hardships increase, they will regard the Field Marshal either as a fraud or possibly as their protector against the in¬ justices which his own Government and their Allies are trying to impose. Troutbeck suggested that a letter should be sent to Mont¬ gomery, to which Bevin consented to put his signature, warning of the dangers of issuing pronouncements to the German people which, both by the fact that they were individual ones from the British Commander and by their tone of solicitude for the Germans, might make the latter see divergences between Britain and its allies over Germany, which, the letter said, did not really exist. While Montgom¬ ery would not need to be told of the need to consult his counterparts representing the other three major powers, there was a danger of alarming the smaller allies, victims of German aggression, who would be unlikely to take it well to see a highly efficient Military Government tempering the wind to the shorn German lamb’. Finally, a cessation of personal messages to the Germans ‘might indirectly have some educative effect in weaning them from their custom of 294

Germany: The Main Battleground

looking to a single Fuhrer for guidance in everything they do and think’. Montgomery’s replies exemplified the charm and willingness to heed the words of political superiors which were to help in soon translating him to the supreme position for a British soldier, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and which, in this case, greatly pleased the Foreign Office. He promised to discuss matters fully with Strang, and stated that in his opinion it was essential that, ‘We out here must not embark on a line of country that is not acceptable to you in Whitehall.’ He claimed that the other commanders also issued statements, and that if he sought prior consent to his own from Zhukov, it would never be forthcoming. However, he concluded, personal messages to the population had served a useful purpose but belonged to a stage which had already come to an end. Delightfully, he sent Bevin two volumes of his collected messages.8 This short-lived concern with some of Montgomery’s actions prompted a number of observations about policy in Germany which showed a definite move away from the punitive approach, in the long term at least. Harrison thought that: It is probably no exaggeration to say that, until the Berlin Conference, no government in the world had a policy towards the future of Germany. I think it is true to say that the broad lines of an agreed policy have now emerged, which might be stated in these terms: ‘German war-making capacity is to be completely and ruthlessly destroyed, regardless of all other con¬ siderations. Within the limitations imposed by this prime objective, the German people will be given the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis, with the goal of one day taking their place among the free peoples of the world.’ But in the shorter term he feared that the military authorities’ readiness to take up the ‘white man’s burden’ in the British zone would be disastrous if it alienated the countries of western Europe, with which Britain was most anxious to strengthen relations: ‘If Germany comes through 295

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the winter with flying colours, and France, Belgium, Holland etc come to grief, we shall have lost more on the round¬ abouts than we gain on the swings.’ Referring to Mont¬ gomery, he added that that consideration had to be para¬ mount, even though: ‘Fundamentally my sympathy is with the Field Marshal’s wish to fill the void left by the elimina¬ tion of Nazism and to set the Germans on the democratic path as early as possible.’9 By November, a definite self-congratulatory note had crept in about the soundness and generosity of British policy. One official wrote that there was much evidence ... that this country alone has any intention of trying to improve the German political mind on a long-term basis ... the Americans are indifferent, the French are sceptical, the Russians callous. In the long run, pro¬ vided we pursue the matter with sufficient vigour and imagination, this lack of interest on the part of the other occupying powers might cause the Germans to welcome our precepts more easily than might otherwise be the case, and might offer a reasonable chance of our re-education policy being effective. At any rate, that was the only ‘sane’ policy. By the end of the year, in contrast with their doubts about General Horrocks’s tea-parties for German children, A.A.E. Franklin of the Office condemned as ‘grotesque nonsense’ the contents of a letter from the Football Association to the Foreign Office in which a policy of not playing soccer with German teams was solemnly enunciated, so that: ‘Although the children of occupied countries should be encouraged to play games in accordance with British traditions, adults should not be given opportunities to take part in sports, although they would be permitted to attend sports functions arranged by the occupying forces in order that they might observe the spirit in which such matches were played.’ Franklin thought that if the mentality which produced this letter was to prevail, ‘We might just as well pull up the whole idea of rebuilding a sound and healthy democracy.’10 By the end of the year, the fear that the Germans would be completely impossible people to deal with had been 296

Germany: The Main Battleground

replaced to a considerable extent by discussion of problems for which the German people were not currently to blame. The first was the financial burden of the British zone, which the same Franklin quoted above recognised at the end of 1945 as being insupportable for long. He pointed out that a recent public statement that the cost of the occupation was running at £130 million annually was an underestimate since it excluded some items; ‘the country as a whole’ simply would not tolerate this. Already officials outside the Office who were concerned with German economic recovery as their sole aim were questioning whether ‘economic’ dis¬ armament should be carried out with its inevitable con¬ straints on the recovery of the economy as a whole. Mark Turner, chief civil servant at the Whitehall ‘ministry’ for Germany, the Control Office for Germany and Austria, wrote to Waley of the Treasury at the beginning of October that it ‘seemed quite likely’ that the Allies would prefer ‘a solvent Germany inadequately disarmed’.11 Secondly, such central administration as there was - the Control Council of the four occupying powers meeting in Berlin - fully accorded in practice with the low expectations which many officials in Britain had had of it when the decision to set it up was taken at Potsdam. At first, Germany had been in such chaos that administration had had to be re-established at local, rather than zonal, level, and the scope for using the Control Council would have been small even if all four countries had been agreed on what to do.12 As winter approached, the Foreign Office wondered what to do when that stage was past, if it was not so already. Since it was very clear that Soviet and French views on policy in Germany differed very much from British, the danger quickly arose that if Britain took the central machinery too seriously it could be used to block policies which the British wished to carry out in their zone. A further danger was that a sustained effort to pretend that there were no real difficul¬ ties with the Russians and the French might actually lead to the creation of such difficulties between the British and the Americans, whose views on German policy might otherwise largely coincide. At Potsdam the British learnt that the American delegation was divided between those, including 297

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Harriman, who thought that four-power control would prove a charade, and those who intended to try to make it work, including the American military chiefs, Eisenhower and Clay, and their State Department adviser, Robert Murphy. The Foreign Office always veered to the Harriman school of thought. At the time of Potsdam, O’ Neill repeated the old fear that the Soviet Union might embark on a competition with the Western powers for Germany’s favour, in which Russia would have ‘one great advantage’: ‘They can offer to restore the eastern territories and make yet another partition of Poland.’13 Towards the end of the year, taking stock of the workings of the machinery for four-power control, officials were unimpressed by the view, which was to be repeated countless times by historians and others, that Russia had been co¬ operating well in Berlin whereas France, with its opposition to any sort of German unity, had been causing all the trouble. The French attitude was admitted to be bad enough, but it was felt that France would not have been able to be obstructive if Russia had joined with the British and Americans in putting this least of the four powers in its place. O’Neill’s view was that ‘the quarrel with the French had provided the Russians in Berlin with a wonderful alibi over the last three months. The world has the impression that it is the French, not the Russians, who are out of step with the rest in Germany. This is a good deal less than half the truth.’ Franklin wondered whether the time had come to face facts in Germany, as they were already having to do in the rest of Europe: It should perhaps be kept in mind that elsewhere in Europe, as apart from Germany, we are running in harness with the Americans on a common road because of the fundamental problem of the Russian attitude. In Berlin, both we and the Americans are still using ‘blinkers’ and trying on occasion to avoid facing unpleasant facts which elsewhere we regard as almost self-evident. As, in Germany, we have not a joint Anglo-American policy, we should not be too surprised at symptoms of friction or loss of temper, nor should we 298

Germany: The Main Battleground

delude ourselves into trying to explain these away on rather flimsy grounds of incompatibility of tempera¬ ment.14 Events were soon to provide Franklin with much no doubt welcome evidence for his views. At the same time, Frank¬ lin’s easy assumption that Britain and the United States were making the same mistake in the Berlin Control Council for the same reasons and could just as easily turn to what he saw as realism was, to quote O’Neill’s words, ‘less than half the truth’. The State Department, if not the American military administration in its part of Germany, attached immense importance to relations with France in the conduct of the occupation regime, including both French reparations demands and demands for the economic crippling and political fragmentation of Germany. The British regarded the French as of very secondary importance by comparison with the Soviet Union, the United States and the needs of the Germans themselves whenever they considered policy in Germany. The Foreign Office showed little sign of aware¬ ness of this divergence, which did at least bring them to the same conclusion, if by different mental processes, about Russia’s responsibility for the deadlock in the Control Council, though they were concerned about American insistence on France having absolute first priority to the meagre amounts of coal being produced from the Ruhr mines.15

II The Foreign Office and control of British policy in Germany From the early months of the occupation the Foreign Office sought to increase its authority at the expense of the Control Office for Germany and Austria (COGA), which was headed by its own minister, J.B. Hynd. By 1946 the Foreign Office felt that COGA had become too Germanophile. For instance, they insisted on major revisions to a speech which Hynd was due to make at Cologne on 3 May, to expunge numerous statements treating Germany as virtually an ally, omitting Russia from a list of countries victimised by Hitler,

299

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and describing most Germans as ordinary and decent people, all of which was due to come hard on the heels of a well-publicised remark by Montgomery that 75 per cent of Germans were still Nazis at heart. Yet COGA was also seen as not giving enough initiative to the Germans - as ‘governessing them excessively’ as Harvey put it in August 1946 with a vast army of administrators in the British zone, by comparison with which the Americans in their zone had only a handful of officials. Above all, it was argued, COGA had no knowledge of British foreign-policy aims, especially as to what went on at the international conferences affecting Germany, of which there were likely to be many more. The Foreign Office, Patrick Dean contended in July, for its part was hampered by having ‘little and insufficient contact with purely German problems, particularly the vital internal political and economic problems’. The only solution was for the Foreign Office to have complete control over policy matters like denazification and control of German industry, with COGA handling only day-to-day administration. Bevin told Attlee that COGA should become part of the Foreign Office.16 Nothing so drastic was done at once, and it was not until the end of the year that COGA was formally subordinated to the Foreign Office, and then in regard to political matters only. Even so, the towering influence of Bevin, by compari¬ son with whom Hynd cut a diminutive figure indeed, ensured in practice a dominant role for the Office in policy towards Germany. In August 1946 Attlee agreed that Bevin should consult the deputy Military Governor, General Sir Brian Robertson, in Paris about the draft directives for policy in Germany which had been worked out in the Foreign Office. Hynd, who was on holiday, should be informed of the meeting, and could please himself whether he attended.17 Perhaps Attlee and other members of the Cabinet were encouraged to accept Foreign Office views of their rightful place in German policy by the remarkable manner in which officials concerned with Germany embraced the Labour Government’s wish to extend into the British zone socialist policies currently being implemented in Britain itself, 300

Germany: The Main Battleground

especially nationalisation of industry, as if it were a natural part of the British tradition in politics and foreign policy, as natural and uncontroversial as the existence of the mon¬ archy. Troutbeck, for instance, warned in May that the fortunes of Communism in Germany might undergo an upturn if nothing constructive was done there: ‘By construct¬ ive measures we mean the kind of policy that is being followed in this country - nationalisation of industry, social reform etc.’ He added: ‘The federal conception should not be carried to such lengths as to prevent the implementation of constructive socialism.’ There was no hint in this that one of the two major parties in the state had little relish for socialism, and from the Opposition benches in Parliament were supporting the American view that the question of nationalisation of industry in Germany should be postponed until the restoration of democracy when the Germans could decide for themselves.18

Ill The frontiers of Germany As the Foreign Office increased their grip on British policy towards Germany, one issue continued to become more than ever a chose jugee in reality, whatever the appearances were to be for another twenty years and more. This was the Oder-Neisse frontier between Germany and Poland, in which there was a revival of British interest in the early autumn, though only in the sense of confirming that it was to be permanent unless the Soviet Union itself reversed it, which was an undesirable prospect to some in the Office. By September, Harvey, who had earlier thought yet another Russian betrayal of the Poles a possibility, had changed his mind: ‘I doubt myself if the Russians trust the Germans much. I think their fundamental idea is to draw a defensive line, mostly Slav, from Stettin to Trieste behind which the eastern bloc will consolidate.’ However, a few weeks later the British Ambassador in Warsaw reported that his Italian colleague, who was a Communist and who had recently had talks with Molotov in Paris, had told him that if the Soviet Government saw any real chance of securing a regime

301

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favourable to themselves in Germany they would return the Oder-Neisse lands forthwith.19 It was solely this possibility which kept the issue of the eastern frontier alive in 1946 and, with nothing but occa¬ sional rumours to the contrary, the Foreign Office were obliged to assume that the Soviet Union would not change its mind on Germany’s eastern frontier. Hankey hoped that they would not. In an important discussion in late October, he wrote that the partition of Germany into two states, non-Communist and Communist, might now be inevitable, and added: If Germany is to be split, the more of Germany we have the better. If the eastern frontier of Germany is only on the Oder and Western Neisse, our share is proportion¬ ately larger. At least Eastern Germany is proportion¬ ately smaller. Even if Germany is not to be split, the Oder-Neisse frontier will make it very much harder for the Russians to secure the real support of the Germans. Not that the Germans will ever forgive the loss of East Prussia, Danzig or Upper Silesia. Indeed, the whole of recent German history seems to show that the Germans will never be satisfied anyway. But if we have really to look forward to the danger of the Russians capturing the sympathies of the whole of Germany, then the Oder-Neisse frontier is a terrible barrier for them to get over. Fear of a German quest for revenge became even more evident as Hankey continued: And in the territories transferred to Polish administra¬ tion is it perhaps not better that an agrarian population from Eastern Poland should try painfully to revive the battered and dismantled industries of East Germany, than that the efficient and ingenious Germans with Soviet help should stage a successful industrial resurgence there which will inevitably be used to increase the economic and industrial build-up not to say war potential on the other side?20 (Bevin was recorded by one of his officials in June 1946 as 302

Germany: The Main Battleground

holding ‘that the Potsdam decision on the eastern frontier is open to reconsideration’. In a major Commons speech on foreign policy in October, he merely reminded the House that British provisional assent to (he Oder-Neisse frontier had been conditional on free elections being held in Poland, and on farms being made available in the new areas to returning soldiers who had served the former London Polish Government - conditions scarcely of much benefit to the Germans! - and that these provisos still applied.)21 On a less speculative level, the Foreign Office had decided that in dealing with the territorial claims against pre-war German territory which Czechoslovakia was making, the acid-test should be whether they concerned areas in the Soviet or American occupation zones, or within territory which Russia had transferred to Poland. The Office ‘did not mind’ what claims Czechoslovakia made against the latter, but was utterly opposed to Czech claims against ‘Germany proper’. Strangely (and the Czechs would clearly have thought unjustly), the Foreign Office, far from not being reconciled to the Oder-Neisse frontier, were actually pre¬ pared to accept a small extension of it at its northernmost point where the city of Stettin had already been transferred to Poland despite the fact that it was on the west side of the mouth of the Oder. Lord Jellicoe of the Foreign Office wrote to a colleague in November 1946: ‘You will notice that all that we are likely to accept in the way of further extensions of Polish territory are the cession of the island of Usedom and a slight rectification of the frontier west of Stettin.’22 (Poland was certainly pressing for the annexation of Usedom, a large island with a population of about 100,000 Germans. Eventually, in a Judgment of Solomon, Stalin ordained its partition between Poland and the Soviet zone of Germany, and therefore later between Poland and the East German state. The island’s chief claim to fame was perhaps the famous Nazi rocket base at Peenemiinde, whose site was in the Soviet zone part of the island.) British policy-makers drew two conclusions from the accomplished fact of Germany’s new eastern frontier. Both were embodied in a report by the Economic Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in November, which 303

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

argued that the vast loss of agricultural production (25 per cent of pre-war Germany’s home-produced food was esti¬ mated to have come from the Oder-Neisse lands, compared with a mere 5 per cent of industrial output) ... combined with the transfer of populations, has made the policy of deindustrialisation in Rump Germany chimerical, except from a strictly security point of view. Equally it militates against any further amputation of agricultural areas, which are normally regarded as rather unimportant. Every marginal acre means a lower degree of self-sufficiency in foodstuffs. In other words, a Germany which would have to earn so much more to pay for food imports could not possibly do so if there were many restraints on its level of industrial output, and could not afford to lose much, if any, further land. The latter point meant rough justice for Germany’s neighbours and victims other than Poland, most of which had territorial claims. An internal meeting in the Office in late November concluded: The considerable amount of truncation that has already occurred cannot be undone and the Polish provisional boundaries in the east are likely to become the perma¬ nent political frontiers. To lop off yet more of rump Germany would considerably impair its economic via¬ bility. Pleas by minor allies that, because some of the others’ claims have already been satisfied, theirs must also be admitted, should be resisted on the ground that a multiplicity of blacks will not make a white. The countries concerned should console themselves with the thought that: ‘On any but a very short view the financial and economic viability of Germany is a vital interest to practi¬ cally all her neighbours, to' some of whom she is an irre¬ placeable market and to others the only rational source of supply of many services and some goods.’23 The Netherlands, a country which had suffered grievously from German aggression, and which was now suffering again from ‘delay in pacifying the Indies’, could at most be allowed to annex only the Frisian island of Borkum. It would 304

Germany: The Main Battleground

have to abandon its more grandiose claims on the mainland, and Luxembourg would have to abandon all of its, which were very considerable in relation to the small size of the Grand Duchy. In that way, thoughtJMigel Ronald, the small countries would be helping the cause of peace by preventing the revival of German irredentist aspirations. Whether that was so or not, the small countries - Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and also Belgium - were certainly being discriminated against. The British felt that they had to be more accommodating towards France with its wish to separate the Saar area from Germany as a minimum territor¬ ial war aim, though not to annex it outright, and certainly not to expel the population. At a dinner in Paris in October Bevin told Bidault that Britain would not oppose any French unilateral action in the Saar if the Russians imposed a veto against such action at the next Council of Foreign Ministers.24 At that meeting, in New York in December, there were no concrete decisions on Germany, but Molotov did agree to renewed negotiations on a German peace treaty. In pre¬ paratory work early in 1947 the Foreign Office did look again at frontiers, but only to reaffirm that: ‘The cessions of territory which have already been agreed cannot be cancel¬ led and the Polish provisional administrative boundaries in the east are likely to become the permanent frontiers.’ It repeated the rough-justice conclusion from this that because Poland had gamed so much, other claimants could have nothing or very little. There was no need to be dogmatic; very small cessions could be conceded but no more. The justification given for this was a familiar one indeed: ‘Otherwise we may well find ourselves in a position ten or fifteen years from now in which, while German opinion violently attacks these changes, British and Allied opinion does not feel that they are sufficiently well-founded to justify energetic counteraction against any German threat.’25 In February Jellicoe commented on the difference between appearance and reality in Britain’s attitude towards the Oder-Neisse frontier: ‘It is certainly not our policy to give the impression at the moment that we are resigned to the present Polish-German frontier (although in fact we are).’ 305

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Another paper stated that Britaiij would be in favour of returning the Kiel Canal outright to an independent Germany instead of internationalising it, and that Britain itself might have one claim of a sort to German territory, concerning that old bone of contention, Heligoland. The Chiefs of Staff wished to use it as a bombing target for a period of fifteen years.26 The possibility that British non-recognition of the OderNeisse line might have to become more than a pretence arose from two quarters, Germany and the United States. If the winning of support from the former was given supreme priority, and if the German people were utterly unresigned to the loss of these areas, and perhaps genuinely unable to provide for their own economic needs within the reduced Reich, then officials conceded that they would at least have to think again. This consideration naturally weighed heaviest in the minds of British representatives in Germany, but even they shrank from urging actual revision of the frontier. ‘Kit’ Steel, succeeding Strang as the Foreign Office’s chief repre¬ sentative in the zone, urged British denunciation of the frontier ‘even if we cannot change it’. More constructively, Turner, the chief civil servant at COGA, wanted the Government to use this colossal amputation of territory and the concentration of its inhabitants within the reduced Reich as an argument in discussions with the other occupying powers for the wholesale lifting of restrictions on German economic growth.27 By early 1947 the Americans were showing distinct signs of pressing seriously for a revision of the Oder-Neisse frontiers. As the time approached for the Moscow Con¬ ference (on which see below), Matthews of the State Department informed Bevin that the United States would propose a Polish western frontier along the whole length of the Oder or at least along the Oder and Eastern Neisse, with the return of the land between the two Neisses to Germany. The Secretary of State said that he had an open mind on the question and was principally interested in ensuring that the greatest possible use was made of the land in this area.’ Bevin asked the Foreign Office Research Department to carry out a detailed study of the arguments for and against 306

Germany: The Main Battleground

frontier revision, including the old idea of using some of the area’s food output to feed Germans while Poland remained in control. In fact, the Foreign Office brief for the Moscow Conference (which was also to be held in readiness for use at the London Foreign Ministers’ Conference at the end of the year) included acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line unless the United States opposed it very stongly. Poland was to be invited to concede only transit facilities for German goods at Szczecin (still referred to by its German name of Stettin). It was felt that the ‘academic’ arguments for and against retrocession were ‘evenly balanced’, but that, in any case, they hardly counted in the face of Polish determination to retain all this territory with the support of Russia. Actual British recognition should be withheld because it would produce the ‘appearance of weakness and would do us great political damage in Germany and elsewhere’. But even that might be conceded if the Soviet Union would agree to the loss to Germany of the Saar and such very small territorial concessions as might be made to Belgium and the Nether¬ lands. Without such an agreement the Russians could be expected to launch a propaganda war of denunciation against these losses, no matter how grotesque that might be in the light of Soviet actions east of the Oder-Neisse line.28 The subject had declined into one of feeble propaganda gestures by the Americans, reluctantly supported by Britain. That is what happened at the Moscow Conference in April when Marshall advocated the reopening of the PolishGerman frontier question. Bevin made an off-the-cuff suggestion for the return of Stettin. In his invaluable diary Dixon wrote: ‘Molotov makes a speech in his schoolmasterly style, reproving us for expressing personal views and re¬ opening matters which were settled by our Governments and betters. There is no doubt of course that he is right.’29

IV Speculation about Soviet intentions in Germany In the new year of 1946 there was a major spasm of speculation in the Foreign Office about Soviet policy in the East zone and Soviet hopes in the rest of Germany. Most 307

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

officials were ready to concede that Soviet policy was based partly on fear - even justified fear - rather than purely on a desire to expand Soviet power to the maximum. At the end of January O’Neill wrote that it would be a great mistake not to accept that Russia was still worried about Germany as a security threat: ‘It may well be that they do not so regard Germany alone \ but Germany as an element in an antiRussian combination is surely the Soviet nightmare.’ On a holiday in Venice in April Strang penned a much lengthier piece on the same theme. He remarked on the resilience of the Germans, and the truly formidable force in international affairs which they were virtually certain to become again in the future: It is fair to assume that the Soviet Government have retained a pre-eminent and abiding impression of the offensive and defensive power of Germany. The German campaign of 1941-45 brought the Soviet Union at one stage to the edge of probably irreparable disaster. The effort of recovery and resurgence has subjected the Soviet economy to almost intolerable strain. This impression must have been powerfully reinforced by the evidence, apparent to the Red Army in Berlin and to Soviet observers in the Western Zones, of the destruction wrought by the Allied air forces throughout Germany, such destruction being a further measure of Germany’s power of resistance and of the immense effort, well beyond the Soviet Union’s unaided capacity, required to overcome it. Soviet observers will also have been impressed, as our own have been, by the evidence they have found since the occupation of the almost inexhaustible ingenuity and resource with which Germany organised herself for war. And as if to recall past experience of Germany’s power of recovery, they will have found, as we have done, a still determined and unbroken people display¬ ing a characteristic, if passive, strength and endurance despite a shattered economy and the grimmest material prospects in any immediately forseeable future. The Soviet Government may well have concluded that with 308

Germany: The Main Battleground

such a Germany, still potentially formidable on a long-term view, particularly if aided in her recovery by other Powers, no risks should be taken. She must be kept weak, and safely contained. With philosophical detachment which a historian might envy, Strang concluded that it was as inevitable that the Soviet Union should wish to have a grip over so formidable a people as it would be foolish for the Western Allies to accede to such a wish. On the contrary, the Western countries should accept the need for a very long-term commitment indeed in both west Germany and west Ber¬ lin.30 Some other prominent members of the Foreign Office, such as Hankey, were to write on similar lines, while others allowed their moral indignation against Soviet actions to dominate their judgment. Though Bevin was hardly one to write elegant minutes that make it possible to pin down exactly his attitude, it would be safe to say that he too could see the tragic element in the conflict between Russia and the West for German allegiance. Early in 1946, officials saw a contrast between the miser¬ able failure of the Russians and the East zone Communists to win significant support among the population of that zone, and their apparent continued hopes of gaining support among the people of the Western zones. Franklin noted that Soviet propaganda to the west Germans was accusing the British of showing favouritism to Nazis, industrialists and reactionaries generally, and undue harshness towards the common people, who ought to be receiving more food and fuel. They were also accused of blocking the restoration of German unity against the wishes of the Soviet Union. He thought that the sheer cynicism of all this was shown by the fact that the French in their zone were exempted from these criticisms, despite the fact that they could actually be levelled at France, though not at Britain with any justice at all. At the same time, the recent Soviet ban on the distribu¬ tion of the Western zones’ press in the East zone ‘rather indicates that they are not getting their ideas across as well as they might have hoped’.31 At this time the British had remarkable first-hand infor309

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

mation on the shot-gun marriage, between the Communist Party and the Social Democrats (SPD) of the East zone, which the Russians were enforcing early in 1946 as, pre¬ sumably, the only way of gaining any popular support at all for Communism among the zone’s population. The essence of the arrangement was the complete ascendancy of the Communists under Walter Ulbricht. Steel, then Foreign Office representative on the Control Council in Berlin, reported early in February on an interview with the SPD leaders in the East zone, Grotewohl (the future East German Prime Minister) and Dahrendorf, who told him that they simply could not resist the pressure for a merger because of ‘naked facts ... He spoke of being tickled by Russian bayonets’. The SPD ... organisation in the provinces had been completely undermined. Men who four days before had assured him of their determination to resist were now begging him to get the business over and have done with it. There had been every kind of pressure on these people from offers of jobs to plain abduction and if he, Grotewohl, with his Central Committee continued their resistance they would merely be disowned and replaced by provincial committees. Moreover there was no point in resisting: they had nothing to hope for from us. On my enquiring what he meant Grotewohl said that evidently ‘iron curtain’ (he used the expression) had come to stay. The French were blocking any approach to German unity and in these circumstances no support from other zones could help them.32 The marriage was formally celebrated in April on Lenin’s birthday. This report and others gave many in the Foreign Office furiously to think, particularly about the sheer folly, as they saw it, of doing nothing positive in the Western zones while the Russians were so active in theirs. Franklin wrote on Steel’s report: This decision in fact means that we can kiss good-bye to democracy on the Western pattern for what is practi310

Germany: The Main Battleground

cally half of pre-war Germany which politically is now being reduced to a Balkan level. The key sentence in this telegram seems to be ‘they’ (the Social Democrats) ‘had nothing to hope for from us’. On the one hand, they saw the reality of Soviet power backed by Soviet prestige and troops, by press¬ ure, threats, persuasion, bribes and above all by active interest and intervention in political affairs. The Communist Party as usual was disciplined and dynamic and entirely unshackled by moral inhibitions. On the other hand, they saw the apathy, wavering and uncer¬ tainty, if not impotence, of the Western Allies and above all their absence of any unified or clear policy. There could clearly be no question of the choice they were forced to make. He wondered whether Britain should drop the idea of special regimes in the Ruhr and Rhineland, as favoured by Britain and France and France alone respectively, when Russia was prepared to pay cynical lip service to the ideal of German unity, and continued about the Russians: Their chances of winning over the Social Democrats in other zones in the immediate future are obviously poor. But once the full effect of Potsdam makes itself felt in unemployment, famine and economic chaos and once the Western Allies are committed to the inter¬ nationalisation or separation of the Ruhr and Rhine¬ land, we are likely to find a very different story. In such conditions almost all German political parties must turn to Moscow and the Soviet sphere will have been extended to the Rhine, if not beyond it. The economic and social ‘Balkanisation’ in the Western zones will in the meantime have contributed its share to such a development. The idea that such a development could be kept in check by ‘judicious publicity’ or by the occasional display of Toe H spirit, with which some of our military leaders are imbued, is hard to swallow. Such a development could only be arrested if in Germany, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, we were to adopt vigor311

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

ous and joint Anglo-American policy. Unless we do this, the rot will probably continue until we finally see the emergence of a proletarian Germany including the Rhineland and Ruhr. If we continue to follow our noses on the present political course, we are likely to go the way of the ‘Gadarene Swine’. O’Neill injected a note of caution and also of hopelessness: Before Germany was defeated, I was much inclined to fear that she would in the long run, of her own choice, opt for Eastern Europe against the West, for collec¬ tivism against individualism, for totalitarianism against democracy. But I confess I did not anticipate that collective Soviet totalitarianism would be forced on part of Germany, against the will of most people there. Nor should we console ourselves by reflecting that it is done against their will. Their opposition is not going to alter events; and in time it will change to acquiescence and then to support. Economic deprivation was the Communists’ weapon, efficient ruthlessness their second:

greatest

We are now seeing the results of the work of those men of whom we were given such a terrifying glimpse in the report on the highly organised group of Communist prisoners who, under the S.S., terrorised and organised Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps. O’Neill did not think that there was very much that Britain could do beyond giving publicity to Soviet and German Communist tactics of force in the East zone; not indulging in appeasement in the Control Council; and trying to bring the French more into line with British and American policy in Germany, though little could be done as long as the French Government included Communists. As a contingency exer¬ cise Britain and the United States might do their own work on a German constitution, ignoring Russia since the Soviet rulers would never assent to ‘the sort of constitution we should approve’. (Despite his pessimism, O’Neill allowed 312

Germany: The Main Battleground

himself to speculate on what would be the best capital for a future liberal-democratic German state - Hanover, Gottingen or perhaps Bonn.) Troutbeck congratulated the mernbers of his department on their contributions and added his own: The real weakness of our policy lies, I think, in Potsdam and its aftermath. As a result we find ourselves aiding and abetting the disintegration of Germany’s social structure which I agree with Mr O’Neill it is Russia’s aim to bring about. Potsdam in fact will complete the ruin of every class which might be on our side, that is to say everybody with anything to lose. The adventurers and thugs who were the backbone of the Nazis will be welcomed into the Communist camp. He concluded that if the struggle regarding levels of industry went against British wishes, Britain should publicly declare that it foresaw disaster. His fears were to be brought a stage nearer realisation the next month when the Level of Indus¬ try Committee of the four occupying powers proposed that German steel output should not exceed 50 to 55 per cent of the 1938 level. From the first, Bevin argued against the wisdom of these limits, but wisely eschewed Troutbeck’s advice to indulge in shrill denunciation, which might well have been counter-productive.33 There was in fact unmistakable tension between these officials and their political masters. For one thing, Bevin remained a stubborn devotee of the idea of a special regime for the Ruhr, with its mighty industries and vast reserves of coal. While officials concerned with Germany in the Foreign Office could see merit in this if it enabled the Ruhr to be exempted from the disastrous policy of restricting German economic output to artificially low levels, the Foreign Secre¬ tary had explained that: He desired the Ruhr to be made safe for Europe by converting it into a public utility corporation under the control of an international consortium. He wished that this area, unique in its economic wealth and war potential, should no longer produce war material but 313

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

should supply the whole of Europe with much-needed peace-time commodities, output being rationalised and integrated with corresponding industries in the par¬ ticipating countries ,.. He also wished the Ruhr to concentrate on semi-finished products, the finishing industries being located elsewhere in Europe. Bevin rounded off this sketch by spelling out that the Soviet Union would be fully included in the arrangements, but that politically the Ruhr would remain part of Germany, though still under an army of occupation even when the rest of the country had been evacuated. In other words, Bevin was telling the officials that they must still regard the German danger as the main one, and that Britain should be ready to allow a Soviet foothold in the Ruhr. He was clearly unwilling to do anything positive to win over the Germans, though the memorandum embodying his views did state that their support was necessary and that ‘a surly docility is not enough’. The entire idea of letting the Ruhr remain in Germany politically but not economically was seen by officials as unworkable, as was international administration, which sup¬ posedly always failed abysmally, even in primitive areas and between relatively like-minded states. Troutbeck, who must have had difficulty containing himself, felt that in so far as the scheme was dictated by immediate foreign-policy con¬ siderations, it was an unhappy compromise between the wishes of the Germans, who obviously desired no separation of the Ruhr from the rest of the country, and the French, who wanted total separation, political as well as economic. Britain wanted France to join a Western grouping under British leadership, but what would be the use of that ‘at a moment when France seems to be heading straight into the Communist camp’. (He might have felt a little reassured if he had known that the French Foreign Minister, Bidault, did not personally favour internationalisation of the Ruhr because of the opportunities that it might give Russia to interfere there, but was obliged to continue defending the proposal ‘until it became impossible’.)34

314

Germany: The Main Battleground

V First moves to a new policy in Germany If France had passed under Communism, the British and American Governments no doubt .would have engaged in a headlong rush for the support of the Germans in their zones. While such a disaster remained only a possibility, the officials had to work hard to divert the Foreign Secretary and the rest of the Government from idealistic but hare¬ brained schemes to more realistic ones whose twin funda¬ mentals were solidarity with the Americans in Germany, and concessions to the German people provided that neither the Soviet Union nor Germany’s western neighbours could legitimately feel aggrieved. This was to lead ultimately to the economic fusion of the British and American zones known as Bizonia. The process of persuasion involved much repeti¬ tion of the point ‘that the Russians are ... trying to integrate their zone into their economic Lebensraum while insisting that nothing similar should be done in the West’. Frank Roberts, in Moscow, had used his widely-respected skills as an analyst of Soviet policy to argue along the same lines, and had written at the end of March that if this view of Soviet policy was accepted: ... it seems to follow that the only policy which offers reasonable chances of success would be for us to push ahead with the same vigour in organising our zone in accordance with our own conceptions of democratic life as Soviet Government have shown in theirs. This should if possible be done in general accord with the United States and French Governments. For tactical reasons it might well be desirable for us to avoid open opposition to the policy of centralisation, putting the blame for the failure to reach agreement on this question upon acceptable terms where it belongs - with the Soviet Government. Since Roberts was convinced that the Soviet Union would make no proposal on German unity which was not to its exclusive advantage, he was in effect calling for the three Western occupiers to ignore the Soviet Union in Germany, with the French abandoning their separatist views about the 315

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Ruhr and Rhineland. (Roberts recognised France as pre¬ senting problems. In April he noted Soviet propaganda support for French demands that the Ruhr should be separated from Germany and its mines and industries pro¬ duce largely for the benefit of France. With the Germans feeling miserable and exploited Communism might at last win converts among the west German workers. As already noted, the French had another great asset in the extreme reluctance of the State Department to oppose them.) Bur¬ rows fully agreed with Roberts, and emphasised the neces¬ sity of Britain maintaining full control in its own zone while sound, long-term plans were drawn up.35 As the spring set in, the Foreign Office were faced by a new complicating factor as the British public became more aware of the huge cost of the British zone to the national exchequer. In his budget speech in April the Germanophobe Chancellor of the Exchequer, Flugh Dalton, had complained about the huge cost of the zone, which he described as British reparations to Germany, and on which he put a fairly precise figure - £80 million - which struck the popular imagination and was widely bandied about for some time. (Preparing his 1947 budget, Dalton was to find to his chagrin that the £80 million had been overspent by a further £39 million. Between budgets he conducted both public and private campaigns against British subsidies to Germans this most intolerable imposition on our humane good nature’.)36 So high was the cost, and so dire Britain’s own economic straits, that the need to make the zone more self-sufficient became inescapable, while the drastic solution of evacuating it altogether could not be ignored. At a meeting between Bevin, Hynd and some of their officials a few days before the 1946 budget was due to be presented, Sargent remarked that authority in the zone would have to be handed over to either an all-German government or a separate government in west Germany alone. If an all-German government ... was going to be friendly we could start handing over at once and so save men and money; if not, we should delay for so long as our resources in manpower and 316

Germany: The Main Battleground

money permitted and plan for the eventual division of Germany into two states. Hynd meekly agreed, and Bevin evidently made no com¬ ment as Sargent, warming to his theme, remarked that if there was not to be a separate government in west Germany, ‘the alternative might mean Communism on the Rhine’, and that ... what he was afraid of was that we might, by failing to take a decision now, merely drift along until we found ourselves obliged, under American pressure added to our own manpower and financial difficulties, to hand over suddenly to a German government which would be under Communist influence.37 A few weeks later Roberts paid a visit to London, bringing with him reports of the most alarming kind from American intelligence sources, which had been passed on to him by George Kennan, that secret orders had been sent to the French and German Communist Parties to stop bickering about the Ruhr, and for the French Party to support its retention in Germany since the Soviet Union hoped that there would soon be Communist governments in France and the whole of Germany, removing the Ruhr from capitalist hands, which was all that mattered.38 Bevin, while accepting much in his advisers’ views, refused to be hurried into abandoning the quest for agreement with Russia on some form of united Germany. On his instruc¬ tions, a major memorandum was drawn up for the Cabinet and for the Dominion Prime Ministers, who were assembling in London for a Commonwealth Conference, on ‘Policy towards Germany’. The Peace Conference for Italy and Germany’s minor allies was assembling in Paris, and it was known that the ever-impatient Byrnes was determined to try to make progress on a treaty for Germany as well. The memorandum came out in favour of seeking the agreement of all three of Britain’s occupation partners in the re¬ constitution of Germany as a loose federation in which the central government would handle only such matters as were essential for economic unity. This would accord with

317

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existing British policy and be a compromise between the confederative views of the French, and the American wish for a strong central government. Bevin professed uncer¬ tainty about the aims of Russian policy in Germany: The Russians have not yet come down in favour either of a unitary Germany or a zonal Germany. They are, at present, hedging and making the best of both worlds. They have established themselves securely in their own zone, are making a strong bid to capture Berlin for the Communists, and are preparing to launch out on a more forward policy in the west. He stated that his plan would lend itself to ‘the possibility of splitting Germany into two parts if, owing to Russian non-cooperation, this latter becomes inevitable’. He admit¬ ted that the German problem was becoming increasingly difficult: Up till recent months we have thought of the German problem solely in terms of Germany itself, our purpose having been to devise the best means of preventing the revival of a strong aggressive Germany. At times the emphasis has been on re-education though usually on controls and measures of security. This purpose can clearly not be discarded. It is one which we have in common with the Russians. But it can no longer be regarded as our sole purpose, or, indeed, perhaps as our primary one. For the danger of Russia has become certainly as great as, and possibly even greater than, that of a revived Germany. The worst situation of all would be a revived Germany in league with or domi¬ nated by Russia. This, of course, greatly complicates an already complicated problem. It involves avoiding measures which would permanently alienate the Germans and drive them into the arms of Russia. It involves again showing sufficient purpose not to let it appear that Russia, when it comes to the point, always gets her way in four-Power discussions about Germany. It involves showing ourselves to be no less constructive in our approach to the problems in our zone than the 318

Germany: The Main Battleground

Russians loudly proclaim themselves to be in theirs. And, above all, it involves maintaining a sufficiently high standard of living in western Germany to prevent the Communists from exploiting^ their advantage the economic hardships suffered by the population. All this calls not only for the highest qualities of resource and tenacity but also for a readiness to use the necessary man-power and resources to uphold our purpose. He dwelt a good deal on Dalton’s £80 million, admitting that for some years not much could be done to reduce the burden short of evacuating the zone, while arguing that the latter was an illusionary option. If Britain did it, the British zone was certain to be ‘absorbed’ by Russia: It should be borne in mind that Russia can absorb countries without spending money on them, but we cannot. The western way of life demands a minimum of material wellbeing ... But even if we were to evacuate Germany completely, we should hardly be prepared to see the country rotting in starvation. Disease knows no frontier. By withdrawing from Germany we could no doubt save ourselves some expense, but not the whole bill, and we should have little control over the manner in which the money was used or what type of authority in Germany, e.g., Nazi or Communist, had the use of it. Ignoring the possibility, which was soon to be realised, of persuading the Americans to assume part of Britain’s finan¬ cial burden, Bevin suggested that an all-German central administration, besides being the best solution on wider grounds, would also offer the best prospects for mitigating that burden by making it much more difficult for the Russians to refuse to send surplus food from their zone into west Germany. Bevin’s colleagues were not likely to be reassured by the paper’s speculations on the probable results of all-German elections. The Russians were certain to manipulate the elections in their zone. The Christian Democrats and Social Democrats would win in the west in the first elections, but their continued ascendancy would be dependent on a fairly 319

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

dramatic improvement in living conditions, without which, ‘Communism will have an obvious appeal and, with its emphasis on strong authoritarian government, can be plausibly represented a§ the only kind of system which can possibly cope with so desperate a situation.’ After recommending a loose federal system as the best way of making it difficult for the Communists to extend their tentacles from the centre, if they controlled it, to all the provinces, the paper went on to list the dangers of openly abandoning the Potsdam policy for Germany in terms of its wider impact on relations between Russia and the West. Here it merged with Bevin’s wider concern to prevent a complete polarisation of Europe, with its risk of a new war in which both the Americans and the French and other west Europeans might back down, leaving Britain truly out on a limb. Britain might embark on a policy of creating a new state in west Germany, ‘which would in effect amount to bringing western Germany into a western anti-Soviet bloc’. Interestingly, Bevin thought that in that case west Berlin would inevitably have to be abandoned. More important, if there was a confrontation: ‘The Americans are probably not yet ready for this. Certainly their leading representatives in Germany would oppose it tooth and nail. In any case one could not count on continued American support even if they came to agree to it. But full American support would be essential.’ Paradoxically, Britain might find that the west Germans were its only ally, and they would undoubtedly indulge in blackmail. ‘Meanwhile we should have lost the one factor which might hold us and the Russians together, viz., the existence of a single Germany which it would be to the interest of us both to hold down.’ Bevin simply would not approve of the readiness of most of his officials to ‘face facts’ and accept that nothing could be hoped for in relations, with the Soviet Union except the avoidance of armed hostilities, to be achieved by uncom¬ promising opposition to Soviet demands. It was an attitude which he was to maintain for well over a year longer, deterred neither by a barrage of contrary advice from within the Foreign Office, nor by Communist and other left-wing attacks against himself personally. He did, however, allow 320

Germany: The Main Battleground

those who set out his thoughts in the memorandum on policy in Germany to conclude with two concessions to the thinking of his advisers. The first was that ‘the proposed new province of the Ruhr’ should form part of a federal Germany, implying the abandonment of his earlier view that it should be ‘internationalised’. The second was a note on tactics to gladden the officials’ hearts: ‘If it was felt that we had to abandon the idea of a unified Germany, even with a federal system, it would be most important to ensure that responsi¬ bility for the break was put squarely on the Russians.’ With Bevin in Paris for the Peace Conference, the Cabinet discussed the memorandum on 7 May. The Prime Minister, with whom Bevin had obviously consulted beforehand, supported its recommendations, and other ministers fell into line, despite individual caveats, some of them distinctly odd, such as Aneurin Bevan’s opinion ‘that the influence of Russia inevitably weakened as it penetrated further to the west’. Attlee wrote accordingly to Bevin, adding his personal view that the ensuring of better food supplies to west Germany was the most important issue of all, at least in the short term. Meanwhile, Britain continued to make colossal sacrifices. In July the Government introduced bread ration¬ ing, a measure which had not been resorted to during the war, and which was a direct consequence of the diversion of wheat imports from Britain to the British zone of Germany. In 1946 Britain was to supply a staggering 70 per cent of the food needs of the zone. Attlee agreed that all this was necessary for both political and humanitarian reasons, while entertaining a mistrust of the Germans which was even deeper than Bevin’s. He warned his Dominion colleagues of the ‘danger of Germany falling completely under Russian influence. A Germany under Russian influence might in time develop into a Russia under German influence.’39 The final stamp of approval was given to Bevin’s policy by the Russia Committee of the Cabinet on 14 May, with the modification, proposed by Hynd, that in the last resort Germany’s constitution must embody the wishes of the German people, even if that meant a stronger government at the centre than Britain would have wished.40 Byrnes’s efforts to force a solution of the German prob321

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

lem at Paris met with predictable-failure at the hands of Molotov, aided, both Bevin and Byrnes felt, by Bidault, who confined his remarks entirely to the Ruhr, Rhineland and Saar as the only parts, of Germany in which France was interested. Byrnes felt snubbed by the Russian rejection of his proposal for a four-power 25-year security pact against revived German aggression, which made it unnecessary for the British to hint at their view that his call for a formal German peace conference to meet on 12 November was madness. The Foreign Office put the most sinister possible interpretation on the Soviet rejection of the pact proposal. Looking back, Burrows was to write in December of that year: ‘The real reason for Russian opposition probably is that they would not like to see America formally committed to military intervention in Europe in any circumstances.’ The rejection convinced Byrnes that the separate organisa¬ tion of the Western zones was necessary. More fundamen¬ tally still, it convinced him and other American policy¬ makers, belatedly from the British point of view and indeed from that of General Lucius Clay, the Governor of the American zone, that Germany was a serious problem in relations between Russia and the West. Albeit with uncharacteristic slowness, and finally only prompted to act by what he saw as evidence of a dangerous Soviet prop¬ aganda drive to win support in west Germany, Byrnes made a speech at Stuttgart on 6 September in which he offered the Germans self-government and economic revival without, by implication, any concern for Soviet susceptibilities.41 For a time Bevin stuck to his guns, despite the evidence from Paris about Soviet aims. In late May Harvey saw the German problem - and he was almost certainly echoing the Foreign Secretary’s views — as ‘settling down into a case of long and hard bargaining between the Soviets and the Western powers, in which we can win provided we and the Americans are able to hold out in our present positions’. Harvey wrote that the policy outlined to the Dominion Prime Ministers was supremely wise under the circum¬ stances. It took account of the historic obsession of the German people with national unity, an obsession which he could not see waning: ‘It is Utopian to contemplate a 322

Germany: The Main Battleground

Western Germany which would not end by reunion with Eastern Germany.’ Yet the loose federal structure, while politically tolerable to German opinion, would lead to welcome inefficiency: ‘The Secretary of State ... does not want Germany to be efficient.’ Every argument had been marshalled against evacuation of the zone, which would be disastrous ‘for if we go out the Soviet Government go in. Even £80 million a year is a small reinsurance to pay to keep Communism beyond the Elbe.’42

VI The founding of the Bizone By the middle of 1946 the majority of Bevin’s advisers on Germany were using the evidence about Soviet policy from the Paris Conference to argue that the time had come to modify the aim of co-operation with Russia in Germany, and turn to the separate organisation of the British and American zones, at least in the field of economic co¬ ordination where progress would be both easiest to make without precluding eventual all-German arrangements, and where it was most urgently needed. Preliminary discussions, for instance with Riddleberger, head of the German section in the State Department, had shown much common ground, and the Office were inclined to think that it might be best if France were left out at first. The French might raise many difficulties, and their zone was ‘not sufficiently large or economically important for it to be of great consequence if the French were to stand out of any such arrangements’.43 Commenting on Soviet tactics in Paris, Duncan Wilson on 12 July wrote that there had been a ‘clean break’ between Russia and the West over the future of Germany. Franklin was more verbose, and commented on Molotov’s sudden demand at Paris for reparations out of current production, as well as expropriation of assets, which would have had a crippling effect on German economic recovery: It looks as if ‘the apostles of the brotherhood of man’ have rushed in and sprung a very fast one. Reparation out of the current deliveries was not envisaged in the Potsdam agreement ... What does this new claim then 323

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

appear to mean? It seems to imply two things - (1) to achieve reparation on this scale German industry in the east must largely be integrated into Soviet economy (perhaps dismantling-of factories will stop, and current production will be collected in lieu of plant, which probably in any case has little more than scrap value by the time it arrives in the USSR); (2) to enforce claims of reparation on this scale a long-term occupation of Eastern Germany would probably be essential. Exclu¬ sive Soviet control is necessary if the Soviet Zone of Germany is to be absorbed politically and economi¬ cally. This means that Germany cannot and must not be treated as an economic unit. Nor will it be possible to exercise this control if occupation troops were with¬ drawn. The American Draft Treaty might well be objectionable from the Soviet point of view because if German disarmament is internationally guaranteed and once immediate demilitarisation measures have been taken in Germany, the main reason for large occupa¬ tion forces would be undermined. In a few years’ time, if not now, this might be increasingly apparent. The Russians have, it is to be imagined, no intention of ever leaving Eastern Germany. The American conception of an independent, self-supporting Germany with its war potential removed in no way fits into the Soviet plan. The Draft Treaty which aims at making a development on these lines possible is of little use or interest to them. It is fairly clear in short that no common basis for agreed quadripartite policy for Germany exists. The paralysis of Government in Germany ever since Pots¬ dam has been due to this fundamental divergence of policy. The Russians would no doubt be prepared to see the present deadlock, involving as it does the economic disorganisation of the Western Zones, con¬ tinue indefinitely. Our own interest is not only £80 million a year but also the danger to European security which must result from the creation of a large industrial slum in the heart of Europe. At a Cabinet meeting in mid-July Bevin confirmed that 324

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Molotov was demanding reparations from the Western zones, while insisting that the Soviet Union had to be left with a free hand in its zone. He added that, in much the same way, Molotov had accused Britain of using Nazis in the British zone, but had rejected Bevin’s offer of an inquiry into the process of denazification which would embrace all the zones.44 Yet Bevin remained reluctant to move towards an Anglo-American joint front in Germany in clear opposition to the Soviet Union. At a meeting with Hynd and General Robertson on 23 July, he talked about the wider dangers of ‘an Anglo-Saxon bloc’, both because it would not afford ‘the best position for negotiating with the Russians’ and because he was ‘most anxious in dealing with the Americans lest they should suddenly change their minds and leave him in the lurch’. Robertson and Hynd stressed the practical advan¬ tages of co-operation between the British and American zones, and the fact, Robertson said, that the arrangements could be widened to take in the Russians and French at any time. Hynd drew attention to the enhanced prospects for industrial recovery in the British zone if it had the enlarged market of the American zone. Above all, the British zone would then be able to pay for more of its food. Bevin found it impossible to sustain his objections. He also agreed that reparations in any form to Russia from the British zone - for instance, the export of goods in return for East zone goods not of equivalent value - should cease.45 Two days later Bevin wrote to Attlee about his approval of the project, and at last showed some enthusiasm for it. Making heavy use of the first person singular in his usual style, he asked for ‘more paper’ for a propaganda campaign to explain to the German people how the population of the two zones would benefit from fusion. The Cabinet gave their approval, its socialist zealots having been assured that the Bizone ‘would not involve abandoning the proposals for the socialised control of industry in the British Zone’. It was just after this that Sargent and leading officials met to consider reports from Foreign Office representatives in Germany and Austria on what should be done to win German popular support now that a positive policy had at last been decided 325

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

upon. Reflecting the curious assumption that what was currently being tried in Britain would be certain to work wonders in Germany, Strang emphasised repeatedly that ‘a progressive policy of sopialism’, combined with fusion of the two zones, would put them back on their feet. (No one could feel so optimistic about the prospects in Austria.) Strang agreed that there was no doubt that Soviet policy aimed at ‘reducing Germany to military impotence and economic misery. The industrial area of the British Zone is a primary target in this respect.’ There could also be no doubt that the Russians knew that their accusations that Britain was rebuilding a German army and using Nazis were false. ‘The idea that these attacks were based upon any real suspicion of our doings may be dismissed.’ On the contrary, it was the Russians who were using German scientists and resources to produce new weapons. Perhaps the Russians were having to fall back on purely wild accusations because they ‘suspect, and rightly, that we intend to deal with these matters on a Socialist basis. Until our full intentions are revealed they cannot criticise our plans without incurring the danger of thereby criticising their own.’ Unlike his colleagues in London, Strang felt that it was no longer conceivable that the Germans would turn to Communism: ‘They hate the Russians with a bitter hatred. Communism means servitude to Russia.’ But the danger of a reversion to right-wing extremism remained, and Britain must continue to make great material sacrifices: ‘The cost of it should be classed, not as reparations for Germany, but as defence expenditure for Britain. In addition, Britain should not show impartiality between the non-Communist parties of west Germany: Definite instructions have already been issued that pre¬ ferential support is to be given to those whose conception of democracy is most akin to our own. In practice we find that this means giving preference to the SPD.’ Despite this policy, from which the Christian Democrats stood to suffer, Strang opposed any barring of Communists from administrative posts in the British zone as ‘undemo¬ cratic’, a recommendation which foreshadowed a later political controversy in the German Federal Republic, but which might seem odd in view of his readiness to 326

Germany: The Main Battleground

discriminate against parties to the right of the Social Democrats. (In fact, the often monoglot British adminis¬ trators in Germany tended to rely on upper- and middleclass Germans, naturally mostly•' people of conservative outlook, if only because they were the ones who could speak English. Any favouritism decreed from the top towards the SPD may therefore in the end have resulted in a roughly even balance towards socialist and non-socialist German supporters of liberal democracy.)46 The Russians apparently did not share Strang’s view that most Germans hated them implacably. They not only con¬ tinued to profess support for a united Germany, which in itself could be dismissed as propaganda, but from mid¬ summer onwards showed some readiness to accept com¬ promises on German political and economic arrangements, including even their sacred cow of reparations. These signs of Soviet reasonableness produced a split among officials. Dean and Duncan Wilson were ready to extend a cautious welcome. Reddaway was dismissive of ‘vague, “democratic” pronouncements’, masking, he thought, a desire for Communist one-party rule. Franklin pleaded for the Government not to be tricked out of their incipient readi¬ ness to abandon ‘the quadripartite nonsense of the last twelve months’. It was the views of Dean and Wilson which were welcome to Bevin. Dean was sent to Berlin in midAugust for talks with Strang. To guide him Harvey drew up a paper on Bevin’s thinking following the decision to estab¬ lish the Bizone. Bevin was: ... eager that Germany should be reconstructed as a loose federal state with a minimum of powers in the centre. Here Mr Dean must be on his guard against the arguments on efficiency which General Robertson and Sir William Strang will advance in Berlin. We do not want an efficient Germany, but one with strong local vested interests, such as will naturally develop if wisely fostered in the zones. The Dutch, Belgian and French Governments are all with us in this, and we must take a firm line and not let our policy be dictated to us by our Zone authorities, who think only in terms of manpower 327

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

and output. The Soviets on the other hand, are backing a highly centralised Germany and a Communist dic¬ tatorship ... Last of all Mr Dean will realise that it is the policy of the Secretary of State to use our control of the Ruhr not against France or the United States but against the Soviets solely to secure the lifting of the Iron Curtain. By excluding Russia from any share in the Ruhr and by keeping a solid U.S.-U.K. front on this he intends to force the Soviets to raise the Iron Curtain. Russia cannot afford to leave the Ruhr in Western hands alone. She hopes to get into the Ruhr while keeping us out of the Eastern Zone. But if we are firm and allow absolutely no infiltration she must in the end give way and open the East Zone to us. We must be quite frank and quite open, remembering that publicity and public opinion are our strongest weapons against the Soviet Government.47 Bevin left more evidence of his thinking in the record of a meeting in Paris on 2 September between representatives of the three pillars of British power in Germany: the COGA, the Military Administration, virtually headed by Robertson (the nominal head between Montgomery’s departure and Robertson s formal elevation to the supreme post in 1947 was Sir Sholto Douglas of the Royal Air Force), and the Foreign Office. The idea of turning west Germany into a replica of the Labour Government’s Britain, for which many in the Foreign Office had developed so remarkable a relish, was unsurprisingly also present in Bevin, whose recipes for the reshaping of Germany have a certain interest. He: ... stressed the great importance of voting systems not being on either the single-list principle or proportional representation. He said that the essence of good gov¬ ernment was that the electors should vote for a man, and the elected representatives should be compelled to resign if they were defeated. The Secretary of State said that he would not agree to proportional representation being the basis of the Lander [provincial] elections. On this his advisers tried to dissuade him. His desire for a 328

Germany: The Main Battleground

stepped-up British propaganda effort in Germany was com¬ prehensible, but it was more idiosyncratic that he ‘was considering whether there should not be a German edition of the Daily Herald to be published and circulated in Germany’. (The Daily Herald was a newspaper closely associated with the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, naturally mostly full of British domestic news, in which Bevin took a paternal pride.) Of greater general interest was his continuing fear of an American return to isolation, which he regarded as one reason for being as unprovocative as possible to the Russians. The fusion plan should be helpful in this respect ‘since he wished to have the Americans so heavily committed with us in the administra¬ tion of the British and United States Zones that they would find it difficult to leave. He was most anxious not to be backward with the Americans in all these matters since they would become discouraged.’48 These somewhat leisurely discussions had to give way to more urgent ones a few weeks later as a major economic crisis loomed in the British zone. Industrial production was stagnant and food stocks were running low. Britain’s own economy was also in trouble, and the Treasury harshly informed the Foreign Office that it was no use having the political will to support the zone if the financial means were lacking. At another Paris meeting in October, Hall-Patch, a recruit to the Foreign Office from the Treasury, told Bevin and Robertson that it would be simply ‘impossible for us to bear the charge of making Germany a going concern; the United States must pay up most of the money’. (A meeting of officials a few days earlier had agreed that an 80:20 per cent sharing of the financial burden between America and Britain should be sought. They also agreed - and Bevin would certainly have opposed anything else - that the four zones should retain one currency, preserving a measure of economic unity, and, said Troutbeck, leaving the door open for real unity if the Russians became more amenable to British and American views.) Bevin could not ignore Treasury advice, and said that talks between high British and American officials would have to be organised, in strict secrecy, as quickly as possible, the British representatives 329

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

being expected to perform the conjuring trick of persuading the Americans to provide most of the money for the British part of the Bizone - perhaps £300 million over the next three years - without demanding more than a half-share in policy. Bevin went on to make a number of policy pronounce¬ ments which showed that the bleak financial outlook had in no way modified his determination for Britain to play a major political role in Germany. He said that Britain’s policy of small-scale and highly selective taking of reparations from the British zone for use in British industries which really needed particular items in German factories should con¬ tinue, with equipment being ‘pinched’, despite the fact that the Americans as well as the Germans, were known to disapprove. (In total, Britain was to extract £24 million of reparations from Germany, an almost insignificant figure compared with British expenditure to support the zone. German denunciations of the former were as frequent and bitter as statements of gratitude for the latter were rare.) The economic powers of the provincial governments had to be very wide, despite probable American and German demands for centralisation. The Foreign Secretary laid down that yet another effort to placate the Russians should be made by telling them that if they agreed to a greatly stepped-up target for German steel production, 5 to 10 per cent of German steel could go to them as reparation — again, a proposal which both Americans and Germans could be expected to unite in resisting, though the former continued strongly to back the French insistence on first claim to Ruhr coal. Bevin added a truly homely touch by responding to Robertson’s statement that there were not many consumer goods available in the zone for the Germans to buy even if their efforts yielded them higher wages, by suggesting that English ‘pots and pans, kettles etc’ might be sent there, helping both the Germans and British exports.49 One of Bevin’s junior advisers, Norman Reddaway, came up with an even more remarkable proposal for helping Germans and the British economy: there was massive unemployment in the British zone and a severe labour shortage in Britain. Might not therefore some German

330

Germany: The Main Battleground

emigration to Britain be mutually beneficial? To begin with, suggested Reddaway, Britain might concentrate on recruit¬ ing ‘top quality scientists’ and farm labourers - a somewhat ill-assorted combination, it mighUbe thought.50 Bevin returned home to argue acrimoniously with Dalton in favour of continued British subsidies to the zone, while officials negotiated more cordially with the Americans about the financial and other details of fusion. The miracle of equal political authority while America provided most of the money was not achieved. Britain had to accept half the financial burden, which still favoured it considerably as the British zone accounted for two-thirds of the Bizone’s deficit. Byrnes offered ‘quite seriously’ to exchange zones if the British found theirs impossible to cope with. The British conviction that west Germany could never recover without the application to its economy of Labour Party socialism was matched by the conviction of the Americans that a pre¬ dominantly private-enterprise economy would lead the Germans to salvation, with American leadership in the early stages.51 In west Germany itself, the people showed no sign of lapsing into hysteria in the face of their plight. Local elections in the Western zones and in Berlin in September and October showed overwhelming success for the demo¬ cratic parties, and defeat for the ‘Socialist Unity Party’ in Berlin, despite Soviet pressure. Despite this and despite advice from someone as respected as Strang, many in London clung obstinately for some time to the view that the Germans might still turn en masse to Communism, or at least ‘cause trouble’ of some kind. While Dean thought that the electoral setbacks would present the Soviet Union with a ‘temptation to concentrate on a wholly Sovietised East Zone’, using ‘force and terror’ to consolidate their hold, Reddaway had other ideas. He thought that they would continue to ‘dip their oar’ into the affairs of the West zones by showing some reasonableness to British and American views because of the magnitude of what was at stake. Their failure could not be guaranteed. The influential Frank Roberts seemed to agree with this.52 The situation as it was in late October 1946 prompted a

331

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

major examination of British policy from the head of the Northern Department, Robin Hankey, in which he sug¬ gested, in effect, that the anti-Soviet moral indignation of some of his colleagues and the readiness to ‘play fair’ with Moscow of the Foreign Secretary might be equally mis¬ placed. He did not see how the latter posture could be maintained in the face of Soviet propaganda attacks against British policy which showed no real sign of abating (and if they did the aim would be to ‘bamboozle’ Britain). If, despite everything, apparent co-operation between Russia and the West was restored, Germany might be reunited, but ‘a reunited Germany will join one side or the other and will almost inevitably start serious trouble’. A Communist Germany would be a ‘mortal danger’ to Britain, while Russia would, ‘perhaps rightly’, see any other sort of Germany as a mortal danger to itself. Should not, therefore, British policy strive for the partition of Germany into two, always seeking to make the Soviet Union appear responsible for the split? I am painfully aware that this minute reeks of the ‘old Adam’ and will inevitably be classed as ‘reactionary’, but I feel that we have to face the facts of relations between the Soviet Union and the outside world as they really are today. Nobody deplores that more than I do. But is it not possible that in the end we may have smoother relations with the Russians in Germany if we accept the division and cease to quarrel so much about what they do in their zone and what we do in ours, than if we indulge in an internecine warfare for the body of a unitary Germany, the results of which ... will inevitably be regarded by the losing side as fatal to its own security? The stakes are so high that it is bound to be a very bitter struggle. W.G. Hayter, who evidently at that time liaised for the Foreign Office with the Chiefs of Staff, agreed with Hankey, and wrote that the Service Chiefs felt that Britain’s very survival depended on western Germany not being in hostile hands. Their information was that Russia was developing new rockets whose range would allow them to hit targets in 332

Germany: The Main Battleground

Britain from north-west Germany but not from the existing East zone.53 Hankey’s thoughts were running far ahead of those of the Foreign Secretary. On 22 October he made a long speech to the House of Commons, his first major speech on foreign policy in five months, in which he showed his continued determination to try to seek co-operation with the Soviet Union in Germany and elsewhere. He both started and ended his speech with his proud and passionate conviction of Britain’s world role. He would continue to practise restraint in answering anti-British propaganda attacks because Britain’s moral stature in the world was such as ‘not to call for a justification of our existence every five minutes’. Nor should silence be interpreted as meaning that Britain was playing an intermediary role between the United States and Russia. It was not in keeping with its status to mediate between other Great Powers: ‘We have our own contribu¬ tion to make to world peace and they have theirs.’ At the periodic meetings of the four Foreign Ministers, Britain would never gang up with one against a third. After these general remarks, he made a plea for Soviet co-operation with Britain and the United States in Germany on the basis of the wartime alliance and of the need to keep a watchful eye on the Germans, which ought to transcend the ideological gulf between Western democracy and Com¬ munism: It must not be forgotten that crimes were committed and millions of Germans were implicated in those crimes, and Nuremburg [where some leading Nazis had just been hanged] by no means wipes the slate clean. We must behave like decent and sensible human beings, and not like Nazis, but I appeal to the country not to allow itself to begin indulging in sloppy senti¬ ments ... It is extremely distasteful to see victorious nations courting a defeated enemy for ideological reasons. Nevertheless, Bevin reiterated several points concerning Germany which the Russians had criticised: Byrnes’s proposal for a four-power security pact against German 333

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

aggression was wholly excellent and ought to be signed; limits on German industrial output should be lifted, except those essential for international security; the Soviet Union could receive reparations from the Western zones only in return for food from the Soviet zone, the very food which that zone was currently exporting to the Soviet Union. The Russians presumably would have found it hard to criticise his statement that there should be a total change in the ownership of German industry in the direction of public control, so that German workers, as well as the rest of mankind, might never again be the victims of ‘cartels, trusts and industrial magnates’ - an echo of the legend that Hitler had been the creature of Big Business. The Foreign Office noted that all the Foreign Secretary got for his pains in the press of Communist countries was to be ignored; the press in the Soviet zone in Germany barely mentioned it, concentrat¬ ing on an international chess tournament at Prague.54 Instead of answering Bevin directly, the Soviet stance on the German question towards the end of 1946 settled into condemning the proposals for the Bizone, which was due to be established on the first day of the new year, as a sinister manoeuvre to deflect German opinion from the reunifica¬ tion of the entire country along centralised lines, which Moscow proclaimed to be the real need of the time. Officials in London and in the British embassy in Moscow were largely agreed in their interpretation of this line. Burrows thought that the Russians had fallen between the two stools of their policy in Germany over the past eighteen months, ‘one of which aims at getting everything possible out of Germany for Russia, while the other aims at securing control of the whole of Germany for Russian ideology’. Reddaway argued that, besides the contradictory nature of their policy, the role of‘opportunism, grab, exaggeration and violence’ in the failure so far of Soviet German policy should not be overlooked. Both Burrows in London and Peterson and Allen in Moscow thought that the Soviet Union would continue to tighten its grip on the East zone even while stripping its industry as part of a universal Soviet policy in eastern Europe of ‘stripping the orbit’, and concentrating the industries of both Russia itself and its vassal states and

334

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occupied areas in the interior of the Soviet Union for strategic reasons. They also thought that the seemingly insane Soviet opposition to federalism in Germany made sense only on the supposition that lyioscow still had hopes of economic crisis in the Western zones causing the population to turn to Communism, so that the German Communists might gather enough temporary popularity to gain control at the centre and then establish a dictatorship. The refusal to accept that Communism was hopelessly discredited with the German people under all possible circumstances was remarkably tenacious. Warner thought that the Soviet rul¬ ers, perhaps partly because of genuine fears, had rejected Britain’s fair offer of improving the German economy while strictly banning a German military revival, and that there was simply nothing to be done in the face of such suspicious intransigence, coupled as it was with the Soviet Union’s own expansionist ambitions.55

VII 1947: Towards the final break with Russia During 1947 Bevin made a determined series of efforts to achieve his idea of renewed East-West co-operation on the basis of unity against German aggression, and then aban¬ doned it finally and decisively towards the very end of the year, even then not conceding that the Germans were people to be trusted. Early in the year a British-French treaty was negotiated and was signed at Dunkirk in March. Its text referred solely to defence against Germany, and Bevin would brook no suggestion that it might serve any other purpose. When seeking Cabinet approval for the treaty, he described its main object as ‘to reassure France that we should not again stand aside, as we had when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland’ in 1936. Almost sounding like Austen Chamberlain defending the Locarno treaties twenty years earlier, he assured his colleagues that if France pro¬ voked a German attack, the treaty would not apply since ‘aggression’ was carefully defined. Sargent wrote about the anti-German basis of the treaty with complete seriousness, while conceding that the danger of Germany being able to

335

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launch new aggression was remote, and impossible while the occupation lasted. His only worries were that the treaty might impede negotiations with Russia for a revision of the Anglo-Soviet treaty of 1942, or might make the Americans feel slighted in that Britain and France had acted bilaterally instead of persevering with Byrnes’s proposal for a fourpower treaty against German aggression. (Byrnes was indeed a proud man, and it may have been just as well that Truman had recently replaced him as Secretary of State with George Marshall.) However, he was confident that the Americans would realise that if the Byrnes treaty did fail to materialise it would be solely because of Soviet hostility. As the date for the signing of the treaty drew closer, Harvey ingeniously explained to an American diplomat that it ought properly to be seen as a supplement to the Byrnes treaty, which Britain still ardently supported. The purpose of the latter was to prevent German aggression, of the former to combat it if the Byrnes instrument failed.56 In the early spring, the Foreign Office had to devote some effort to opposing Churchill’s agitation for a United States of Europe, with the Soviet Union excluded. The many reasons for this opposition (see pp. 279 and 446—7) included a wish not to provoke Russia, but also fear of Germany. A circular to embassies stated that Britain’s overseas interests virtually precluded British membership of any United States of Europe, so that, with Britain absent, Germany might be able to dominate such a body, and ‘the prospect of Germany establishing control over the Continent could not be lightly dismissed; and if this were to come about it would obviously constitute a menace to the security both of these islands and of the Soviet Union’. Bevin would certainly have been annoyed by any other line. In an important speech to the Labour Party Conference he declared that consistent British views on a fairly high level of German steel output had been vindicated, and announced as a triumph that on that very day Britain and the United States were signing an agreement for the setting up of an Economic Council for the Bizone, which could well be seen as the first step towards a central government for the two zones. Yet he went on to express mistrust of the Germans:

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Germany: The Main Battleground

Just one word about the Germans. It is true that the Germans are a very efficient people, but I would impress upon you that many of the most efficient were the Nazis, whereas the people \ye have had to bring back from the concentration camps and to put into certain positions, are very good men, but a man does not feel quite as good as he might do after he has been in a concentration camp for three or four years. At the end of the year, his professed attitude had not changed. In a conversation in December with Bidault, whose preoccupation with the Soviet danger had apparently made him quite forgetful of the usual French hostility to all things German, Bevin*remarked that ‘In fact he doubted whether Russia was as great a danger as a resurgent Germany might become.’57 None of this distrust and even dislike of the Germans produced any reservations about the need to get the British zone back on its feet economically, and to move towards German self-government on federal lines. As matters stood in 1947 the framework for this clearly had to be the Bizone. The British might have been quite pleased with a period of inactivity in regard to Great Power diplomacy over the future of Germany, so that the new arrangements could have time to be made to work. A Foreign Office brief for Bevin for use in talks with Attlee in mid-January pointed out that the agreement on fusion of the two zones meant that the Americans were involved in west Germany as a whole, and so were that much less likely simply to withdraw from the country. Britain had made gains without sacrifices. The United States would now pay part of the cost of subsidis¬ ing the British zone (see above, p. 331) while ‘our policy of socialisation of the heavy industries in the Ruhr is not in my view affected adversely by the fusion agreement’. Britain could therefore continue to work for both socialism and democracy in its zone, showing some partiality for the SPD, yet not forgetting that the Christian Democrats in the Rhineland included ‘left-wing and moderate elements’. Admission of the Soviet zone might be impossible on financial grounds alone because of ‘the risk of being 337

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

involved in further expenditure; aad I regard it as basic that the British taxpayer should not be called upon to contribute another dollar or another pound to Germany beyond that to which he is already committed’. (Earlier he had warned the Prime Minister ‘that Russia would use the Communists and sympathisers in our Party in order to work up an agitation to involve the British taxpayer in more liability’.)58 At the very start of the Bizone arrangement there were few misgivings about the exclusion of the French zone, which was of little value economically without the Saar, which the French had separated from it. In early January Dean urged on Bevin the unwisdom of including the French zone since the profit-minded French would insist on terms which ‘would cost us money which we have not got’ and which, indirectly, would be even more costly since the French would wish to impose so many restrictions on the recovery of German industry throughout the Western zones in the name of security’ that there would be little chance of ending ‘the present disastrous conditions in western Germany which are costing us so much money’. He con¬ cluded: The British nation is entitled to some return both for its wartime efforts and the sums which it has been compel¬ led to pour into Germany to keep the population from starvation. The French have not been faced with the same difficulty, and have hitherto made a good thing out of their zone, quite apart from their having incorpo¬ rated the Saar economically into France. Political developments were very soon to cause Dean to change his mind. In January and February there were worrying reports that France and Russia were engaged in talks on a joint policy towards Germany. Happily, it was difficult to see what common ground there could be between the Soviet demand for a unitary Germany and the French for a loose confederation. Even so, Dean now wrote, efforts should be doubled to persuade France ‘to take a direct and responsible share as a third partner in the political and economic development of western Germany’.59 Stalin was determined not to allow a period of calm to 338

Germany: The Main Battleground

intervene precisely because of his opposition to the Bizone. It was probably useful for him that the four Foreign Ministers were due to meet in Moscow in March in a conference to be devoted very largely to Germany and Austria. In December the Foreign Office had embarked on a debate about strategy and tactics for the forthcoming con¬ ference. Roger Stevens was worried that the British public might see any Soviet proposals for German unity as the key to reducing British subsidies to Germany, contrary to the view in the Office that such proposals would almost certainly increase Britain’s burden. The American and French Governments and many Labour MPs might go along with such proposals, the latter for ‘ideological reasons’, the United States because ‘in their simple way the Americans feel a tremendous inward urge to get along with the Russians if they can’. The pressure in favour of Soviet proposals might therefore be ‘terrific’, presenting officials with a formidable educational job: If therefore the conclusion is reached here that, except on terms which the Russians could not conceivably accept, economic unity is not at present desirable, officials will have the task of convincing ministers of this unpalatable truth. This process is only likely to be successful if a plan of campaign is carefully prepared. On Christmas Eve Duncan Wilson wrote that purely from the angle of policy towards Russia there was very little to be said in favour of any Soviet proposals on German economic unity. Major British concessions would probably merely transform existing ‘hard feelings’ into ‘ones of contempt’. It was the German angle which gave him pause for thought: The strongest argument against any permanent division is, however, that it could never be acceptable to the Germans, and might eventually lead to a dangerous outburst of German nationalism. Even if this was in the first instance directed eastward, it would be unlikely to be profitable to us in the long run. This fear of the Germans turning to Russia led Wilson to think that it might be best to make real concessions on 339

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

reparations to the Soviet Union (and also to France) if the Russians would give a little in return in the form of raw materials for the British and American zones. At the end of January, Wilson was still preoccupied with the danger of the Germans seeking revenge, or at least casting off any demo¬ cratic facade which was imposed upon them. He favoured an international statute instead of a peace treaty for Germany since ‘it would deprive the Germans of one excuse for getting rid of the German government which signed the eventual treaty and which, presumably, would be a govern¬ ment acceptable to the Allied Powers.’ Dean thought that such a statute might serve as an interim measure to dispose of ‘a large measure of the really disagreeable part of the punishment which they [the Germans] will have to undergo’. Eventually, however, the Office came round to the view that if there ever was a German peace treaty it should be signed by all the parties involved, in the normal manner.60 However, the Soviet Government embarked about this time on a big propaganda drive to win support in west Germany, which had the inevitable effect of making the Foreign Office better-disposed towards the Germans. In January the Russians reduced the scale of their reparations from their zone, and returned some factories to German ownership. Duncan Wilson noted, ‘Since then there has been in Soviet-controlled newspapers and radio a campaign of bitter reproach against the Western powers for the capitalist exploitation of western Germany.’ From Moscow Peterson reported that expert opinion in both the American and his own embassy was that the Soviet Government were determined to retain complete control of their own zone even after a central German government had been set up: The Soviet policy after centralisation would be to claim all the privileges afforded by democracy in the Western zones while suppressing these privileges in the Soviet Zone ’ They would also regard ‘unity’ as a formula for securing immense reparations from western Germany for their own needs, but also ‘to prevent or at any rate hamper, the development of a healthy economy in the fused Western zones’. Wilson com¬ mented despairingly: ‘It is evident that in the Russian view the existence of a Central Government is quite compatible

340

Germany: The Main Battleground

with the existence of an Iron Curtain. This increases the importance of our “conditions” for establishment of central organisations.’ Suspicion of Soviet motives for advocating fusion of the zones went hand in hapd with similar feelings about what the Foreign Office saw as the extremely sinister Soviet opposition to federalism in Germany - something all the more dangerous, in that unitary government had a wide appeal to Germans and not least to the Social Democrats, whom the British were wooing so assiduously. Wilson, even though he knew that the proposal would be unwelcome to Bevin, thought that Britain might have to concede more powers to the central government than they would have liked, and that the details of a constitution - including the right to reject Bevin’s beloved system of single-member constituencies - would have to be left to the Germans.61 On 1 February 1947 Dean wrote what was almost a definitive summary of the policy by then favoured by the German specialists in the Foreign Office, and which Soviet intransigence was eventually to induce the Foreign Secretary to adopt. Agreeing with Peterson’s analysis of Soviet motives, Dean continued: ... we want to keep the iron curtain down (unless we get satisfaction on all our conditions) and build up Western Germany behind it - but only up to an agreed level - so that when a reasonable standard of living and prosperity has been restored there is more chance of drawing Eastern Germany towards the west than vice versa. The moment will then come for unifying Germany, which we hope by that time will, at any rate so far as the West is concerned, have reached a sufficiently advanced standard of political education and economic rehabilitation to enable the democratic and federalised system which we advocate to have a fair chance of success. It would be madness to let Russia - even a few ‘observers’ into the Ruhr. They would indulge in sabotage; ‘this is not idle guesswork since we have had definite evidence of this on more than one occasion already’. British policy was that an

341

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

international regime should be setup in the Ruhr, but one from which the Soviet Union should be totally excluded: ... unless we really get all we want in Germany (or possibly outside it)-which involves not only Russian promises to evacuate Eastern Germany or Eastern Europe (except for specified areas) and to allow us to trade there freely, but the real guarantee of such promises backed by an effective means of ensuring that the Russians carry out their side of the bargain. Dean concluded that, with Silesia ceded to Poland, there was not enough in East Germany alone to justify admitting Russia into the Ruhr.62 In March, a visit to Berlin convinced Dean that any idea that the four occupying powers could simply do with Germany what they wanted if only they could agree among themselves was now false, if it had ever been true. Talks with leading British members of the occupation regime resulted in his writing: As regards the feeling in Berlin, there is no doubt that there is genuine anxiety, which as far as I can see is well justified, that if we go on loading straws on the back of the German camel it will eventually sit down and refuse to cooperate any further. General Robertson pointed out that the Germans were in no position to cause serious military trouble, but we have certainly gone so far in devolving responsibility upon them and in pulling out ourselves that it would be almost impossible for us to take over the running of the country again if the more trustworthy and cooperative Germans refused to play any longer.63 By that time Bevin was in Moscow for the Foreign Ministers’ Conference. He made an initial effort to foster unity on the German problem, and also perhaps to win favourable public¬ ity for himself, to which he was by no means averse, by proposing that they should announce the liquidation of Prussia as any sort of entity within Germany - thus actually doing nothing more than giving a stamp of approval to something which the Nazis had already done (see above, 342

Germany: The Main Battleground

pp. 33-4).64 The long-drawn out conference proved an endurance test in which the Western delegates, assuming that they would all have agreed with him, could draw comfort only from the view, expressed by Dixon, that they were playing with a strong hand: ‘We can afford not to be over-eager, as our zone, fused, will work, and the Russian, we suspect, is in a bad way. So a workable settlement is not impossible.’65 The confident conclusion proved misplaced. In its earlier phase, the conference bore a faint resem¬ blance to Yalta in two respects. Firstly, the Soviet authorities went to considerable lengths to provide their guests with adequate and pleasant facilities, including accommodation at the best Moscow hotels and the provision of a fleet of Soviet limousines. At the end of the conference there was a ‘well-appointed, well-served’ meal instead of the usual bar¬ barian feast, followed by a film of a folk-tale from the Urals and not the anticipated propaganda film showing how the Soviet Union had defeated both Germany and Japan single-handed.66 Secondly, the British and Americans some¬ times differed from one another while agreeing with the Soviet side. The British did not like Marshall’s wish for what Dixon called ‘a vast peace conference of fifty states’; the Americans were especially anxious to associate China with the German peace treaty - again a curious harking back to the war years. Nor did they like the American idea, which they had earlier examined and rejected, that peace terms should be imposed on Germany by an international statute. Like the Russians they had concluded in favour of an orthodox peace treaty. All four countries - France was by now established as a partner at these meetings, though on this occasion Molotov hardly treated it as such (see above, p. 288) - made progress on the political structure of Germany. For a time only the Soviet insistence on payment of reparations from current production seemed an insuperable obstacle to agreement. Even a Soviet demand for the exclusion of the British Dominions from any role in the peace treaty, which pro¬ voked from Bevin a retort that ‘If they were good enough to fight with us, they are good enough to sit down with us’, became a cause for Dixon to suspect American motives 343

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

when Marshall proceeded ‘to pay a tremendous compliment to Canada, quoting her man-power and financial expendi¬ ture in the war. This is the first time I recall America speaking so possessively of Canada, and it is a pretty significant development in American Imperial policy in keeping with the Greek coup’ - an oddly ungracious way of describing America’s assumption of Britain’s recentlyabandoned financial burden in Greece. A few days later, Dixon found the Americans guilty of the old Soviet sin of making difficulties over procedure: ‘It would seem that the Americans really do not want to agree ... If there is no hope of agreement on economic unity, it might be as well to suspend the Conference, but why choose such a rotten ground as Marshall did this afternoon?’67 Gradually, however, alignments shifted, with the Western powers and Russia on opposite sides of a sharp dividing-line. There was the strange and sinister Soviet insistence on a highly centralised regime in Germany. Dixon commented on 7 April: Molotov advocates plebiscite for creation of German constitution. Secretary of State says he will not be a party to a plebiscite which may throw up a Hitler again. Molotov may have ideological reasons, our reasons are purely security. Germany too near to be healthy. Allies have a responsibility to build the new state. Cannot risk concentration of power in the hands of a Central Government. On the same day, he recorded news from home which he felt seriously weakened the British delegation’s hand; a hundred and forty Labour MPs had abstained or voted against the Government’s conscription proposals, ultimately forcing it to reduce the term of military service from eighteen to twelve months. He would have felt more reassured if he had been able to peep into the future since this was to be the only time that the 1945-51 Labour Governments were to make a serious modification in defence or foreign policy in the face of backbench pressure. At the time he wrote: ‘We are all shocked to the core by decision, a few days after Debate in Parliament, to reduce military service from 18 to 12 months. 344

Germany: The Main Battleground

It will not produce an armed force, and is an abject capitulation to left-wing critics.’68 A week later, Molotov was, in Dixon’s view, simply being gratuitously insulting. On the 14th he attacked in the most offensive terms the Byrnes proposal for a four-power treaty, the entire purpose of which had been to reassure the Soviet Union (and also France), and in which the Americans themselves had been losing interest, having become ‘rather bored by this badly-drafted baby’, which the Russians could therefore have left to die a natural death.69 Final dis¬ illusionment came over Austria. Molotov made a claim to German assets in that country so widely defined as to amount to a stranglehold on the economy. Dixon wrote angrily: Never has the shameless rapacity of Soviet policy been so apparent. The division is complete: the Western Powers want Austria to live, Russia wants her to moulder under Soviet domination. Unless the Soviets do a real volte-face, give up their charming double policy of loot and domination, there is not a chance of agreement or of four-power treaty. The nearest Molotov came to a concession was to hint at abandoning support for Yugoslav territorial claims in south-east Austria in return for an accommodating Western attitude on ‘German assets’ - an interesting indication of how Moscow was prepared to treat its one ally that was not purely a puppet.70 Bevin sent Attlee a measured and unemotional account of the impending failure of the conference. He described Molotov’s attitude as ‘cool, calculating’ rather than insulting or outrageous, and reiterated the major problems as being the Soviet Union’s economic demands on Germany and Austria and its rejection of the four-power treaty. There was no hint in this of a final break. The conference concluded in late April with an agreement to hold technical talks on the ‘German assets’ issue in Austria, though with Molotov putting the final touch to the tone which he had given it by making a speech which was so ‘offensive’ as to be ‘really crazy’ to Pierson Dixon.71

345

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Before grinning for the photographers at the airport and going home, Bevin had a talk with Marshall in which he suggested that with the conference ending so unhappily, their two countries should announce new decisions of their own for the Bizone: steel output to be allowed to rise to ten million tons; the dismantling of industrial plant for repara¬ tions to be ended; and ‘the German people to be told the final score against them’. Marshall’s reply was discouraging, despite an interview with Stalin from which he had, probably wrongly, drawn very sinister implications about Soviet policy. The American declared himself ‘mortally afraid’ of agitation in his country for its commitments in Germany to be reduced. He did agree to a package of economic meas¬ ures for Germany, including a promise that steel output would almost certainly be increased, that reparations, chiefly to France, would be reduced, and that the Bizone would be made more of a reality by the setting up of economic agencies which actually dealt with both zones.72 Marshall had been ready to heed Britain’s economic predicament in Germany, and, in any case, Bevin’s pleas merely reinforced similar ones from Clay and the United States army. Uncertainty about wider American support strengthened Bevin’s determination that there should be another lengthy period of trying to agree with the Soviet Government about Germany and other matters, but above all about Germany. Bevin gave an early earnest of this determination by refusing to concede a strong demand by Clay for some form of central parliament with a political role to be set up in the Bizone, as opposed to a central administration whose func¬ tions were purely economic. He told the Cabinet that he was unwilling to take a step which the Russians would find so provocative unless there was failure at the next conference of Foreign Ministers due to be held in London a full eight months later.73 This went hand-in-hand with an obstinate distrust of the Germans which continued to permeate the planning work of the Foreign Office. In August 1947 Bernard Burrows wrote that maximum decentralisation con¬ tinued to be the policy, not, obviously, to please the Soviet Union with its demand for the very opposite form of governV

346

Germany: The Main Battleground

ment, but ‘to make Germany a less efficient war machine than she would be if centralised. Administrative untidiness, provided it does not conflict with our immediate economic objectives, has some positive advantages.’74 This attitude of the men based in London was the more important because of the fact that the Foreign Office was proceeding from victory to victory in its contest with COGA for control of policy in the zone. A change of personalities in the Control Office also helped early in 1947 with Frank Pakenham replacing Hynd. Dixon thought Pakenham ‘a great improvement’ and ‘virtually an additional Foreign Office Under Secretary’.75 Typically, in the spring of 1947 Duncan Wilson still thought that ‘the average German’, who, ‘so far as he is politically-minded must think in terms of power politics’, might yet be won over to Communism if he was convinced that it would give him political unity and economic security. This disregarded continuing advice from British administrators in Germany about the deep hatred of Russia, and therefore of Communism as well, among the public. In the summer, when the Foreign Office inquired how strong a hand could be used against any Communist industrial sabotage in the Ruhr, Major General N.C.D. Brownjohn replied that such sabotage would be unlikely since there were very few Communists among the Ruhr workers, and that if there were any saboteurs, the more severely they were punished the more would the German people applaud.76 Another continuing assumption was that in purely economic terms west Germany would never recover unless measures closely resembling those being implemented in Britain itself were duplicated there. Dugald Malcolm, of the Foreign Office wrote in May about the chances of the Americans taking over the entire dollar cost of the Bizone. He thought that they would not, and that that would be no bad thing: ‘If they did they might not make a success of Western Germany, influenced as they are by laissez-faire ideas, and it would be difficult for us to sit by and watch Western Germany pass through a state of chaos into Russian hands.’ Dean wrote with relish about the ‘socialisation’ of basic industries.77 This attitude soon suffered nemesis. In

347

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 the middle of the year a combination of worsening eco¬ nomic conditions in Britain - in particular the crisis over the convertibility of sterling - and something of an ultimatum from Marshall caused the British Government to move decisively towards accepting that the Americans were the senior, and themselves the junior, partner in the occupation of Germany. Marshall sent Bevin a message on 24 June on the eve of the meeting in Paris to consider his recent offer of aid, in which he laid down the abandonment of any idea of nationalising industry in the Ruhr as a condition of United States aid to that area. At Anglo-American discussions in Washington in August it was agreed to establish joint control of coal production in the Ruhr, with German man¬ agement at the lower levels and with America providing new equipment for the mines and food for the miners. Further talks on Bizonal financing took place in the American capital between October and December, with Strang leading the British delegation. The United States agreed to shoulder most of the costs of the Bizone, while Britain agreed to leave the question of socialist economic measures to a future German government. The lifting of all restraints on German economic growth was discussed, but for the time being was prevented by the French. Officials, as well as Labour politicians whose faith in socialism was not unnatural, had to swallow their words about the indispensability of Britishtype social democracy to west Germany’s economic recovery.78 Against this background of diminishing British power, as the summer drew to a close officials concerned with Germany had to apply themselves, with obvious weariness, to drawing up detailed plans for the conference due in London in November, plans which they knew would come to nothing unless Soviet policy changed beyond recognition. At the end of September Dean wrote that it was lamentable that ‘heavily overburdened’ British officials would have to spend much of their precious time on a scheme which would simply be confronted with rival schemes from the other participants almost certainly leading to ‘a reiteration with increasing exasperation’ of differing national standpoints. The British would have their work cut out in another way as •I

348

Germany: The Main Battleground

well: ‘The Russians will produce a mass of vituperative charges which would have no foundation but which would have to be dealt with.’ From Lord Inverchapel (the former Sir Archibald Clark Kerr) in Washington came essentially welcome news that the State Department favoured a strong line with the Russians, particularly on the economic unity of Germany, and hoped that Britain, as the occupying power in the Ruhr, would be on its guard against Soviet ‘penetration’ there. The United States would favour responding to any Soviet proposals on German unity with conditions which were reasonable, but which the Soviet rulers would never accept, such as freedom of travel to the West for residents of the East zone, and a common export-import programme for the whole of Germany. Wilson thought that the problem might be reducing itself to one of presentation. Referring to another of E.H. Carr’s outpourings in The Times, he wrote: I agree that we must stick firm to our political con¬ ditions for unity. We should, however, remember that the Soviet [s/c] may make apparently large concessions, and that public opinion both here and in Germany is strongly in favour of unity, and may demand at least an apparent effort and some nominal concessions.79 By this time the Foreign Office were actively trying to round off the virtual de facto partition of Germany by persuading France to include its zone into what would then be a Trizone. Embarrassingly, the French indicated that in return for taking such a risk they might demand a formal BritishAmerican guarantee of their own security against the Soviet Union. That would have been going too fast, if not too far, but there was a mood of longing among British officials by late 1947 to have done with the pretence of four-power control. In November P.R. Fraser wondered why Britain should, if only through inactivity, allow the Russians to persist with ‘their wrecking tactics’ in Germany, which were intended to inflict harm on the whole of western Europe.80 The conference in London in November and December deserves little notice under the heading of Germany, despite the fact that the future of that country, and of Austria, was its ostensible raison d’etre. As discussed elsewhere (see 349

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

above, pp. 288-90), it did not get beyond propaganda exchanges. Sargent thought that in so far as a purpose could be discerned in the Soviet proposals, apart from scoring debating points, it was to deny any government which might be set up in Germany ‘genuine freedom and power to govern’. In the British view, the stage had been reached where the German people had to be given responsibility over most aspects of their lives. Officials now accepted a fairly strong central government within a federal system, and hoped that it would not stifle the ‘delicate plants’ of the provincial or Land governments. In any case, it would be restrained during the ‘comparatively long period’ in which the occupying powers would retain ultimate military and civil authority. By the time the conference neared its end Sargent was worried about the difficulty of having serious talks with the Americans. They had not yet become accus¬ tomed to having intimate talks with the British and reaching immediate decisions in the event of an emergency such as the conference collapsing in acrimony, he thought. Bevin added: ‘I find it impossible to get real conversations with the French or USA.’81 Despite these obstacles, the Foreign Secretary was to persevere and achieve some success in discussions with both French and Americans about what to do now that the semblance of co-operation with Russia was gone (on which see Chapter 8 below). Specifically on Germany, as the conference broke up Bevin gave the green light for open political and economic competition with the Russians for German popular support. On 16 December he asked a meeting of officials ‘how soon it would be possible to achieve a balance of payments in the bizonal area and to build up an economy which would be superior to anything which the Russians could achieve in the Eastern Zone’. Robertson answered five years or possibly somewhat sooner. Abandoning all previous inhibitions, Bevin said that he would favour every effort to increase industrial output in the Bizone, agreement if possible with the Americans about restoring a normal democratic political life to the Bizone within six to twelve months, and some sort of concession to the French on security to induce them to bring in their zone. In a wide-ranging talk with Marshall just 350

Germany: The Main Battleground

after the conference broke up, Bevin put these proposals to him and added: ‘Then any German Irredentist movement for unity would come from the west, and not be a Russianinspired movement coming from the east.’82 Earlier the same day Bevin talked with Bidault and contrived to suggest that Britain’s relations with France were uniquely close and important, just as with Marshall he was to imply the same about Anglo-American relations. Bevin remarked to Bidault on the difficulties of negotiating with the Americans ‘because of lack of co-ordination between the various American departments’. Germany was especially difficult since responsibility was shared between State and War. He suggested that Britain and France should co¬ ordinate their policy in Germany when dealing with the United States, and did not bring up the small matter of the inclusion of the French zone into a Trizone. As for the institutional form of the future West German state, Bevin declared, no doubt bearing in mind the lingering French wish for confederation and his own personal preference for a loose federation, that he was ‘thinking on the lines of the four Lander’, and did not share the American wish for ‘grandiose elections’; presumably he meant that the provin¬ cial governments should choose the one at the centre, which would therefore be only indirectly elected.83 The next day it was back to the Americans, and a true meeting of grandees, Marshall, Bevin and the two military governors, Robertson and Clay. Bevin was not happy when both the Americans suggested giving Russia a last chance to change its ways and show a serious willingness to co-operate in Germany. Clay said that he favoured a currency reform in the Bizone, which had long been recognised as the most decisive step towards the partition of Germany, but only after the Soviet Union had been given another chance to enter the Bizone arrangement at the Control Council in Berlin in a few days’ time. Marshall said that it would have to be a serious offer, and not a propaganda gesture. Bevin showed his dislike of this, choosing to argue against it on a ground which reflected his own earlier career, when other and perhaps weightier arguments could have been used: if the Russians came into the fusion arrangement, they might, 351

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

he feared, shackle the German trade unions in regard to wage negotiations. Drawing on the ‘impressions’ of a future head of his own union in Britain, he told the meeting that He had been impressed by what Mr Jack Jones, who had just returned from Germany, had said to the effect that under the Soviet system, trade unions were pre¬ vented from functioning in their normal field of fixing wages ... The Communist method, based on Lenin, of fixing wages ruined trade unions ... If trade unions could not negotiate over wages, they would only make trouble politically ... He wanted the German trade unions to grow on the British and American model [and] to be an example to the rest of Germany.84 Bevin must, however, have been confident from his own recently-abandoned efforts to agree with the Soviet Union over Germany that such a ‘last chance’ could only fail.

VIII The Austrian sub-problem At the end of the war Austria, like Germany, was divided into occupation zones of the four powers, while Vienna, like Berlin within the Soviet zone of Germany, was separated from the surrounding Soviet zone and divided also into four sectors. The fortunes of war had carried the Soviet army well into the Western zones as decided in the European Advisory Commission in London and, consequently, the Russians had been in a position to woo the Austrian population before the arrival of a strong British, American or French presence. That they did perhaps more wholeheartedly than anywhere else in the east or central Europe, in the sense of minimising reliance on the use of brute force. As the Red Army moved deeper into Austria after capturing Vienna, the Austria specialist in the Foreign Office, M.F. Cullis, commented scornfully on ‘the myth of Austrian resistance’ in response to Soviet propaganda statements appealing for the support of the liberty-loving mass of the Austrian people and offering lenient treatment to those Austrian Nazis not guilty of serious war crimes. Cullis was clearly thinking of the way in 352

Germany: The Main Battleground

which the Soviet Union had previously taken much the same line on Austria’s war record as he was still taking.85 Stalin had evidently decided to translate his reluctant consent at the Teheran Conference to Austria being treated as a liberated country into something much more wholehearted. The aged Austrian Social Democratic leader, Karl Renner, who was personally wholly untainted by any Nazi associations, having lived through the Anschluss years in a remote village, was invited by the Russians to form a government (or, according to a Soviet source, invited him¬ self, which invitation was accepted on orders from Moscow because Stalin vaguely remembered his name from the time of parliamentary politics in Austria before the Dollfuss dictatorship was set up in 1934). The Foreign Office knew nothing but good about Renner personally, but wondered whether, given his advanced years, he was unwittingly lending his services to the establishment of a puppet government. At the prompting of Sargent, Churchill sent a protest to Stalin at the end of April against Soviet prevari¬ cating tactics which were preventing the dispatch of Allied missions to Vienna and against the unilateral establishment of the Renner Government. Sargent warned Churchill that there were unmistakable signs that Russia was trying to ‘organise’ Austria on Romanian lines.86 Fortunately, Renner and his colleagues showed them¬ selves most unwilling to be organised, and, once four-power control had been set up after a good deal of wrangling in the months after the German surrender, the Western powers were in a position to give them much help. Nothing was more gratifying than to help people who were willing to help themselves. Cullis wrote at the beginning of 1946: ‘Austria has shown signs of a commendable, and wholly un¬ revolutionary, stability [s/c] ... The Socialists, too, have represented in many ways a conservative [sic] influence in the country’s revival.’ This came hard on the heels of a comment by Harvey: ‘God knows when we shall see an Austrian peace treaty.’87 The Foreign Office were anxious that Austrian independence should be rebuilt on sound lines and, besides the obvious and paramount need to save the country from having Communism forced upon it against its 353

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

will, they saw this as requiring a federal system with large powers for the provinces, despite Austria’s small size, to prevent a repetition of the conflicts between Vienna and the conservative provinces which had wrecked Austrian demo¬ cracy even before the Nazi take-over. Gradually, such considerations began to look less important beside the sheer necessity of preserving the country from Soviet domination. The initial move by the Russians in setting up a provisional Government was seen in a cynical light after they had started to block that Government’s every action almost as soon as it had refused to act as a puppet, and after the Austrian public, in free elections in November 1945, had given only 5 per cent of their votes to the Communist Party. Harvey felt that there were lessons to be learned from this relevant to Germany: The Russian attitude towards Austria affords a fore¬ taste of what their attitude would be to Germany if a central German government were not under Commun¬ ist domination. They would prolong their occupation and generally use every means of pressure to break down resistance to Soviet control. Sargent responded that Austria was important enough in itself: It looks as though the administration of Austria is going to become a test case between the Russians on the one hand and ourselves and the Americans on the other. If so, we cannot afford a policy of drift and I think the time is coming when we ought to study the problem both from a strategic and a political angle and to decide whether and, if so, where to make a stand. Up till now we have tried to deal piecemeal with each incident as it arises. This gives an enormous advantage to the Russians if they really intend to get the ultimate control of Austria. He took comfort from signs that the Americans intended to resist Soviet pressure in Austria.88 There was also comfort to be drawn from the belief that the Soviet Union had made itself so unpopular in Austria 354

Germany: The Main Battleground

that no amount of renewed ‘friendliness’ could win it many supporters among the population. Officials found it so much easier to think that the Austrians were immune to Commun¬ ist totalitarianism than to think thp same of the Germans. The Soviet Union actually indulged in a major act of ‘friendliness’, which they almost certainly soon started to regret, in June 1946, when they agreed that the Austrian Government’s actions could be vetoed only by unanimous decision of the occupying powers, that there should be complete freedom of movement of goods and people between the zones, and that Austria could establish lega¬ tions and consulates abroad. Russia simply refused to observe the part of the agreement on economic unification, but was unable to recover its veto over the actions of the Austrian Government.89 Partly because of Foreign Office advice, the Chiefs of Staff recommended in a report in June a major and long¬ term British manpower and economic commitment in Austria, to resist not only the Russians but also Tito, whose Yugoslav regime wished to annex part of south-east Austria, the area of the British zone of occupation. The Chiefs saw Russian policy as bent on the domination of Austria or, as a minimum, the exclusion of the Western powers from Vienna. That step might be a forerunner to a formal partition of the country, with a Communist regime in the Soviet zone and in Vienna, which was to be strongly resisted as economically unsound and because of its effect on the Austrian people as a whole, who were showing sturdy resistance to Communist threats and blandishments. Austria was not only worth supporting in its own right, its loss would have several dire consequences: ‘It would bring the Russians into direct contact with the French Zone of Germany, and so with France herself, the preservation of which from Russian influence is essential to the security of western Europe’; the Soviet Union would acquire opportunities for influence in the American zone of Germany; ‘it would be a further factor in excluding Western influence from Czechoslovakia’; ‘it would expose Italy to Soviet influence from a new quarter and would thus increase the means of penetration of Russian influence into the Mediterranean’; finally, it would rule 355

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

out any serious hope of international control of the Danube.90 Regrettably, Bevin soon afterwards made a chance remark that the partition of Austria could not be ruled out, and the Foreign Office were also disheartened by what they saw as the sheer intractability of Austria’s economic prob¬ lems, both existing and long term, problems more serious than those of Germany.91 Perhaps repenting of his remark, Bevin, in his major speech on foreign policy to the Com¬ mons in October (see above, pp. 333-4), while generally at pains to be conciliatory to Russia, almost demanded con¬ cessions in Austria. He stated a clear suspicion that the Soviet refusal to conclude an Austrian peace treaty was dictated by a wish to keep troops in Hungary and Romania, ostensibly to man the lines of communication with the Soviet zone of Austria. He also made it clear that he did not like the Soviet refusal to define simply what they wanted in repara¬ tions from Austria in the form of ‘German assets’ — property which had allegedly belonged to the Nazi state. Keeping to his usual practice at this time of not mentioning the Soviet Union by name when he felt that he had to be critical of it, he declared that ‘eastern Austria’ — it would have been more exact to refer to the Soviet zone since the south-east was not under Russian occupation and was in fact the British zone ‘must be dealt with by opening the area fully to the authority of the Austrian Government, and not by shutting it off as a plague spot which can only be treated in isolation from the rest of the country.’92 During the next fifteen months there were no major developments in the Austrian problem. The British con¬ tinued to find it more difficult to evaluate Soviet aims there than in Germany or indeed anywhere else in Europe. The most widely-held opinion in the Foreign Office was that of M.F. Cullis, expressed at the end of January: ‘Ultimate Soviet policy towards Austria, while not susceptible of very precise definition, continues to aim at the subjection or, alternatively, ruination of the country.’ Some weeks later’ Brimelow, in his lecture on the aims of British foreign policy for the Staff College at Camberley (see above, pp. 276-8) stated that: 356

Germany: The Main Battleground

As regards Austria, there is some evidence for believ¬ ing that the original Soviet plan was to create such chaos there by the removal of industrial equipment and other assets that the Western a.llies would withdraw in disgust and the Austrian Government would be reduced to accepting Soviet help on Soviet terms. This had since been replaced by policies of economic exploitation and efforts to continue indefinitely the system of occupation zones. In other words, Western policy in Austria at least had forced Russia into retreat there.93 This was reaffirmed early in January 1947 by the British Political Representative in Vienna, Sir H. Mack, according to whom Russia was having to tolerate an Austrian Government, in origin of Soviet creation, of which it openly disapproved as ‘rooted in the reactionary soil of clericofascism’. It was trying to spread propaganda among the population by bringing into the country emigre Austrian Communists and those few Austrian prisoners-of-war in Soviet camps who were converts to Communism or had convinced their captors that they were. In the meantime, Soviet policy sought ever more economic concessions ‘which will at the same time by their nature complete the establish¬ ment of Soviet control over the whole economy of the Danube basin, and by their terms ensure that that complete control continues’.94 There was little change in all this during the next year. At a loss for relatively plausible arguments against the full restoration of independence and democracy to Austria of the kind which could be used in Germany, they adopted stone-walling tactics at conferences at which Austrian affairs came up (see above, pp. 289-90 and 345). British officials were left with the impression that the Soviet Union might possibly concede an Austrian peace treaty in return for enormous political and economic concessions in that little country such as the Western powers could never offer.95

357

7 Eastern Europe After the War

I Introduction There was a very marked contrast between British policy in Germany, where there was everything to play for in the years after the end of the war in Europe and where the British felt that in many ways they had a strong hand, and policy in most of the vast area of east and central Europe. When the war ended the Red Army was installed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. However,’ troops were soon withdrawn from Czechoslovakia, and Moscow did not simply set up outright Communist regimes in the other occupied or liberated countries. It and the local Communists allowed more political freedom for some time in Hungary than in Romania and a little more in Romania than in Poland or Bulgaria. In two other countries, Yugo¬ slavia and Albania, Communist regimes with a monopoly of power were firmly installed by the spring of 1945. They had come to power largely through their own efforts, and, in the Yugoslav case, with British, rather than Soviet, help at a stage in the struggle of the Communist Partisans when their survival was still at stake. The Foreign Office watched the Tito regime gratuitously turn against its British benefactor, as they saw it, and abase itself before Stalin. Even so, they did not lose sight of the fact that, uniquely, Yugoslavia’s subservience to the Soviet rulers was voluntary and there¬ fore conceivably reversible. Albania was under considerable Yugoslav influence, but 358

Eastern Europe After the War

was also receiving large numbers of Soviet ‘advisers’, accord¬ ing to reports reaching the Foreign Office which, in March 1946, detected ‘a close parallel between present penetration of all spheres of administration by fhe Russians and the same process carried out by Italians prior to 1939’. The only question seemed to be whether Albania would remain a sub-dependency of Russia or would succeed in raising itself to vassal status proper. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Albania in 1946 after the mining of British destroyers in the Corfu Channel. The country’s exclusion from the Cominform in the autumn of 1947 - the only Communist regime to be so treated - was interpreted by the British embassy in Yugoslavia as meaning that Albania would soon be formally annexed by Tito’s state. The author of this opinion went on to describe meeting the Albanian Com¬ munist leaders during a pilgrimage to Belgrade that year, ‘and one and all were either persons of complete insignifi¬ cance or else characters out of a farce’.1 British interest inevitably remained greatest in the southernmost Balkans, comprising Greece and a small part of Turkey. The latter is, of course, both a south-east European and a Middle Eastern country. Its relations with Britain at this time will be considered later in this chapter as a phase in the containment of Soviet power in both Europe and Asia in which, until President Truman’s dramatic announcement early in 1947, the British felt themselves out on a limb, defending the interests of the Western world with no reliable prospect of help except from the Turks them¬ selves, yet determined not to yield to Soviet pressure. In Greece Stalin continued his policy of detachment during 1945. Two non-revisionist historians have curiously called it a ‘display of integrity’.2 Eschewing any value judgments, one must recognise that Stalin was undoubtedly sacrificing the prospects of the Greek Communists in the hope of the Western powers turning a blind eye to the forcible Soviet imposition of Communism in much of the rest of eastern Europe. The United States and Britain under the new leadership of Truman and Attlee and Bevin were unwilling to accept such a tacit bargain, and were prepared to run the risks of internationally-supervised elections in 359

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Greece in return for the same in .countries farther north. Very soon after Bevin took office, Dixon found him uncer¬ tain about some things but not about policy to Greece. On the one hand, Britain had to maintain ‘an adequate military position’ there. On the o’ther, genuinely free elections should be held; till then, ‘we are hampered in pressing for free elections in other Balkan countries’. At the special United Nations Security Council meeting in London early in 1946 Bevin’s statements on Greece were so strong that the delighted Dixon could write: ‘The frankest and most forth¬ right speech any Foreign Secretary has ever made since Palmerston.’3 Recent and excellent books on Greece in this period, and on the Greek role in the origins of the Truman Doctrine, make more than a brief survey of Greece in British foreign policy after the war unnecessary, vastly important as that role was until 1947.4 Greece was virtually a British protecto¬ rate from late 1944 to early 1947, with the Americans showing an open readiness to help in preserving the nonCommunist regime from the middle of 1946, though Truman’s deep interest in Greece dated from the earliest weeks of his presidency. To some extent the British were undoubtedly ready to turn a blind eye to acts of political and social injustice by their Greek proteges, but, as already recorded, were also ready for free elections, which were seen as a tremendous gamble. There was no possibility of the Communists winning a fair election in Greece but the British did not realise that. Almost throughout Europe (except, ironically, in Czechoslovakia), they consistently over¬ estimated Communist chances of winning elections. The Communists boycotted the Greek elections of March 1946, no doubt because they had a better appreciation of their chances than had the Foreign Office; intimidation could always be offered as a reason and every abstention claimed as a vote for Communism.5 By then Greece was rapidly sliding into renewed and this time prolonged civil war. The evidence for Soviet instigation of this war is highly inconclusive and, on balance, seems to indicate Russian innocence’, though Stalin’s disavowal of the Greek Party’s struggle to Milovan Djilas in 1948 hardly 360

Eastern Europe After the War

settles the matter. Only in the field of propaganda, and then briefly and belatedly, was Soviet support for the Greek comrades manifest. The relations between Moscow and the Communist regimes in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria which gave the Greeks material aid remain conjectural over that issue. The Foreign Office, however, took it for granted that Yugoslav and Bulgarian aid to the Greek Communists ‘on an increasing scale’ was ‘the Soviet answer to the “Truman doctrine’' in Greece’.6 As the Foreign Office writer could not fail to record, the United States had assumed the major share of Western support for Greece in 1947 (on the Truman Doctrine, see below, pp. 435-9). After funding Greece to the figure of £132 million between 1944 and early 1947, Britain had had to lay down most of its burden in the face of economic adversity.7 This was a bitter blow to Bevin, who had almost boasted in the Commons in October 1946: ‘I say this with emphasis, we will not desert Greece after the great comradeship that existed between us and we shall pursue a policy of trying to assist her economically as well.’ To Dixon in December Greece was still simply ‘our most difficult satellite’. There was some consolation in that Britain did not bow out of Greek affairs completely. If financial aid ceased, military assistance continued. Marshall was highly appreciative of it, and wished it to continue until the Communist rebels were finally defeated, which is what happened.8 In the Balkans apart from Greece and Turkey and in central Europe to their north, the British attitude to the task of peace-making in relation to such traditional matters as frontiers was one of deference to the Soviet Union, partly because of the futility of trying to play a major role in areas where the Soviet Union or Communism or both were so clearly in the ascendant, and partly, particularly while Churchill remained in office, because of a wish not to sway Stalin from his gratifying lack of interest in the affairs of Greece and Italy. The Yalta Conference’s products included the Declaration on Liberated Europe, proposed by the Americans, in which all three participants agreed to observe the highest democratic standards in the treatment of ‘liber¬ ated’ European countries, including former German allies 361

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

such as Romania which for this purpose were deemed to have been ‘liberated’. The ink was scarcely dry before the Russians showed clear evidence of an unwillingness to stand by any reasonable interpretation of the Declaration in Romania and in Poland (which, in the strictest legal sense, was the subject of a separate arrangement at Yalta and therefore not covered by the Declaration). The United States refused to turn a blind eye to the ill-treatment of its child and the Foreign Office had to consider whether Britain should join with American protests, in the case of Romania at least. At an Office meeting in late February 1945, as recorded by Jebb, it was decided to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ and ‘not to invoke the Declaration at all except for the specific purpose of inducing the Americans to accept responsibility for any line of policy which might be agreed with them in the areas of Europe in which we had a major interest’. The meeting had evidently seen some merit in the idea of allowing the Soviet Union ‘some say’ in western Europe if that was ‘the one way of preserving our influence in Eastern Europe’; ‘against it there was the fact that if we for any reason invoked the Declaration in e.g. Romania, the Russians might tend to revise their present policy of allowing us to play the hand in Greece.’ Presumably this meant that Russia could safely be allowed a nominal voice in western Europe, but that the risks of doing the same in Greece were simply too great to be taken. A week later Sargent returned to the question whether Britain should join the United States in invoking the Decla¬ ration to try to stop Russia from ‘cooking the elections’ in Bulgaria and Romania. He thought not, and agreed that the Declaration’s only real value, though a very great one, lay ‘in the fact that it enshrines the new policy of the United States to assume their share of responsibility for the maintenance of democratic institutions and free elections in the liberated countries’. Britain had to perform a balancing act: not antagonising the Americans by openly spurning the Declara¬ tion and not antagonising the Russians by supporting it too wholeheartedly. Sargent would almost certainly have agreed with Dixon who wrote in his diary in March about the dangers of supporting United States concern with eastern 362

Eastern Europe After the War

Europe when ‘the Americans are only too prone to espouse a cause enthusiastically, take us along with them, and later let us down with a bump’. Eden laid down that British policy would have to come down somewhat on the side of the United States. An official reverted to the question of maintaining Stalin’s self-denying ordinance, this time in the case of Italy rather than Greece. Claims to a voice in Romania might be ‘a very inconvenient line when applied in some other liberated countries such as Italy. Surely if when northern Italy is liberated and there is perhaps some trouble there, we do not want the Russians claiming to intervene because we have not treated the Communist Party in Milan as Moscow would like us to have treated them’.9 Soon afterwards the war in Europe ended without any serious ‘trouble’ from the powerful bands of Communist resistance fighters in north Italy, whether obeying orders from Moscow or not. To digress on that last point, a ray of light is cast on this by Wolfgang Leonhard. In 1943 at the Comintern School which he attended, the Italian ‘pupils’ were reprimanded by their Soviet teachers for saying that they assumed that the dissolution of the Comintern was a tactical move and that any Communist partisans in Italy active when the war ended would bury their arms for possible use against the British and American troops who would presumably be in occupation of the country. The Italians were told that the dissolution was a sincere step towards honest co-operation with the Western powers. By contrast the political advisers to the British and American forces in Italy in 1945, including Harold Macmillan, were intent on reducing the Communist partisans in the north, who were indeed very numerous by that time, to political and military impotence as soon as the Germans surrendered. They had no wish to use force if it could be avoided and evolved a policy of offering the partisans lavish quantities of medals while disarming them. Macmillan felt that the com¬ plete success of this policy was a ‘last great achievement’ of Anglo-American wartime co-operation, but he must still have wondered why it worked so easily.10 At this stage the British were being forced somewhat reluctantly by the Americans into not ignoring Soviet high363

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

handedness in countries where-' the Red Army was ensconced. Gradually they were to come round of their own accord to feeling some concern, if strictly of a passive kind, about the gradual but ruthless establishment of Communist dictatorships, known as ‘people’s democracies’, in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. The sheer cynicism of this process was to make a very adverse impact on British and American official thinking, as when a Soviet general replied to the complaints of the American Ambas¬ sador in Moscow about Russian heavy-handed tactics in eastern Europe by asking what was wrong, since the Soviet Government was only applying there the methods used at home.11 The passive approach was well-exemplified in the case of Poland, about which only a few brief remarks will be made here. Britain continued to maintain diplomatic rela¬ tions with the Polish Communist regime despite some remarkable humiliations inflicted on British diplomats. Hankey, who served for a time as charge at the embassy in Warsaw before returning to London to take up an important post in the Northern Department of the Foreign Office, found physical communication with the Polish Foreign Ministry difficult since the British mission had been given squalid quarters eight miles from the ministry and no car. (Hankey, for his part, was unwilling to travel by cattle cart.) Meanwhile he and other Western diplomats had to watch while Poland gave supreme priority in its post-war recon¬ struction drive to the building of a magnificent Soviet embassy. Even more wounding, the Ambassador, Cavendish-Bentinck, was arrested late in 1946 while visiting a friend, Count Grochalski, who had survived the rigours of the German occupation despite an active role in the resis¬ tance. Cavendish-Bentinck was eventually freed only to read later in the press that his friend had been tried and executed on charges which included passing information to a foreign Ambassador. This shortly preceded the holding of general elections in Poland in January 1947 which were manifestly rigged. None of this provoked anything more from Britain than diplomatic protests.12 As the war ended and just afterwards the British were usually aroused only by problems on the borderland 364

Eastern Europe After the War

between the British and Soviet spheres of control. In June 1945 a meeting to consider the peace treaties with Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary decided that most issues inevitably would be decided by the Russians, and that Britain’s most vital interest was probably to resist Bulgarian claims, which Russia was presumably inspiring, to territory in north-east Greece which would have extended Bulgaria to the Aegean and brought Communism close to the great port of Salonica. Britain should also do what it could to prevent a fusion of Bulgarian and Yugoslav Macedonia in a separate Macedo¬ nian Communist state which would obviously, and with some prospects of success, seek the addition of Greek Macedonia. Far to the north of the area of British interest, the chief issue in terms of ‘old diplomacy’ was the fixing of frontiers between Hungary and its neighbours, Czecho¬ slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. (Soviet annexations at the expense of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania meant that Russia and Hungary were also now neighbours, but Moscow graciously refrained from laying claim to any Hun¬ garian territory.) Between the wars, almost all Hungarians had complained loudly and incessantly about the magnitude of their territorial losses in the treaty of Trianon in 1920, which had deprived them of two-thirds of their former territory and left large Magyar minorities, mostly in Czecho¬ slovakia and the great Romanian province of Transylvania. British visitors had either sympathised intensely or been left with the impression that the Hungarians were the most boorish people on earth. Before the war the Foreign Office would probably have put Hungarian revisionist claims high on any list of European problems, but the mood was wholly different in 1945. There was little inclination to make a fuss about the clear Soviet intention to restore the Trianon frontiers and the equally clear Czech intention, with Soviet concurrence, to expel its Magyar minority, just as they were expelling the Sudeten Germans. (In the event, Czecho¬ slovakia was to allow the majority of its Magyars to remain.) Early in August, Hood wrote that the Czech policy would apparently depopulate some parts of Slovakia completely, but that at the peace conference it would be best to ‘leave it to the Russians’ to make proposals about Hungary’s 365

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

frontiers; to accept Trianon ‘if that is what the Russians propose’; and, equally, to accept any changes in Trianon ‘if this is suggested by the Russians.’ In return, commented Nigel Ronald, Russia could expect no say whatever in fixing the frontiers of Italy. Sa’rgent’s logic was, as usual, ruthless. Noting that Britain had affixed its signature to the armistice terms which the Soviet Union had dictated to Romania a year earlier and which promised the return of the Transylva¬ nian areas which Hitler had ‘awarded’ to Hungary in 1940, he did not see how this implicit commitment could be changed, nor how Britain could gain from supporting Hungary’s claims: The only argument I can see for going back on our undertaking in the armistice would be that we felt that Rumania was no longer an independent country but merely an appendage to the Soviet Union and that it was therefore to our advantage to reduce the size of the country as much as possible. This argument would only hold good, however, if we were certain that Hungary, unlike Rumania, was going to be able to maintain her independence and that it was therefore worthwhile increasing her territory and strengthening her position at the expense of Rumania. But we may be fairly certain that if the Russians decided to give large tracts °f Transylvania to Hungary it will be precisely because they think that Hungary will be as effectively under their control as Rumania and that as a satellite she will be of more value than Rumania and therefore more worthy of Russia’s favours. At the Peace Conference in Paris in 1946 it was decided not to support the American proposal to return some small Transylvanian districts to Hungary on the grounds of the futility of opposing the Soviet Union over such a matter.13 What follows is a survey of British policy towards some east European countries in 1946-7 as the Cold War set in. Each country in the region naturally exhibited its own special features. Even so, the study of a selection of coun¬ tries may add up to a fairly comprehensive picture. In Czechoslovakia the Russians, who liberated most of the

366

Eastern Europe After the War

country from German occupation, allowed democratic pro¬ cesses as they would be understood in the West to be re-established. The exact nature of Soviet policy there can be only conjectural, but the existence of a very strong Communist Party and the profound wish of the country’s president, Benes, for Soviet friendship must have played a considerable part in deciding policy. In addition, American troops occupied parts of western Czechoslovakia in the closing days of the war, though not, to Churchill’s bitter regret, Prague. Later the United States would withdraw its troops from the country only if Soviet forces departed simultaneously, to which Stalin agreed in November 1945.14 In Romania, the Soviet Union had installed a largely Communist government even before the war ended, but were hampered by the sheer lack of support for Communism among the population and by certain other obstacles, includ¬ ing a popular monarchy. In Bulgaria there was a reservoir of native Communism but not as strong a one as in Czecho¬ slovakia. Bulgaria’s progress towards the most slavish imita¬ tion of Soviet-type Communism was always unmistakable and, in a sense, orderly. Yugoslavia presented, as discussed already, the spectacle of a home-grown Communist regime abasing itself before Moscow and so contributing to the Foreign Office’s belief that there was no important Communist anywhere (their rank-and-file supporters were a different matter) who did not give his first loyalty to the Soviet Union. In Turkey, Russia had no foothold, the Turkish Government were determined not to give it one and Britain was determined to support the Turkish Government.

II Czechoslovakia When Sir Philip Nichols was appointed first British Ambas¬ sador to the Czechoslovak Government during the war (pre-war relations having been at legation level) it was presumably known that an envoy had been chosen with a fey streak which matched that of the Czech President, Benes, himself. Nichols certainly showed this after he took up residence in Prague in 1945, consistently displaying

367

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optimism about Czechoslovakia’s.^ chances of escaping Communist rule. Probably the choice of Ambassador was a wise one. Even without hindsight the odds against demo¬ cracy in Czechoslovakia after the war were formidable and Britain’s scope for improving the situation was extremely restricted. It was not only that any form of political interven¬ tion was totally ruled out. Although Nichols was characteris¬ tically convinced that Czechoslovakia’s economic links with the West were predominant and irreversible, the Board of Trade in London would do nothing to ensure this by offering that country favourable terms of trade. In the spring of 1946 the Foreign Office were to be reduced to looking for some ‘suitable British publicist to lecture in Czechoslovakia before the elections on British democracy and Parliamentary pro¬ cedure’.15 It would have been all too easy for a British Ambassador to feel despair. In fact, however, despair was the last thing evident in Nichols’s report for 1945 written at the end of that year. In accordance with an agreement which Benes had made with the Czech Communists in Moscow in February, a coalition Government had been set up with several Communist ministers, and the Soviet Union, despite its recent military withdrawal, had shown its teeth by forcing Czechoslovakia to surrender its easternmost province, SubCarpathian Ruthenia, following a ‘softening up’ process (see above, pp. 192-3). (Another report described how the Red Army had retained a toe-hold at the spa town of Karlovy Vary which they had Russified so far as they could and where the British diplomat who wrote the report in 1946 found ‘a Russian general drinking the waters, looking, I should think, much the same as his counterpart would have done in 1910, engaged on a similar attempt to banish the troubles of the liver’. Soviet imperialism appears to have had a medicinal dimension.) In his report the Ambassador saw the Communists as having passed their peak: ‘The Czechs and Slovaks are reverting rapidly to type - to the type of dour, possessive, practical peasants, or petits bourgeois - and they have no fancy to adjust their standards to those which prevailed amongst the occupying Soviet forces.’ Most cadres stood out as ‘untrained, unintelligent, unprincipled and 368

Eastern Europe After the War

discredited’; the better ones would in many cases have great scruples about resorting to force. As for the Soviet Union: ‘I have reported before, and emphasise here again, that, apart from the pressure she must have exerted to obtain the cession of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, Russia has, so far as I am aware, taken no high-level action in this country since its liberation incompatible with its independence and sovereignty.’16 Three months later, as campaigning got under way for elections due on 26 May, Nichols admitted that the nonCommunist parties were not all that they could be. They refused to sink their differences or to use evidence of Communist dirty tricks. They were determined to preserve the coalition form of government whatever the election results so that the Communists would have to share respon¬ sibility for ‘the hard times ahead and, secondly, they would be an insupportable source of trouble and disorder if they were in opposition’. Hence the non-Communists did not want them to be ‘crushed and humiliated’. (Nichols himself sent consistently low estimates of the likely Communist share of the vote.)17 Warner felt that if the proposals in his memorandum on resisting Soviet moves against Britain (see above, pp. 255-9) were adopted, Czechoslovakia was the country where action was most imperatively required in view of the ‘appeasement’ mentality of the non-Communist parties. Nichols visited London in April and asked the Foreign Office not to instruct him to urge the non-Communists to adopt truculent attitudes towards the Communists. That would not accord with the Czech political style and might reverse the existing trend which was ‘in the right direction’ of not allowing the Communists ‘to increase their present somewhat precarious hold’. On returning to Prague Nichols was asked by Benes to send Bevin a personal message that he could rest assured that the election results would contain no disagreeable surprises. The Foreign Office were not very impressed by all this and drew up a letter for the Ambassador about the nature of the anti-Communist ‘counter-offensive’ which they were considering, and which would, apparently, largely consist of exhortations to non-Communists to stand up and

369

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be counted. Nichols was to be advised that Britain felt obliged to take a close interest in Czechoslovak politics: ... because in the last six months it has become apparent that the Communists all over Europe (and in fact elsewhere) are conducting a virulent campaign against us and against our interests, evidently on orders from Moscow, and we therefore feel that in order to protect our interests we must begin to encourage our friends to stand up for themselves. Specifically, the Czechs should be advised of the dangers to ‘the civil liberties of the people’ of having a ‘totalitarian’ as minister of the interior; and that their natural desire for friendly relations with the Soviet Union did not need to extend to ‘adopting a knock-kneed policy with their own Communists unless of course the latter really secure major¬ ity control’.18 Dispatch of this letter was suspended in view of the ‘unexpected’, as Hankey put it, results of the Czech elections in which the Communist Party polled 38 per cent of the votes and the Marxist and, in part, fellow-travelling Social Democrats a further 12 per cent. Hankey’s first reaction was that this ‘should be a lesson to other democrats not to be so fat-headed as to leave Communists in control of the Ministry of Interior, Police and Propaganda’. This impression must have been dispelled by the report which Nichols sent a few days later in which he wrote that British embassy and consular officials who had been at pains to observe the elections had to concede that ‘they were free and were conducted with order and decency’. He went on to make the staggering comment that the results were ‘not so bad’; even with the Social Democrats the Communists were still three seats short of an overall majority in the 300-member parlia¬ ment, and many had voted Communist not out of conviction but because they thought that it was in their own material interest. (Nichols evidently thought that it was abnormal for a political party to win support on that basis.) The Czechs and Slovaks were so ‘individualistic’ that they were bound to ‘slowly return to the tradition of Masaryk’ if spared outside interference. Even more staggering, in calling on Benes 370

Eastern Europe After the War

two days after the election for the dual purpose of con¬ gratulating him on his birthday and consoling him on the election results, Nichols, representative of the country which had engineered the Munich Agreement of 1938, ‘thought it right to inform the President that his country could rely in the future as in the past upon the continued support of His Majesty’s Government’. Hankey thought Nichols ‘horribly optimistic’ and officials in London speculated uneasily on how many in the Social Democratic Party were nearer to the British Labour Party in outlook than to the Communists, with a feeling that all such speculation was a waste of time.19 Coalition government continued after the election, but the Communists insisted on a reshaping of the Cabinet, includ¬ ing their leader, Gottwald, as Prime Minister, which gave them considerably more than 38 per cent of governmental authority. Warr, a junior official specialising on Czecho¬ slovakia, wrote that they now held five of the seven minis¬ tries which mattered and that the holder of one of the remaining two was guilty of ‘rather pro-Russian pro¬ nouncements’. The situation was ‘bad’ but not ‘hopeless’. The ‘moderate elements’ were ‘very feeble’ but might perhaps ‘pluck up courage’.20 It was obvious by this time that Czechoslovakia’s chances of escaping Communism depended almost entirely on the Soviet Union continuing the unique restraint which it had shown towards that country. This was emphasised to Bevin and Sargent by the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, when he visited London in June. He told Sargent that the fate of Czechoslovakia ‘depended on whether or not the Western powers were able to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union. If there was no agreement, Czechoslovakia would inevitably be sucked into the Soviet orbit.’ The next month Masaryk visited Moscow where, according to Nichols, he ‘saw a lot of Stalin’, who was very reassuring even when he ‘made it plain to the Czechs that he would expect purely Slav questions to be settled by the Slavs themselves, leaving it to be understood that Russia, as the largest Slav power, would have the largest say’. He gave the frontier dispute with Poland over the ownership of the Teschen area as an example of a ‘purely Slav question’. It 371

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

was also one in which the Soviet Union had found in favour of Czechoslovakia.21 If Stalin and Masaryk found one another pleasing, the Foreign Office became less enchanted with the Czech Foreign Minister as his public support for Soviet foreign policy, not only in ‘Slav questions’, particularly at the Paris Peace Conference, became steadily more vehement and anti-Western, so that Hankey and Warr came to feel that it would be less offensive to Britain if he were replaced by an avowed Communist. In Czechoslovakia itself, in the autumn, Britain launched a rather pathetic cultural drive in Prague, consisting of the showing of British films and the visit of a theatre company, in an effort to make the Czechs ‘pluck up courage . The embassy in Prague sent in a mixture of favourable reports about a stronger spirit among anti¬ communists and disturbing ones about the health of Benes, which were considered important enough to pass on to the Cabinet Office for Attlee’s personal perusal, and in which Nichols admitted that if the President’s poor health gave way altogether, it would be ‘a disaster of the first magnitude’. No possible successor could command the same respect and Czechoslovakia might finally ‘slip behind the Iron Curtain’.22 The next year was a comparatively uneventful one to British observers before the storm of the Communist coup in February 1948. The normally optimistic Nichols had reverted to form by January 1947 when he wrote: ‘There’s [s7c] no question but that the early fears of a restriction on democracy engendered by the Communist gains at the May elections have not been justified and democracy is fighting a winning battle.’ In late February Warner wrote to ask Nichols whether there was any possibility of ‘opposing Muscovite-Nationalist clashes inside’ the Czech Communist Party and whether some Communists could be convinced that their Czech or Slovak patriotism was incompatible with loyalty to the Soviet Union. The Ambassador had to reply that he did not know of a single Communist in a position to influence the basic party policy who has not served a long apprenticeship and proved his loyalty to Moscow’. How¬ ever, there had so far been no crisis to test the loyalties of Party members, the Soviet annexation of Sub-Carpathian 372

Eastern Europe After the War Ruthenia in 1945 having been accepted by the Czech people in general.23 In July the Soviet Union forced the Czechoslovak Government to reject Marshall’s offer of aid, which many Czech Communists had wished to accept. Nichols reported that this had not produced any real revulsion against Com¬ munism or the Soviet Union either. Public opinion accepted that Moscow could not be defied on a major foreign-policy issue. He continued: ‘The Czechs are a deeply patriotic people and genuinely devoted, in my view, to the cause of democratic freedom, but the idea of fighting against hope¬ less odds is alien to their nature.’ He concluded that the episode merely served to reaffirm the truth that if the division of Europe between Russia and the West became complete Czechoslovakia was certain to become wholly Communist. Meanwhile Britain should ‘cultivate and nour¬ ish’ economic and cultural links with the country and should encourage the United States to do likewise. An official wrote that he assumed that it was British policy to do that since otherwise ‘we shall soon find ourselves fighting [sic] uncomfortably nearer home’. The Foreign Office regretted that American policy had veered to a position where Czechoslovakia was regarded as being wholly in the Soviet orbit, but felt that ‘in the present temper of American feeling towards Russia’ it was not worth while ‘to run any risk of appearing to advocate appeasement of the satellite countries’.24 With the founding of the Cominform in October with the Czech Party as a full member, though the non-ruling French and Italian Parties were also included, the Northern Department of the Foreign Office saw it as an ‘obvious deduction’ ... that steps will now be taken to complete the communization of Czechoslovakia and presumably also of Hungary, and to complete the liquidation of opposi¬ tion groups within the Soviet orbit. Enormous progress with this has been made in the last year and the time may well seem ripe for further advances now that the situation is so far consolidated within the orbit. 373

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This obvious deduction’ made by Robin Hankey was in fact perfectly correct. The Czech Party, almost certainly spurred on by the Soviet Union, knew that it stood almost no chance of winning 51 per cent of the votes — its avowed aim — in fresh elections due in 1'948 and was dismayed by defeats for the fellow-travelling element in the Social Democrats. It began preparations for a coup which was to be carried out, in complex circumstances, the next February.25 If anything the coup came a little later than expected. Some officials philosophised about the reasons for Czecho¬ slovakia s complete submission to Communism before it had actually happened. Anthony Meyer, writing on 23 December 1947, had some of the Christmas spirit of good¬ will in him; since Munich, he explained, the Czechs had looked east for security and west for cultural inspiration. This had produced marked indecisiveness within the politi¬ cal parties other than the Communists. Another official, writing shortly before the coup, was more savage: ‘The basic trouble is that the Czechs - or too many of them - are what Dr Benes calls “calculators”; they are a nation of shop¬ keepers and lacking in guts.’26

Ill Romania Stalin and the British had both somewhat altered their attitudes to Romania by the end of the war. The coup of August 1944, by which some Romanians, including the King, overthrew Antonescu’s fascist Government and suc¬ cessfully held most of the country against German attack while the Red Army poured in troops, caused this change. It was a sign of the sincerity with which the British regarded Hitlers defeat as the overriding priority that they always held this episode in King Michael’s favour, despite the fact that it resulted in Soviet domination of much of the Balkans at relatively small cost (see above, pp. 215-16). It may be impossible to ascribe gratitude to Stalin, but, even so puffmg calmiy away on his pipe’, he told his impatient and politically naive generals in late 1944 that he had no intention of abolishing the Romanian monarchy for some 374

Eastern Europe After the War

time to come.27 Stalin recognised the King’s popularity and perhaps misjudged that he could be transformed into an obedient puppet. Generally, Stalin’s policy towards Romania was conciliatory; in particular he promised to restore all the Transylvanian districts which Hitler had given to Hungary, a promise which was to be kept. There seemed a possibility that Stalin would allow Romania a measure of genuine freedom, instead of imposing Soviet-controlled Communism after the bloody conquest of the country, the outcome expected by the Foreign Office before the August 1944 coup and probably planned by the Russians them¬ selves.28 In March 1945 Stalin sent Vyshinsky to Bucharest to force the King to install a Communist-dominated government of Party members and fellow-travellers, with an opportunistic lawyer, Groza, as Prime Minister. The Peasant Party of Maniu and the National Liberals led by Bratianu, who undoubtedly represented most of the Romanian people, were excluded, but for nearly three years Moscow refrained from ordaining a one-party ‘people’s republic’ in Romania. In the case of Britain, it took time for the wartime attitude of special indifference to Romania to be replaced by one of no more and no less indifference to the fate of that country than to that of the rest of eastern Europe dubiously ‘liber¬ ated’ by the Soviet army. Churchill in particular readily conceded 90 per cent (i.e. total) control there to Stalin in the abortive percentile deal of October 1944 which, of course, came after the anti-German coup in Bucharest. He con¬ tinued for some time afterwards to insist that ‘late Rumanian enemies’ should be ‘largely ignored’ in the hope that Stalin would make concessions in Poland. He also felt that Stalin’s keeping to his side of the bargain in Greece dictated British self-effacement in Romania, as Stalin at Potsdam indicated that he would expect.29 It soon became clear that Stalin was determined to deny Poland every vestige of political freedom, while the British general election consigned Churchill, with his special con¬ cern for the Poles which was in any case waning because of the Oder-Neisse frontier issue, into opposition. The way then became open for a measure of British interest in 375

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Romanian affairs, especially as that corresponded with what the Americans were doing in the expectation of British support.30 At the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in December 1945 Bevin supported Byrnes’s demand for a joint effort of the two'countries and of the Soviet Union to establish conditions of political freedom in both Romania and Bulgaria and rectify abuses which were doubtless purely the work of low-ranking Soviet officials. The British and American Ambassadors in Moscow, Clark Kerr and Harriman, visited Bucharest in the new year to find the Romanian Government of Groza and his Deputy Prime Minister, Tatarescu, and its Soviet backers unwilling to do anything except tell barefaced lies. Clark Kerr reported his repug¬ nance at having to deal with ‘a pair of uncommon rogues (one of whom is desperate)’ - clearly a reference to Tatarescu who was intelligent but told ‘cascades of lies’ and was ‘steeped to the lips in deceit and treachery’, while Groza was ‘a genial fool’. The Ambassador spoke of his personal disillusion with his earlier belief that fair dealing and good faith would work in dealing with the Soviet Government if practised for long enough. Clark Kerr must have felt ready for his transfer from Moscow to Washington which took place later that year. Having had ‘a peep, as it were, under the skirts’ of Soviet policy, ‘I am somewhat shaken’.31 In the Foreign Office officials still hoped that the sheer lack of support, as they believed, for Communism in Romania would impel the Russians to allow relatively free elections and insist on total subservience only in foreign policy. In the meantime, Britain and the United States had a weapon of some potency in their ability to withhold their signatures from the peace treaty with Romania when it was eventually negotiated. It was known that the Soviet Union, and there¬ fore also its puppets in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, attached great importance to the Western powers signing these treaties. Although Britain and the United States recognised the Groza Government in February 1946, despite the adverse views about it of the two Ambassadors’ the British decided to refuse to sign any treaty unless elections were held beforehand, giving the Communists a reason for allowing at least some measure of free voting.32 376

Eastern Europe After the War

Unfortunately, during the long-drawn-out ‘campaign’ before elections were held in November, there was little sign that there would be anything free about them. The Foreign Office thought that the attitude of inypotent outrage adopted by Maniu, Bratianu and other leading non-Communists was not the most useful or sensible one possible. Perhaps they were rationalising their own unwillingness and inability to do anything. Increasingly, they concentrated on the King as the one outstanding figure in the country. They were impressed by what Adrian Holman, the British Political Representative in Bucharest, called ‘the King’s character and strong sense of duty’. But, in March 1946, he went on to add: ‘However, it appeared his advisers were giving him nothing but gloom.’ In fact, the King’s policy seems to have been to stay on and do what little he could to protect the interests of the majority of his subjects who were not Communists. He endured petty humiliations and did not flinch at the risk to his life. It was also in March that he told Air Vice-Marshal Stevenson of the RAF, who was visiting Bucharest, that he believed a report that a few months earlier the Russians had planned his assassination, making some Communist Romanian soldiers draw lots for one of them to kill him. The one so chosen had committed suicide, leaving a note which revealed the plot. Moscow had then called it off and, as a precaution, had ordered the death of the Soviet colonel who had been in charge of the plan and who had been living with a Romanian girl with whom he presumably might have been too talkative. The colonel had met his fate when his car was bombarded with hand-grenades in January. Steward of the British mission in Bucharest said that the mission was inclined to accept the story. The colonel, one Nekrashevitch, had been buried with military honours, but the Soviet authorities had otherwise made no fuss about his death or any serious effort to arrest his killers: ‘This struck us at the time as unusual.’ Yet more confirmation came from the American State Department, who gave their report on the episode to the Foreign Office. (More delicate in language than the British report, the American one said that the colonel had ‘formed a close friendship’ with the Romanian female.) Apart from this entirely credible episode, the King, the Queen Mother 377

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

and the royal household were being given inadequate provi¬ sions and were denied regular servicing facilities for their cars so that the vehicles often broke down on the road and the King had to wait while repairs were carried out.33 (Concerning cars, it is indicative of the sort of men that Russia had chosen as the new rulers of Romania that Groza tried to do a deal with Holman to use state funds to buy the latter’s private Rolls-Royce. Corruption was immemorial in Romanian public life, but this was exceptionally brazen. He declined the offer with the feeling that he had succeeded only too well in his aim in taking the car with him that it would be ‘excellent propaganda’ for Britain.)34 The Foreign Office became anxious to obtain a commit¬ ment from the British Government to offer asylum to King Michael if he was finally driven out and to make it clear to the Soviet Government that a very serious view would be taken if he died, ‘accidentally’ or otherwise. Herbert Morri¬ son, a future Foreign Secretary, raised objections, fore¬ shadowing his later lamentable relationship with the Foreign Office. The officials persevered in explaining to Cabinet ministers and indeed to their own monarch that King Michael’s war record ‘alone’ entitled him to such help, and that he would perform much better his role as ‘one of the principal bulwarks against complete Communist domina¬ tion’ of his country if he knew that the British were trying to preserve his life and that of the Queen Mother and were ready to give them a new home if necessary.35 In the middle of the year the King felt compelled to sign a new electoral law which gave the Government ample scope for ‘arranging’ the results. (Holman felt that the King had displayed ‘political sense and suppleness of mind’.) The elections when held were characterised, according to a report from the British mission in Bucharest, by the already familiar east European pattern of intimidation, threats of dismissal to government employees, multi-voting by Communists and disfranchisement of known opponents. In the end the actual ballot papers were simply disregarded and the Communist-inspired Bloc of Democratic Parties was declared to have won 90 per cent of the seats. For months Maniu, Bratianu and the rest of the non-Communists 378

Eastern Europe After the War

indulged in loud wailing which showed that freedom was not totally dead in Romania, but which the British found irritating and futile. They preferred the King’s readiness to do what he could within the new system, and by this time late 1946 - there seems to have been no idea of refusing to sign the peace treaty because of the shameless falsifying of the election results.36 During the early months of 1947 the Communists in Romania did little to tighten their already firm degree of control. A report from the British mission wondered whether their dismal showing in the real (as opposed to falsified) election results had given the Soviet Government real pause for thought. The Russians were exploiting the Romanian economy ruthlessly, whereas in Bulgaria they were actually giving some economic aid, which might be taken as meaning that they had given up hope of imposing an orthodox Communist regime and were contenting them¬ selves with pure plundering. In May 1947 John Colville was still writing that Soviet ‘economic demands in Rumania have also been such as to bring the country over the edge of starvation and to destroy any possibility of an early economic revival’.37 The British could not think of any way of reinforcing this possible Soviet reluctance to consolidate in Romania. It was not merely that they were unwilling to do more than make gestures, they were unwilling to go even so far as that. In March 1947 Colville cited evidence that there might soon be a show-trial in the country and wondered whether Britain should seek United States support for a joint protest as ‘a last gesture, if for no better purpose than to go on record’ before the Allied Control Commission was withdrawn following the signature of the Romanian peace treaty. Opinion was against such an action on the grounds that it would merely show Britain’s weakness. At the same time officials expressed hearty approval of the categorical rejec¬ tion by the State Department of a plea from Romanian non-Communists for help in launching a coup against the regime. It was felt that it would be disastrous if the Com¬ munists had genuine evidence of Anglo-American inter¬ ference in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, though that 379

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

was, of course, what they incessantly complained about in their propaganda.38 Two facets of what there was of British relations with Romania during the last year before the abolition of the monarchy are of some interest. The first was an attempt by Denis Healey, then secretary of the international section of the Labour Party research department, to make a mark on British policy there through his relations with junior Foreign Office ministers, notably Christopher Mayhew and Hector McNeil. At the end of 1946 Healey urged on Mayhew strong British support for the Social Democratic Party and not for ‘the Maniu and Bratianu gang’ of opponents of Communism in Romania whose corrupt pre-war antics were such that the ‘average Rumanian workman’ could, Healey said, have no faith in them. He renewed his plea the next March. Colville gave an interview to a Romanian Social Democratic politi¬ cian who visited London that month but still thought Healey’s advice odd since all the evidence indicated that the Social Democrats represented only ‘a very small portion of the community in Rumania’, having no support among the rural masses of that agrarian state.39 Healey was nevertheless persona grata on the fringes of the Foreign Office, and at the end of the year McNeil suggested an important job for him: the production of ‘a small pamphlet’ showing ‘the contradictions between Stalin’s statements’. He continued: ‘It always involves the Communists in explanation. I always feel that it is useful to arm the ordinary British socialist in the factory with simple stuff to show that Stalin is no more infallible than the Pope and much less consistent.’ This would have been a successor to Healey’s recent pamphlet ‘Cards on the Table’, a notable popular defence of Bevin’s foreign policy for moderate left-wing consumption.40 Secondly, in the autumn of 1947, despite adverse developments such as the ‘election’ by Healey’s cherished Social Democrats of a central committee consisting wholly of fellow-travellers, which caused J.H. Watson to write that the struggle is lost in Rumania’, the Foreign Office did bestir themselves to foil a possible plot to depose King Michael. They had evidence that Anna Pauker, the 380

Eastern Europe After the War

Communist Foreign Minister, had written to Michael’s father, the utterly discredited former King Carol, in exile in Portugal, inviting him to return as King with Michael reverting to Crown Prince (repeating a manoeuvre of 1930 when Michael had been a small child). With supreme folly Carol seemed likely to accept. The Foreign Office instructed the British Ambassador in Lisbon to ask the Portuguese to use every method to keep Carol where he was, explaining: King Michael has shown great courage and skill in dealing with a difficult situation and it is the monarchy which is now the main obstacle to communisation of Rumania: Carol’s return in collusion with Communists is clearly designed by latter to discredit monarchy by getting rid of Michael. Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, obliged by putting Carol under close police surveillance and the episode ended.41 This was an unusual burst of activity. At the end of November Warner told Flolman in Bucharest that ‘Question whether it would be right, expedient and any use to encour¬ age resistance to Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in our propaganda is under active consideration at the moment.’ This indicated a belief that there was plenty of time, whereas there was not. Holman had more sense of urgency. Before going on leave in mid-December he had an interview with Anna Pauker in which she astonished him by treating him as a friendly acquaintance, inviting him and his wife to dine with her when they came back. ‘All this is a little surprising coming from a Communist of the East to a Democrat of the West.’ However, she was unforthcoming about the future of the monarchy, which was very much on Holman’s mind since, as a guest at the recent wedding of Princess Elizabeth in London, Michael had met another princess whom he wished to marry, raising for the Romanian regime the prospect of a continuation of the dynasty: I pressed her very hard as to her conception of a monarchy in a Communist state, but she absolutely refused to be drawn and rather took the line that if one looked round the countries of Europe such as Spain, 381

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Germany and Great Britain, there was no hard and fast rule based on the regime as to where monarchies existed.42 The King returned to his capital before Christmas, only to be deposed a week later. He was allowed to go into exile in return for signing an abdication statement couched in what he must have found very distasteful terms. Romania was proclaimed a people’s republic. IV Bulgaria Bulgaria was perhaps the classic case of the establishment of a ‘people’s democracy’. Not only was there a Russophile tradition and a fairly strong Communist Party (though one which had been at its strongest during the 1920s and had since declined) to build upon,43 but in addition, the Bul¬ garian Communist leaders were especially ruthless and indeed barbaric, as was symbolised in 1947 by the contrast between the execution of the leading Bulgarian nonCommunist, Petkov, and the sentence only of imprisonment imposed on his Romanian counterpart, Maniu. It is not surprising that British diplomats came to see events in Bulgaria as a microcosm of the Sovietisation of eastern Europe. After the armistice of September 1944 (see above, p. 216) the Communists set up a front body, the Fatherland Front, which at first claimed only a part-share in the Government but later, with the bayonets of the Soviet army to support it, enforced a monopoly of Communists and fellow-travellers in ministerial posts. The Moscow agreement of December 1945 to reorganise the governments in Romania and Bul¬ garia was no more successful in the latter than in the former. Indeed, the Bulgarian regime’s readiness to resort to intimi¬ dation and terror was so pronounced that British and American recognition of the Groza Government in early 1946 was not accompanied by any like step in Bulgaria, though the Americans were more insistent on making such a stand than were the British. As in Romania, the Foreign Office saw their one card as lying in the Soviet Union’s very 382

Eastern Europe After the War

strong, though not wholly comprehensible, wish for Western signatures on the peace treaty. Unlike Romania, however, they thought that any genuine non-Communists who might be taken into the Government would be unceremoniously ousted as soon as the ink was dry on the treaty.44 ‘Elections’ in Bulgaria were not so delayed as in Romania and in March 1946 the British Political Representative in Sofia, W.E. Houstoun-Boswall, drew up a report on their ‘arranging’ at the request not of the Foreign Office but of the British Ambassador in Warsaw, Cavendish-Bentinck. Boswall drew attention firstly to the Communist insistence on forming a bloc or front with some of the other parties or sections of parties. A majority could be claimed for such a bloc whereas ‘the Communist Party would merely appear ridiculous if it claimed a majority for itself’ alone. Secondly, from the beginning the Communists had insisted on holding the ministries of Justice and Interior. Thirdly, there had been great reliance on opportunists: In developing their control of the governmental coali¬ tion, which for the first few months after the coup d’etat had been a genuine alliance, the Communists drove the main body of the Agrarian and Social Democratic parties into opposition, and substituted for them in the coalition a minority of careerists and crypto¬ communists. The standing of the latter was shown by the circulations of their papers and those of the opposition: 25,000 against 172,000 and a good many of those 25,000 were compulsory subscriptions from libraries and so on. Fourthly, the opposi¬ tion parties and their publications were constantly subjected to harassment, which had led them to boycott the first post-war elections in 1945. Those ‘elections’ had therefore turned on how many people actually went to vote, with instructive results; voting had been 76 per cent in rural areas and only 62 per cent in urban. In so far as the Fatherland Front had support it was naturally greatest in the towns among the urban workers; there were very few if any big landowners in Bulgaria, a country of peasant proprietors. However, the Communists had had free rein for intimidation 383

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

in the country but not in the towns where Western observers were sometimes present. Voting in the army had been on the lines of a military exercise with 100 per cent support for the regime. All this struck both John Galsworthy in the Foreign Office and Cavendish-Bentinck in Warsaw with the similarities between what was happening in Bulgaria and in Poland, at opposite geographical ends of eastern Europe. CavendishBentinck wrote to Hankey: If I were asked to forecast the Polish elections of 1946, unless conditions change here, all I need do would be to take Houstoun-Boswall’s memorandum and change the words ‘Bulgaria’ and ‘Bulgarian’ to ‘Poland’ and ‘Polish’, and one or two other Bulgarian designations where they occur, and send you Houstoun-Boswall’s memorandum. M.S. Williams wondered precisely what Britain could do to ‘secure the formation of a government not wholly tied to the Russians ... to achieve our objective of building Bulgaria up into a moderately independent buffer state’. The Office found no magic formula and had to watch as persecution of opposition elements intensified, despite a further election in which the opposition parties, this time participating, were ‘allowed’ to poll a million votes. The Government showed no regard for legality. It not only ‘fixed’ a plebiscite in August 1946 on whether to abolish the monarchy but passed legislation based on a republican form of state even before the plebiscite. Boswall had got the message that his Government were unwilling to do much in the way even of verbal protest, but still wrote at length about the regime’s misdeeds because he wanted the British Government to ‘know that here there is no freedom for the press, there is no freedom of speech, there is no freedom of assembly and there is no liberty at all’.45 British recognition of the Bulgarian Government was being held up only by the attitude of the United States, and officials in London were somewhat annoyed by the strident tone of their political representative and of the head of the British element in the Allied Control Commission in 384

Eastern Europe After the War

Bulgaria, General Oxley. The British attitude, as in Romania, was not one of pure indifference but of an unwillingness to create a crisis with the Soviet Union over events in those countries, and to s>ee what little could be done by polite persuasion. It took the appearance in Sofia of posters libelling Churchill, somewhat on the lines of the famous Nazi poster in which he was depicted as a gangster with a sub-machine-gun, and, later, the outstanding courage and dignity of the Peasant Party leader, Petkov, when faced with the likelihood of his own judicial murder, to do something to alter this mood.46 By early 1947 some officials at home were beginning to have qualms that Britain should have dealings with a regime like the Bulgarian. Colville wrote in January that the Bulgarian Government ‘makes use of torture as a method of interrogation, maintains concentration camps and is in general the most barbaric of all the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe’. Despite this he did not see how Britain could refuse it formal, de jure recognition since the British Government had every intention of signing a peace treaty with it, and because if recognition was denied on the grounds that the Bulgarian was ‘a government of terrorists and thugs’, similar arguments could be used in the case of Romania and Spain. The next month an abortive decision was taken to try to win influence in Bulgaria by dropping complaints relating to the falsifying of elections and by trying to increase cultural and trade links.47 Moral indignation would have been in that way set aside. In fact, the February decision was never put into practice because Bulgaria offered such manifestly unfruitful soil for the cultivation of normal, civilised relations. Some insensitiv¬ ity still remained. Bevin himself, in May 1947, showed a readiness to believe Bulgarian Communist slanders against the opposition elements whom they were suppressing. He noticed a report from Sofia about allegations in the official Bulgarian press that the opposition press was inciting the peasants not to deliver food to the towns, and took the infrequent step of writing a minute: I cannot encourage opposition Press encouraging non385

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

delivery of food. Enquire whether this is correct. The food situation is so serious in Europe. I feel that opposition Press should not resort to this method. I am in favour of freedom.of Press but not to use it to impose starvation. All this was misguided and naive in the extreme. Williams commented that a careful investigation showed that the regime’s mouthpieces had distorted some perfectly fair comments on the undoubted shortage of food in Bulgaria. He urged that the British Government should protest against such lies under Article 2 of the recently-signed peace treaty in which Bulgaria pledged itself to respect ‘human rights’: ‘In fact, we shall have to rely on this article and similar articles in the other treaties for such influence as we can bring to prevent the governments concerned from suppressing all freedom.’ He added that the Americans were seeking joint action on this with the Russians and the British in Sofia, but that ‘the Soviet minister displayed little interest and stated that it was a Bulgarian internal affair’. The new British envoy in Bulgaria, John Sterndale Bennett, made a similar plea to that of Williams.48 For months Bennett and officials in London concerned with Bulgaria continued to argue against any revival of the February decision to seek normal relations with the Bul¬ garian Government on the grounds that the sheer nastiness of its actions must dictate a different course, accepting that this would have repercussions in regard to the other satellite states. In June J.H. Watson commented contemptuously on a split within the fellow-travelling splinter of the Agrarian Party in the Fatherland Front: ‘These facade parties are a characteristic of satellite governments; and there always seem to be bitter fights for the position of jackal-in-chief which perhaps makes, it look nice and democratic.’ He suggested that British newspapers should be encouraged to draw attention to the unseemly goings-on in Bulgaria, including the current suppression of the opposition press which might be expected to arouse their interest and sym¬ pathy. Bennett warned that time was running out in that the entire structure of the opposition parties was crumbling in 386

Eastern Europe After the War

the face of the regime’s assault against them and that their leaders were becoming dispirited. He realised that Britain and the United States could not radically alter their existing policy of ‘striving by publicity and action in the United Nations’ to get ‘general acceptance’ of the human rights clauses in the peace treaties. He pleaded only that these efforts should be increased and the opposition given more moral support. Then, after Russian troops were withdrawn, there might be some chance of the opposition recovering ground.49 In a memorandum in July with the consciously Gladstonian title ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’ Colville recorded that the Southern Department had been considering how best Britain could show publicly its ‘horror’ at the ‘bestial’ developments in Bulgaria, the latest of which was the arrest of Petkov, to face capital charges of working for AngloAmerican imperialism. His proposals were weak in the light of the remarks which had prefaced them. He saw a British veto on Bulgarian United Nations membership as the most potent weapon, but thought that that should be used only if Russia vetoed the entry of a Western candidate such as Italy. If Bulgaria had to be admitted, the British delegation in the General Assembly should merely ‘make it clear that we were greatly perturbed by the methods which the Bulgarian Government employs’. British action should be independent of the United States ‘with the idea of reasserting British moral leadership in such matters’.50 A more immediate issue arose when Petkov was sen¬ tenced to death. Britain and the United States publicly protested against the sentence and against the preposterous charges levelled against him. While Petkov was in the condemned cell, Roberts in Moscow questioned the wisdom of the diplomacy of public protests and exhortations which the Foreign Office had subscribed to in this case. His view was that the Soviet and Bulgarian Governments had been left with little choice but to execute him or suffer a serious loss of face: ‘I realise, of course, that this argument to some extent breaks down if we are concerned not only with saving Petkov’s life but also with demonstrating to world public opinion the forces we are up against in Eastern Europe.’ 387

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Even so, he hoped that there would be a different approach if the next victim was Mikolajczyk in Poland, for whom ‘we have a greater moral responsibility ... than we ever had for Petkov’. Mikolajczyk was actually destined to escape to safety in the West, but Petkov was executed in September, with the Bulgarian Communist leader, Dimitrov, claiming that he might have been spared but for Anglo-American protests which constituted interference in Bulgaria’s internal affairs - an exceptionally disgusting assertion in view of the well-known fact that only international protest had saved Dimitrov from being executed by the Nazis over the Reich¬ stag fire affair in 1933.51 In that summer Watson took time off from considering the tactics of seeking some sort of diplomatic voice for Britain in Bulgaria to wonder whether it made any real sense to take an interest in that country. It was small and unimportant, both in global terms and in those of British foreign policy concerns. There was no trade between the two countries and no possibility that significant economic links could be forged. He felt that such facts should not prevail: We are not supporting the Opposition as such. We are supporting certain principles. The question is whether we are right in doing so and in trying to propagate our own ideas of democracy. If what is going on in Bulgaria were confined to Bulgaria, there might be some hesitation in replying affirmatively to this question; but parallel action in other countries shows this to be a concerted plan to consolidate the Slav bloc on a Communist basis. It may be said that even this is none of our business. But it is. Communism is militant and in Bulgaria is allied to irredentism. What is being done in Bulgaria today is laying the foundations of future strife, internal and external.52 V Yugoslavia Bulgaria and Yugoslavia connected in the Foreign Office mind of the immediate post-war years in the sense that their 388

Eastern Europe After the War

territories included much of the area of the possible Macedonian state which the British dreaded because of the certainty that it would claim part of northern Greece. In July 1946 the Cabinet noted that the Soviet Union appeared to be working towards a Balkan federation in which a separate Macedonia would be one of the units.53 With hindsight it can be seen that in so far as Stalin did toy with such an idea his concern was not so much with Greece as with the incorpora¬ tion of Yugoslavia into his satellite empire with more solid bonds than the largely ideological ones which had caused Tito to orient his regime so emphatically towards Moscow as soon as the defeat of the Germans in the greater part of Yugoslavia allowed it to assume the normal form of a state in late 1944. In 1946-7 British officials could not conceive that the Soviet dictator might be dissatisfied with the degree of allegiance which he was receiving from Belgrade. How¬ ever, whereas the United States tended to regard Tito with special and unique abhorrence and periodically urged Britain to adopt the same attitude, the Foreign Office favoured, as an act of faith, making small conciliatory gestures to Yugoslavia, despite real anger that Tito was gratuitously biting the hand which had so recently fed him. Besides resentment at ingratitude, there were more seri¬ ous and solid reasons for hostility to Tito’s regime. As the war drew to an end Tito created what the British and Americans regarded as a major threat to peace with his claim to the whole of Venezia Giulia, the area at the head of the Adriatic, most of which Italy had acquired from Austria-Hungary after the First World War, including the great port of Trieste with its largely Italian population. In 1945 Tito ignored all calls against occupation of the area, pending its division between Italy and Yugoslavia at the Peace Conference. Allied troops were able to occupy Trieste itself and a strip of coastal land connecting it with the rest of Italy (see above, pp. 142, 218). Both Truman and Churchill professed to regard the situation as a possible cause for war and were certainly determined to use force to keep the Yugoslavs out of Trieste. Possibly restrained by Stalin, Tito held back and the dispute became semi-dormant until its ultimate solution in very different international circum389

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

stances in 1954.54 The Venezia Giulia crisis had scarcely settled down somewhat before civil war was renewed in Greece. Tito gave the Greek Communists aid and sanctuary and indicated that the surrender by a Communist Greece of ‘Aegean Macedonia’ would be suitable recompense.55 In March 1946 John Colville explained to John Balfour in the Washington embassy the nature of the policy of forbear¬ ance which the Foreign Office wished to practise towards Yugoslavia: We are under no illusions about the present regime in Yugoslavia; indeed the reports which we received from Belgrade make it increasingly clear that none of the principles for which we thought we were fighting the war have any value in Yugoslavia today, and that policy in Belgrade is a faithful reflection of that in Moscow. On the other hand there is at present no conceivable alternative to Tito and we are therefore trying to get along with him as best we can without submitting to blackmail, and without doing anything to help Yugo¬ slavia which would entail a sacrifice of British interests. We realise that there is no point in trying to build up good will as an asset in Yugoslavia today. We do however feel, and it is apparently here that we sometimes part company from the views of the State Department, that it is pointless to continue a war of pinpricks against the Yugoslav Government and that in small ways, which do not cost us anything, we should be as cooperative as possible. Colville concluded that Britain would pursue this policy despite the fact that Yugoslav propaganda was more vit¬ uperative against Britain than against America, presumably because the latter was still seen as a potential source of economic aid. Colville and some of his colleagues had an exasperating experience the following week when Nesic, the head of the British section in the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry, visited London and showed himself utterly suspicious, and, in Colville’s words, ‘brushed aside any protestation of good faith as mere diplomatic graces [sic] which, between friends, 390

Eastern Europe After the War

could be disregarded. Whenever I said that we were genuinely anxious to re-establish friendly relations with Yugoslavia and that we wanted to avoid a policy of pin¬ pricks, he smiled sardonically and showed that he entirely disbelieved it.’ Yet while undergoing this experience Colville wrote that the Foreign Office had persuaded a reluctant Treasury to agree to certain financial steps, ‘which were not strictly orthodox’, to facilitate Anglo-Yugoslav trade, not¬ ably barter arrangements, ‘in view of the political impor¬ tance of keeping the door into Yugoslavia open’. For his pains, the British embassy in Belgrade sent him a collection of anti-British cartoons from the Yugoslav press.56 As anti-British propaganda continued relentlessly, with the most offensive pieces coming from Tito’s right-hand man, the future renegade from Communism, Milovan Djilas, who, ironically, was perceived by the British at this time as the harshest Stalinist and the most rabidly proMoscow figure in the Yugoslav regime, their patience even¬ tually wore thin. In May Colville wrote that while trade ties between Yugoslavia and the West would be regarded by the former as a distasteful necessity, they might still induce some moderation, particularly in making the ‘official Anglophobia go underground’. He had sought the advice of Sir Ralph Stevenson, one of their most senior ambassadors who had just been withdrawn from Belgrade on the grounds that Yugoslav policy was such that they were entitled to only a more junior figure. Stevenson urged that BBC broadcasts to Yugoslavia should be stepped up to ‘let daylight’ into the country. He also urged that the emphasis should be on defending British policy and not on fostering opposition to the regime. Stevenson ‘considered that this would lead to civil war, and that we should be taking upon ourselves a terrible responsibility towards people whom in the last resort we could not materially assist’.57 By the summer Colville, understandably perhaps in view of the incessant provocations, was reduced to despair about Anglo-Yugoslav relations, coupled with a touch of hysteria and wishful thinking. He wrote in late July that secret information showed that the Yugoslav regime was actively doing all it could to bring about Communist world 391

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

revolution, with aid to the Greek rebels as only one of its moves and with Britain as its special target. The Yugoslav people did not support the regime and were Anglophile in spirit: It is true that Tito has the army and the police force, trained and equipped by the Russians, and like the Polish Government he knows that the Red Army is behind him; but Belgrade is a good deal further from Moscow than Warsaw is. Whether a new generation of robots will grow up in time to make his regime a permanency is unpredictable. It is submitted that we should resolve to give him no assistance. It was left to the new British Ambassador (or Ambassadordesignate since, though he was in Belgrade, he had not yet presented his credentials), Charles Peake, to strive with some success to preserve the earlier policy of ‘keeping open the door’. On 1 August he wrote to the Foreign Office: The outlook is certainly unpromising on a short view, but I comfort myself as much as I can by recalling the attitude of Schulenburg, German ambassador in Moscow before the war. Russo-German relations were at least as bad at that time as ours today with Jugoslavia [s/c]. He remained undismayed and continued to culti¬ vate personal relationships with Soviet officials wherever he could, and when the unexpected happened - the Russo-German non-aggression pact - he was able to jump in and be of great use. That at the moment is the only straw at which I can clutch. Before he could present his credentials, the Yugoslavs, indulging in one of their favourite pastimes, shot down two American planes, and the State Department, who also had an Ambassador-designate in Belgrade, ordered him not to present his credentials and strongly requested Britain to show solidarity by doing the same. Peake did not wish to follow this request on the grounds that the planes were American, not British, and eventually presented his creden¬ tials without fully clearing himself with the Foreign Office. 392

Eastern Europe After the War

He was rewarded with an informal meeting with Tito after the formal ceremony, and took advantage of it to tell the Yugoslav leader that he had ‘a mixture of good and bad things to say’, though apparently the best that he could find in the former category was that the secret policemen who were constantly stopping and searching his car were ‘courte¬ ous and friendly’.58 From the summer of 1946 until after the end of the period under discussion the Foreign Office remained convinced that relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were unique and had settled down into those between a senior and a trusted junior partner. Stalin’s antipathy to Tito was simply not suspected. In April 1947, answering Warner’s question to a number of British missions about the prospects for splitting Communist Parties along ‘Muscovite-Nationalist’ lines, Peake could see ‘no chance whatever’ for such a ploy in Yugoslavia. He admitted that the regime relied on nationalism and on Tito as a great national hero, who was given more prominence than Stalin, to win support from the Yugoslav peoples, who were not being subjected to any great attempt to indoctrinate them with Marxist theory. However, the Yugoslav leaders them¬ selves were profoundly ideological in outlook and probably took Marxism-Leninism more seriously than did Stalin. Their ambition seemed to be that Yugoslavia should be the regional leader of a Communist Balkans within a wholly Communist Europe. ‘The Yugoslav Government seem to enjoy as much confidence as the Soviet Government are ever likely to give to any organisation outside Russia.’ There was a process of give-and-take in the relations between the two, but the Yugoslavs accepted that they were the juniors: ‘In the last resort they will carry out instructions.’59 The previous month officials had been amused by the Yugoslav reaction to the Anglo-French treaty signed at Dunkirk. Peake described it as ‘noncommittal and at the same time both suspicious and wishful thinking’ [v/c]. John Wilson of the West European Department surmised, no doubt correctly, that the Yugoslavs had been perplexed by the indecisive reaction of Moscow and the French Commun¬ ists. They must have been ‘hard put to it to know what line to 393

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

take’, but ‘on the whole their comments show great ingenuity’.60 It is supremely to the credit of the British that they did not, like the Americans who had less reason, become violently antipathetic to the Tito regime even now. In April, Balfour wrote from Washington that the motivation behind the Truman Doctrine had been as much anti-Tito as antiSoviet. The President had been warning Stalin to keep off the Straits, but he had also been warning Tito to keep off Salonica. On the contrary, in the late spring of 1947 a junior Foreign Office minister, Philip Noel Baker, visited Belgrade and had what were felt to be useful talks on trade and cultural relations. Peake continued his patient work. In June he conceded that the trade links which were being forged were dictated by necessity as far as the Yugoslavs were concerned and in no way meant a turning away from Moscow. However, he thought that the Yugoslav leadership was not monolithic. There was constant wrangling between the fanatics like Djilas and Rankovic and the ‘milder brethren’ who, it was to be hoped, included Tito. Trade and cultural links might tilt the balance a little towards the latter, as well as providing ‘certain small material dividends’ for British exporters. The Foreign Office agreed that Peake was acting rightly, despite Yugoslav aid to the Greek rebels. The Yugoslav rejection of Marshall aid at this time served as a sharp reminder of where Yugoslavia’s loyalties lay. Peake’s interpretation was that many in the Yugoslav leadership had wanted to accept the aid, but that Djilas, ‘one of the purest of Communists’, had successfully rallied the forces of oppos¬ ition. In London, officials were convinced that the Russians had ‘put their foot down’.61 By late 1947 the Foreign Office were getting very close to the view that Tito was simply impossible. At the Cominform conference in Poland in early October, the Yugoslav delega¬ tion, led by the dreaded Djilas, made personal attacks on Attlee and Bevin. This profoundly upset Peake. As Warner pointed out, the Ambassador had been having ‘frequent, frank and friendly discussions with Tito and his leading ministers ... He is evidently - and I think rightly - incensed by the blatant contrast between these friendly conversations 394

Eastern Europe After the War

and the Yugoslav ministers’ participation in these violent attacks upon the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State.’ Hankey and Warner suggested to Bevin that he should set aside his ruling that there should be no official protests against personal attacks on himself. The Foreign Secretary, not easily provoked, replied: ‘Leave the question of men¬ tioning it to Tito to Peake’s discretion.’ A formal protest was to be avoided.62 In November, a Foreign Office research document stated factually that Russia had assigned to Yugoslavia the task of co-ordinating all Communist activity in South America from Yugoslav legations there, and that ‘Marshal Tito seems to have been assigned the role of consolidating the Communist block in south-east Europe’. In connection with the last point, significance was seen in the fact that the abdication of King Michael of Romania followed shortly on a visit by Tito to his country. Perhaps Tito had been instrumental in the downfall of the Romanian King, whom the Foreign Office valued politically and respected for his personal qualities, it was surmised.63

VI Turkey Turkey was in a good position to maintain its independence from Soviet imperialism after the Second World War. Some of the reasons for this were clear at the time. Its neutrality during the war - except for a token declaration of war on Germany early in 1945 - meant that the country had suffered none of the political and economic disruption which war is apt to bring about. It had a huge army, even if alone it was manifestly no match for the Soviet army and even if its upkeep imposed a cruel burden on the resources of so poor a country, as was observed by the outgoing British Ambas¬ sador, Sir Maurice Peterson, in April 1946.64 The Turkish Government was in firm control, unlike its Greek counter¬ part, threatened by Communist rebels. With hindsight, there is little doubt that Turkey’s position was stronger still: Stalin’s post-war foreign policy eschewed taking major risks in his undoubted quest for the expansion of Soviet power; 395

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

and a country in Turkey’s position, backed strongly by Britain and, much more uncertainly until 1947, by the United States, clearly posed great dangers if a forward policy were pursued with anything more than words and a willing¬ ness to have one’s bluff called. These self-imposed limita¬ tions on Soviet foreign policy were by no means obvious at the time, and in 1946 British policy-makers braced them¬ selves for a possible major confrontation with Russia over Turkey. There were two distinct sides to the pressure which Stalin started to exert on Turkey in 1945. The first, even before the German surrender, was for drastic revision of the Montreux Convention of 1936, regulating rights of passage, especially of warships, through the Straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In 1936 Turkey had taken advantage of a time when its international position was strong to secure an agreement in which, as a Foreign Office paper of 1947 put it, ‘it was Turkey who scored’, gaining limitations on the number of ships that could pass through the Straits and rights of prior notice before they did so.65 At Teheran, Moscow (in October 1944), Yalta and Potsdam Stalin informally but repeatedly demanded much greater rights for the Soviet Union in the Straits, eliciting remarks from Churchill which certainly amounted to assent in principle to that idea.66 Also, between Yalta and Potsdam in March 1945 the Soviet Government denounced the Turco-Soviet pact of non-aggression and neutrality and demanded at least one base on the Straits. (A year earlier, in the spring of 1944, an abortive Turkish move to improve its relations with Moscow had been called off when the Soviet response provided strong evidence that it would try to take advantage of any closer ties to terminate Turkey’s indepen¬ dence under the guise of ‘mutual assistance’, by which large numbers of Russian troops would enter the country.)67 About the same time, the Soviet Union initiated the other prong of what the Foreign Office saw as a war of nerves against Turkey: a press and radio campaign for the ‘return’ of large areas of north-eastern Turkey which were described as rightfully part of the Armenian and Georgian republics of the Soviet Union. Bevin’s policy in the face of all this was a 396

Eastern Europe After the War

direct continuation of Churchill’s and also largely coincided with that favoured by the United States: Russia was entitled to some revision of Montreux but not to the establishment of a Turkish-Russian condominium -*at the Straits in which Russia as the stronger power would inevitably predominate. The frontier demands against Asiatic Turkey were deemed unacceptable, though not, surprisingly, without reluctance in the case of those relating to the Armenians. At the very end of 1945, after returning to London from the Conference of Foreign Ministers in Moscow, Bevin invited the Turkish Ambassador to call upon him so that he could be told directly how stoutly the British Foreign Secretary had spoken up for Turkey when he had had his interview with Stalin himself. Stalin had said that Turkey had nothing to fear from Russia, and that talk of war between them was ‘all rubbish’. He went on to ask Bevin whether he had received the communication from the Georgians and Armenians. Bevin said that he had heard about a letter from some professors in the Moscow press. Stalin made no more reference to that. Bevin evidently stopped short of giving Stalin a serious warning against encroachments on Turkey but was more outspoken to Molotov. When the Turkish Foreign Minister, Saka, was in London in January 1946, Bevin’s record of his meeting with him states that: I mentioned that I had told M. Molotov at Moscow (in connexion with Persia and not with Turkey) that we had seen the working of Soviet policy in Rumania and Bulgaria, and that we did not want to see the policy of faits accomplis pursued anywhere else. M. Molotov had replied that the Soviet Government would not pursue any such policy. Here the Turkish Foreign Minister again showed scepticism. This scepticism was shared by Bevin and his officials, but what Stalin had stated was probably more revealing of his true intentions than any of those in Britain privileged to read it probably supposed. Perhaps one of the few things which can be said with certainty about his post-war foreign policy is that if he had any intention of going to war with Turkey he 397

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

soon abandoned it. In July 1946, in conversations with the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, he was to repeat ‘three times’ that Russia absolutely would not attack Turkey, probably hoping that Masaryk would pass this message on to his many acquaintances in Western capitals, as he did. While assurances from such a man were, of course, utterly worthless in themselves, it is probable that Stalin wanted to test the Western response to them, and, finding it - even that of Britain alone - resolute, decided to observe his own ‘assurances’. The cautious reference in December 1945 to Georgian and Armenian claims and the quick retreat in the face of Bevin’s contemptuous reply epitomised his penchant for seeking weak spots and then retreating if none was to be found. If all this had been appreciated more clearly in the British, American and indeed Turkish Governments a great deal of anguish could have been avoided during the coming years.68 As it was, the Foreign Office agonised. On the last day of 1945 Peterson reported that Turkey was considering bring¬ ing its relations with the Soviet Union before the Security Council of the United Nations. Ward thought that such action might present the ‘infant’ organisation with too severe a test, perhaps a ‘Corfu’ or a ‘Manchukuo’, referring to the Italian and Japanese acts of aggression against Greece and China respectively in 1923 and 1931 in which the League of Nations had failed to acquit itself well as the guardian of the weak against a strong aggressor. In fact, if the argument above is correct, there was no risk at that time of Stalin resorting to overt aggression like Mussolini or the Japanese generals. The British felt that Turkey was important to Britain, that its fears might be justified, but that it was also a nuisance at times. In late February, Bevin made a speech in Parliament in which he emphasised how important Turkey was and that Britain would help it to resist unjustifiable Soviet demands. Although Peterson assured him that this speech had won for him in Turkey the title of ‘Baba Bevin’ - ‘Father Bevin’ - the Turks were not content with it alone, and requested a new defence treaty with Britain to replace the admittedly obsolete one of 1939. As Geoffrey McDermott noted, this was out of the question if only 398

Eastern Europe After the War

because it would have to be openly directed against the Soviet Union (see above, p. 255), but would also serve little purpose for Britain since Turkey could give very little in return for it, and since it would be positively undesirable if, as seemed to be the case, the Turks would expect from it a voice ‘on all kinds of matters which do not really concern them’. In private the British were adopting a distinctly de haut en bas tone towards the Turks at this time. Bevin told the Turkish Ambassador in April that: ... while Turkey might depend on us for security, we did not depend on Turkey. Moreover, as shown in this last war, our strategic position was not necessarily dependent on maintaining communications through the Eastern Mediterranean. It did seem to me, however, that the Moslem world must hang together in its own interest. The British seemed hardly to notice that Turkey was acquir¬ ing a powerful new patron in the United States, which had made the important gesture of sending home the body of the deceased - he had actually died in 1944! - Turkish Ambas¬ sador in Washington on board the warship Missouri on which the Japanese surrender had been signed, though the gesture was rather downgraded at the last minute by the withdrawal of a naval task force which was to have accom¬ panied the battleship. In a sense the British could not be blamed. The Missouri incident was only a gesture, and, though Truman’s recent and successful firm stand in demanding immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from north-west Iran had obvious and pleasant implications for American interest in the security of neighbouring Turkey, the American President was unwilling to reveal to either British or Turks the true extent of his concern with saving Turkey from Soviet vassaldom - an aim passionately sup¬ ported by the influential new head of the State Department’s Near East division, Loy Henderson. Peterson could still write after the Missouri episode: ‘But, when all is said and done, the main factor in Turkey’s world position today remains what it was last July - her dependence upon and her confidence in the alliance with Great Britain.’ This paternal 399

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

attitude did not extend to a readiness to give Turkey credits to buy arms for its large but ill-equipped forces. It was felt that Turkey had large gold reserves and must use some of them if it wanted British arms.69 If there was a certain arrogance in the British attitude towards Turkey - an arrogance which was to receive its nemesis early in 1947 when Britain had to yield pride of place in both Greece and Turkey to the United States there was something almost other-worldly about the serious¬ ness with which they investigated Soviet claims in regard to part of north-east Turkey, the alleged lost lands of the Armenian and Georgian Soviet republics. To these Stalin himself, as a Georgian, was thought to attach real impor¬ tance, and the fact that the Soviet Union was formally to renounce any claim to Turkish territory in May 1953, only a matter of weeks after Stalin’s death, obviously reinforces that view.70 The Foreign Office were prepared to allow themselves to chuckle over the Soviet claim that the Soviet-Turkish treaty of 1921, by which Lenin’s Govern¬ ment had ceded substantial areas to the resurgent Turkey of Kemal Atattirk, was morally null and void since it had been dictated by a strong Turkey to a temporarily weak Soviet Union and since the Soviet Union was opposed in principle to the strong bullying the weak. They also had no time for the ‘Georgian’ claim since in so far as the area claimed had been populated by Georgians, it was centuries since they had not only adopted the Moslem religion but had become Turkish in sentiment, showing themselves wholly loyal when their area had been a battleground between Turkey and Tsarist Russia between 1914 and 1917. However, there was real concern, and some sympathy, with the ‘Armenian’ claim to areas whose Armenian population had been killed or expelled by Turkey during the First World War. Officials like Brimelow - scourge of the Soviet prisoners in western Europe but sensitive and human towards the Armenians felt that the obvious moral claim was reinforced by the economic achievements of the Armenian people in the Soviet Union since they had been given a moderately favourable environment for their energies by the establish¬ ment of the Armenian republic of the Soviet Union, small 400

Eastern Europe After the War and barren though it was, and by the courage and skill in warfare which Armenians had demonstrated as part of the Soviet army during the war when nearly 25,000 of them had been decorated. Having ‘risen from the depth of human misery, famine and devastation’ during the First World War, it would, wrote W.S. Edmonds, ‘be regrettable if the development of a people with such potentialities were really hampered by a lack of living space’. The conclusion reached was that the Armenians had a strong case for some Turkish territory, even under the cynical auspices of Stalin, but that that case was not strong enough to merit British support. The conclusion was less remarkable than the fact that the Office did not simply sweep Armenian claims aside in the name of Realpolitik ,71 The main issue was clearly perceived as being not the ‘unofficial’ Soviet claim, abusive yet half-hearted, to part of eastern Turkey, but the future regime in the Straits. In the summer of 1946 this was reasserted strongly, with a Soviet note to Turkey on 7 August demanding free passage for all merchant ships through the Straits; free passage for all warships of Black Sea powers; exclusion of warships of non-Black Sea powers; elaboration of a new regime for the Straits by Black Sea powers only; and joint TurkishSoviet defence of the Straits. A further note was sent in September.72 Officials in the Foreign Office were quite clear about their strategy: acceptance of the first three points in the Soviet proposals, which would have meant an immense improve¬ ment in the Montreux regulations from the Soviet point of view, and resolute rejection of the latter two. They had some trouble from the Foreign Secretary, for whom the resolution of this age-old problem exercised a fascination which caused him to produce what his officials regarded as extremely misconceived schemes. First, in July, he suggested an Anglo-Soviet deal by which Russia would endorse a British trusteeship over Cyrenaica in return for settlement of the Dardanelles ‘in such a way as to allow Russia to close the Straits in the event of her being attacked, and not leaving this right only to Turkey’. R.P. Pinsent pointed out in alarm that this would entail a Soviet base on the Straits at least

401

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in time of war. Bevin wrote his apologies: ‘This was a passing statement no paper was being prepared but the Straits question is now raised and I shall follow it up.’ In September he ‘followed it up’ by suggesting that the regime in the Great Belt between Sweden and Denmark might be reproduced at the Straits. Presumably he had nothing else in mind than that relations between those two Scandinavian countries were a pattern of perfection in international relations. His officials were certainly perplexed. Sargent pointed out that if the Belt’s regime were adopted, non-riparian warships would be able to enter the Black Sea at all times — ‘a right which is precisely what the Russians are determined to abolish and one which we and the Americans are more or less prepared to forego’. If Britain did mention the regime in the Great Belt, the Russians ‘in their present mood’, wrote Sargent, might turn the tables by demanding that non-riparian warships should be banned from both the Baltic and the Black Sea. Yet again, Bevin recanted handsomely: ‘The Balance of Argument seems to be against I will not Press it.’73 Aside from these diversions, great importance attached to America’s growing interest in Turkey and the Straits. In late August the new Ambassador in Washington, Lord Inverchapel, learned from Byrnes’s deputy, Dean Acheson, that President Truman was prepared to get himself ‘up to the neck in boiling water’ with Congress, rather than leave the problem to fate. Britain and the United States joined in urging Turkey not to panic in the face of the two Soviet notes and reported Soviet troop concentrations along the frontier with Asiatic Turkey. They successfully urged Tur¬ key to agree to attend without preconditions a conference to revise the Montreux Convention, while being quite clear about what could, and what could not, be conceded to the Soviet Union. Bevin, in his foreign policy speech to Parlia¬ ment on 22 October, at last settled down to advocating a line of policy on the Straits which reflected the views of his advisers.74 Pinsent felt that the United States and Turkish Govern¬ ments were being wise but that the Soviet stance on the Straits was part of a plot to subvert Turkey from within: 402

Eastern Europe After the War

The Americans are showing a welcome tough attitude on the Straits. They are convinced that the Soviets have no real desire for a modified Straits Convention agree¬ able to all, but are merely using the Straits question as a means of upsetting and unsettling the Turks. The Russians feel that time is on their side as Vyshinsky said to Hodza about Greece and Albania, and are quite prepared to continue the nerve war indefinitely. Accompanied by the stirring up of discontent in all classes, especially among the Kurds and Armenians, by penetration of the Democratic Party, by troop con¬ centrations on the frontier and by espionage on a wide scale, they hope that this nerve war will so weaken the Turkish Government’s position that it will be over¬ thrown and a revolution start which will set up a pro-Soviet government. There is no doubt some ground for this hope as the discontent with economic con¬ ditions is fairly widespread and the Democratic Party could easily become a Russian instrument. Britain should combine a refusal to be unnecessarily pro¬ vocative to Russia with an equal refusal to lose its place as Turkey’s first ally: ... the Americans are prepared to act, as well as speak, tough. We should also, of course, be prepared to propose joint defence of the Straits, but only if the situation was so serious that a Russian attack was expected. We must, presumably, as allies of the Turks, not let the Americans appear more determined than ourselves over the Straits. Despite complete disbelief in Soviet claims that their only interest in the Straits was Russian security, the Foreign Office did detailed work on a new Straits Convention and were prepared to consider further concessions to soothe Soviet security fears, such as demilitarisation of all islands in the Aegean including the Dodecanese, which would be ceded to Greece only if it agreed to that condition. Russia would then have no- reason to fear hostile bases on islands near the Straits, and less reason than ever to claim a base for

403

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

itself there. But the prevailing mood was one of profound mistrust of Soviet intentions. Pinsent wrote in November: I think, however, that even if we yielded on the Straits and by thus abandoning the Turks jeopardised our whole position in the Middle East, we would not be very likely to gain any worthwhile compensation else¬ where. Other Russian demands might be abated tem¬ porarily but they would come up again sooner or later. As there is no question of our yielding on this point the problem does not arise.75 At the end of November Pinsent thought that the time might have come for a new alliance, replacing that of 1939 between Britain, France and Turkey, and this time between Britain and Turkey alone since France had never shown any real interest in the 1939 treaty. American membership would be welcome, but Pinsent could see little chance of it materialising ‘in view of the general American dislike for foreign commitments’. There was no inkling here of the replacement of Britain by the United States as Turkey’s Great Power protector which Truman was to announce so dramatically later that winter. Doubt about Britain’s strength may have been the reason for Pinsent’s conclusion that on balance a new alliance should be postponed as ‘it would only arouse the deepest suspicion on the part of the Russians’.76 The British were prepared to swallow any feelings of hurt pride and welcome the Truman Doctrine as giving American protection to Turkey. During 1947 the Foreign Office combined relaxed feelings about Turkey’s short-term secur¬ ity with foreboding about the ultimate reawakening of Soviet ambitions there. In October the British Government told the United States that they had no objection to the partial demobilisation measures which Turkey proposed to carry out for economic reasons. They would not ‘entail an undue risk ... nor do they expect Turkey to be the victim of aggression from any quarter in present circumstances’. Yet two months earlier, officials had speculated that Russia’s aim in Turkey might be the detachment of the European part and its transformation into a constituent Soviet republic 404

Eastern Europe After the War

- realising mutatis mutandis a Tsarist aim of the First World

War — with eastern areas going to Georgia and Armenia (‘Stalin’s pet Caucasian republics’) and a Communist government in the rump of the country.77

405

8 Britain, the United States and Western Europe

I Churchill and the Foreign Office towards the end of the war The West European defence organisations of the post-war period - the Anglo-French treaty of Dunkirk in 1947, the Brussels Treaty Organisation of 1948 and nato in 1949 - all owed mote to Britain than to any other single country, except perhaps, allowing for the much lower degree of its influence, Belgium with Paul-Henri Spaak as Foreign Minis¬ ter. British official thinking on international organisation after the war is a subject in itself, and only a slight outline of its earlier stages will be attempted here.1 The matter began to be treated seriously, rather than dismissively, in 1942. A clear split soon appeared between Churchill and the Foreign Office. The Prime Minister favoured regional security organ¬ isations, even if, at American insistence, there had to be a world body as well. He was most interested in the one for Europe which, in his ideal scheme, would comprise large powers and federations — Danubian, Balkan, Scandinavian, Belgium and the Netherlands - of smaller ones. As has been extensively discussed above, the Foreign Office wanted federations, though often not the ones favoured by Churchill. They also thought that, if only because of the United States, great regional bodies were out of the question and that the future United Nations would have to be all-important. Churchill was as fervent a believer in AngloAmerican co-operation as anyone, but did not see why his 406

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

views should not prevail over those of Roosevelt. He had not thought the thing out properly, as Jebb had mockingly noted at one time (see above, pp. 31-3). The Foreign Office gained a notable victory in May 1944 when the Cabinet endorsed a scheme of theirs for international organisation which contained only a minor sop to Churchill’s views, a United Nations Commission for Europe which would prob¬ ably be dissolved after the immediate post-war period. Then the contestants reversed roles. The Office started to see merit in a West European Bloc or Group, while the Prime Minister opposed such an idea strongly. The reasons for this will now be examined. The British envoy to the French Committee of National Liberation and former Conservative politician Sir Alfred Duff Cooper could claim credit for initiating discussion of the Western group idea, and was wrong to think that the views which he urged on Eden in 1944 made little impres¬ sion. The Foreign Office began sounding out opinion both among relevant exile Governments (Belgian, Norwegian, Dutch; the British were scarcely on speaking terms with de Gaulle, leading the anti-Nazi forces of the most relevant country of all), which were informed that in principle Britain favoured some form of organisation among them, and in other official quarters, notably the Chiefs of Staff. The alarm felt by the Foreign Office at the naive relish with which the Chiefs referred to Germany as a possible ally and to Russia as a possible enemy has already been discussed (see above, pp. 114-23).2 The Foreign Office were not discouraged by their tussle with the Chiefs to the point where they lost interest. Public interest in the subject was fairly widespread, and in October Eden had felt compelled to refer to a Western grouping in Parliament, very probably earlier than he would have liked. In late November, Clark Kerr in Moscow had broached the subject with Molotov, mentioning a British-led security organisation in western Europe and a similar body under the aegis of the Soviet Union in the east, containing Germany from two sides. He received no clear reply.3 The quizzical Soviet attitude to the plan contrasted with the opposition to it from the most formidable quarter of all: the Prime 407

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

Minister. Openly admitting that his attitude was based in part on anger against de Gaulle, Churchill wrote to Eden on the last day of 1944 that it would be for the French leader to propose such a schemp to Britain since he stood to gain so much more from it than would the British. It was an anxiety to the Prime Minister that de Gaulle had just been to Moscow, attempting to strike a rapport with Stalin. Churchill was afraid that the French leader might pass any British proposals on to the Kremlin, distorting them in the process to cause Britain trouble. Yet de Gaulle had fresh cause to feel offended; in Paris in November Churchill had told him that if he had to choose between France and the United States, it would be the latter every time. The weakness of the prospective allies provided Churchill with the more general part of his argument: Meantime we are losing nothing from the point of view of security because the French have practically no army and all other nations concerned are prostrate or still enslaved. We must be careful not to involve ourselves in liabilities which we cannot discharge and in engage¬ ments to others for which there is no corresponding return. I do not know what our financial position will be after the war, but I am sure we shall not be able to maintain armed forces sufficient to protect all these helpless nations even if they make some show of recreating their armies. Anyhow the first thing to do is to set up the World Organisation, on which all depends. Churchill had already banned all discussions of a Western group with the countries concerned.4 Churchill, increasingly worried about a Russian threat to post-war British security rather than a renewed one from Germany, had come to the conclusion that Britain should pin all its hopes on a permanent military alliance with the United States; a Western group might encourage a revival of isolationism there. In February 1945 he gave Eden a very sharp rap over the knuckles when he dared to bring up the Western group again: 408

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

1. The only bond of the victors is their common Hate [sic].

2. To make Britain safe she must become responsible for the safety of a cluster of feeble States. We ought to think of something better than these. The Foreign Office felt that Britain simply could not afford to trust the Americans to retain their wartime interest in western Europe and, in Dixon’s words, deeply regretted that the Prime Minister was opposed to such an ‘obvious measure of self-protection’. And was the German danger really over? Ward, thinking not, wrote early in January: The Prime Minister does not answer the Secretary of State’s contention that it is of vital interest to the United Kingdom to try to keep the Germans out of Western Europe so as: (I) to gain defence in depth; (II) to deprive the Germans of the millions of slave labour whose existence has enabled the Germans to keep up so remarkably the numbers of their fighting army.5 The officials were also not free from a feeling that even if the American repudiation of isolationism did prove permanent, it might be more attractive for Britain to be top dog in a West European grouping rather than junior partner in an American-led Western Europe. Harvey seemed to think that, just as the United States led the Western Hemisphere, and the Soviet Union was destined to lead Eastern Europe, Britain should naturally lead Western Europe. In December 1944 he noted approvingly that: ‘We have no evidence that Joe [Stalin] has stirred up Communist troubles in our areas’, which he defined as ‘Greece, Belgium, France, Italy etc’. There were similar feelings of jealousy about possible American leadership in Western Europe in some ministerial quarters, such as the Armistice and Post-War Committee of the War Cabinet, which resolved in July 1944 that every effort should be made to induce such countries as Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway to use British advice and equipment in rebuilding their armed forces. There was, in 409

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

fact, a fundamental difference between the Foreign Office and many politicians, including Attlee, on the one side, and Churchill on the other, about the question of permanent alliance with the United States during the last phase of the war. Among the former, fears that the Americans might make unreliable allies existed alongside ones that it would be humiliating for Britain precisely if they did prove reliable. Nobody in the Foreign Office seemed to think that if it would be humiliating for Britain to be America’s junior partner, the French might reasonably find it humiliating to be Britain’s. Churchill comes out the better in this compari¬ son since his desire for close relations with the United States did not blind him, except in moments of total exasperation with de Gaulle, to the importance of France, as he showed at Yalta, even if his attitude to the smaller West European countries was cavalier in a more basic sense.6 Ward wrote on 18 January 1945: ‘Our latest idea is to hang arrangements with the small allies upon a treaty with the French.’ This was to remain the ‘idea’ until the policy actually started to yield results between two and three years later. It was based on the theory that the immense difficul¬ ties in dealing with France, first under the pernickety de Gaulle and then under a government which included Communists, were more than cancelled out by the towering importance of France among the prospective members of the group, excluding, of course, Britain itself. Just what a formidable task they had set themselves, quite apart from prime ministerial objections, was emphasised at the end of February when de Gaulle’s Foreign Minister, Bidault, visit¬ ed London, offering no thanks for Britain’s championship of France at Yalta and, instead, demanding what the Office saw as ludicrously high terms for an Anglo-French alliance: a settlement of Syria and the Lebanon along lines favoured by France; a French zone of occupation in Germany equal in size to the British or American; and a British commitment to attend no more meetings with the United States and the Soviet Union unless France was also invited.7 From this point of view the incessant pleas of Spaak from 1944 onwards for an immediate Anglo-Belgian alliance were to be more embarrassing than flattering.8 One thing 410

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

above all stands out about internal discussions on the Western group. (Eden told the Ambassador to Turkey, Peterson, in July 1945 that the word ‘bloc’ was not to be used ‘owing to the pejorative sense in which [it] has come to be used’.) This was the emphasis in confidential minutes on the need for defence against Germany. In March Troutbeck wrote: The broad factor there is that since 1871 there has been on the German side a single state able to execute without hindrance a single military plan of attack or defence. On the other side there are, if Denmark is included, six distinct political units. Germany in fact has had one western frontier, while western Europe has had six eastern frontiers. Unless these are welded together by the closest political and military collabora¬ tion, the danger from Germany is likely to remain, even though it drops into the background for a decade. It seems to me that we alone can do the welding, but it will not be an easy task, as the Belgians are no doubt fully justified in their fear of French ambitions to dominate them. Concerning possible membership, there were, as Troutbeck indicated, question marks against the Scandinavian states. Denmark’s ambiguous war record and geographical defencelessness against German attack argued against its membership. If Norway were cut off from Germany by a neutral Denmark, its membership might seem more to be directed against Russia, with which it had a common frontier, than against Germany. The Norwegians themselves blew hot and then cold about whether they wanted an alliance with Britain. The British felt that if there were alliances with France and the Low Countries and if Norway wished to join, it could not be refused. Sweden was virtually a neighbour of Germany across a relatively narrow stretch of the Baltic, but soundings made by the British legation in Stockholm in late 1944 indicated that Sweden was deter¬ mined to remain neutral under all circumstances. Ward thought that the Swedes were selfish and hypocritical, adding: ‘But we need not worry about Swedish opinion if we 411

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

can obtain French cooperation and. Soviet concurrence in an eventual “Western regional security organisation” within and under a World Organisation.’9 Occasionally there were references to the possibility that a Western group might be needed against another enemy. In April Hood wrote about ‘the importance of stabilising our relations with France and the need for creating the Western Group whilst it can still be presented as a defence system directed against Germany’. But basically in 1945 the Foreign Office were still intent on performing the balancing act which they had witnessed the Chiefs of Staff endangering the previous autumn: the proposed grouping would have to serve the needs of defence against Russia if co-operation broke down, but it had not to be the very instrument which brought about the downfall of such co-operation. In July, as unknowingly he neared the end of his second period as Foreign Secretary, Eden wrote to an ambassador that Spain, Portugal and Italy were all to be excluded from the group ‘as it would precisely mean the division of Europe into two camps, which would be bound to provoke the opposition and hostility of Russia’. The Western group and the correspond¬ ing Eastern group were to include only those countries under direct German threat. At the beginning of September Ward drew a contrast between the Foreign Office and the Chiefs: Whereas the Foreign Office have had primarily in mind reinsurance against a renewal of German aggression (on the hypothesis that the United States might go into isolation and that Russian future policy is incalculable and may be distracted by internal dissensions) the Chiefs of Staff have made it plain that their main interest in the Western Group is their fear of Russia entering upon a Napoleonic phase.10 Earlier, at Potsdam, the proposed group was naturally not mentioned by Churchill who tried to interest Truman in his idea of a permanent British-American military alliance.11 The Foreign Office were relieved in a sense by the delay caused by that and by the fact that, in the words of one of their memoranda, the ‘antics’ of de Gaulle had prevented 412

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

any progress at all on an Anglo-French treaty. Study of this paper indicates that the French leader’s manifest feeling that Britain and France were inevitably rivals was shared by British officials as far as the leadership of the smaller members of the putative group was concerned. Britain was stated to be making ‘inconspicuous progress’ in helping the Dutch and Belgians to rebuild their armed forces with the aim of inducing them to accept permanent British leadership in the military sphere: One of the express objects of the offers made to the small countries is to build up Allied contingents to take part under British command in the occupation of the British Zone in Germany and this would accustom the small Allies to serving under British command in peace as well as in war. The paper went on to express dismay that the Americans now seemed to see their role in Europe as that of ‘mediator’ between Britain and Russia, ‘very anxious’ not to offend the latter. It optimistically hoped that the United States’ own regional group in the Western Hemisphere would prevent them from being altogether hostile to a British-sponsored system in Western Europe. One final point worth noting in this summary of Office thinking on the Western group idea in July 1945 is the admission that it was unfortunate that the group would have to be exclusively concerned with defence and not also with economics. Britain’s trade links with the Dominions and with the United States posed ‘formidable’ obstacles against anything like a customs union. Jebb wrote resignedly that he was convinced that the group ‘would only make sense if it were founded on something like a customs union’, but that on this point he was probably in a minority of one.12

II The advent of Bevin and fears of a Communist France In fact Jebb had a very august supporter indeed in the new Foreign Secretary. On the very day that Jebb penned the 413

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

minute cited above, Bevin presided over an Office meeting at which he ... explained that his long-term policy was to establish close relations between the United Kingdom and the countries on the western and southern fringes of Europe, including the Scandinavian countries, as much in commercial and economic as in political matters. He was convinced that the first step was to clear up outstanding difficulties with the French and reach an understanding with them. Meanwhile, he proposed to defer any active steps towards the conclusion of a ‘Western Group’ until he had had more time to con¬ sider possible Russian reactions. It is unlikely that at that early stage in his new job Bevin had given much thought to the problems in the way of any sort of British economic integration with Western Europe. He was not to change his mind, but had to set the subject aside for about two years. Politics in the narrow sense were more pressing. The Foreign Office could argue with some justice that if the proposal for a Western group began to have anti-Soviet overtones almost as soon as the war had ended, it was the doing of the Russians themselves. Before and during the London Foreign Ministers’ Conference in September, which was so dismal for Anglo-Soviet relations in every way, Soviet propaganda launched an unbridled press campaign against such a grouping, not brooking any suggestion that there was any possible comparison with the relations which the Soviet Union was itself developing with Poland, Czecho¬ slovakia and Yugoslavia. Ward wrote on 19 September: ‘The Soviet Government never have the slightest hesitation in trying to “have it both ways” and the saying that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones has no point in Moscow.’ Warner commented: I find it very hard to believe that there is any genuine fear or suspicion behind this. We and the Americans have surely amply proved that we are prepared to be tough with Germany. Had we not, there might have been cause for real Soviet suspicion: as it is I don’t believe it.

414

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

When Bevin tried to dispel Soviet fears during a conversa¬ tion with Molotov on 23 September, the Soviet Foreign Minister would reply only with heavy sarcasm and in obvious reference to innumerable British protestations over the years that the Government did not control the press, that it would be wrong to attribute importance to what was written in ‘irresponsible Soviet newspapers’. After returning to Moscow, Molotov continued to make what the British saw as ‘dishonest’ attacks on their interest in West European security.13 Surveying the debris of British-Russian relations after the conference, the Foreign Office considered offering Stalin a formal division of Europe into British and Soviet spheres, only to reject the idea as wrong in itself, unacceptable to public opinion, especially in America, and unlikely to be honoured by the Russians in their exalted post-war mood which had aroused their age-old national desire for expan¬ sion (see above, p. 240). Bevin, no matter how annoyed he might feel with Molotov, was unwilling to proceed in trying to form a Western group if it was going to mean a complete break in relations with the Soviet Union. At a meeting on 12 October it was decided that an Anglo-French treaty, if it could be agreed upon, should be as much as was to be aimed at in terms of formal arrangements: ‘Once a treaty had been concluded, the smaller nations, particularly the Belgians and the Dutch, would feel reassured and would probably not press for formal treaties.’ It was difficult to see how the Soviet Union could object to so limited an arrange¬ ment since ‘M. Molotov had expressed himself in favour of an Anglo-French treaty if it were directed against Germany [and if] the Secretary of State had repudiated the idea of a Western Bloc.’ An Anglo-French treaty would therefore be ‘propitious’ and would, as far as Europe was concerned, be exclusively for defence against German aggression, though it would also have to include a settlement of Anglo-French differences in Syria and the Lebanon where Britain was standing out for the complete independence of those countries in the face of de Gaulle’s wish to retain a measure of French influence. Although there was great concern not to provoke the Soviet Union (or the United

415

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States, which was seen as still shovying little sign of appre¬ ciating British security needs in Western Europe), it was agreed that the line should be drawn at giving them a veto over the limited arrangement which was now proposed: ‘The United States and the Soviet Union would be informed of the Treaty only after negotiations were considerably advanced.’14 Bevin persisted with this policy during 1946, despite what the Soviet Union was doing in eastern Europe. The policy obviously called for a major effort to woo France. One example of the effort made was British support for the holding in Paris of the Peace Conference for Italy and Germany’s former allies in eastern Europe, although it had earlier been felt that London had very good claims to be the venue (see above, p. 246). Bidault did at least express gratitude for that. During late 1945 and throughout 1946 the proposed alliance with France gave plenty of work to the West European Department of the Foreign Office, and particularly to two officials, F.R. Hoyer Millar and Anthony Rumbold, and, above them, to Harvey and Sargent. The documents afford occasional glimpses of Bevin’s thinking. Following the decision to concentrate on an alliance with France and probably not to follow it with any other alliances in Western Europe, the Foreign Office became more embar¬ rassed than ever by the solicitations of the Belgian Foreign Minister. Spaak, for a special relationship with Britain in every sphere, military, political and economic. However agreeably that might contrast with the Anglophobia of de Gaulle, who resigned the headship of the French Govern¬ ment in January 1946, opposed to the end to a treaty with Britain,15 and the Communist presence in the succeeding French Government, Belgium simply did not compare with France as a partner in Western Europe. When Spaak was in London in late 1945 Bevin felt unable to refuse a ‘purely exploratory and informal’ examination of the co-ordination of the British and Belgian armed forces. In addition, the Dutch were pressing a more modest request to pool with Britain their scientific resources in relation to military research. Hoyer Millar urged that as little and as slow progress as possible should be made with the undertaking to 416

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

Belgium since ‘purely Anglo-Belgian talks might not be of much value’. Sargent went further and urged Bevin to tell Spaak ‘quite frankly that his proposal was a little pre¬ mature’. The Office continued to be evasive or negative with Belgium: in April 1946 when the latter suggested a formal arrangement for political consultation on international ques¬ tions like Germany where Belgian interests were concerned; in July, when Rumbold recorded that yet again Britain had had to ‘choke off a plea by Spaak for the integration of the British and Belgian armed forces; and in November, when Hoyer Millar anticipated forthcoming Anglo-Belgian trade talks with little relish. At the same time, the Foreign Office were anxious for close relations with Belgium and the Netherlands and regretted only the impatience of the former. There was no wish to keep them at arm’s length more than was necessary while the French were wooed. In August 1946, for instance, Harvey suggested that Strang, as Foreign Office Representative in Germany, should take special pains to keep the Dutch and Belgian, as well as French, missions in the British zone in touch with British policy: ‘We should have no secrets from them.’16 The petulant resignation from office of de Gaulle meant the replacement of one obstacle preventing an alliance with France by another. The new Government showed little interest in Syria, over which de Gaulle had been loud and bitter in his denunciations of Britain, but it made agreement on the Ruhr, whose permanent separation from the rest of Germany French opinion of the time was almost unanimous in demanding, a sine qua non of alliance. At the beginning of January 1946 Sargent put it to Bevin that that condition was not unreasonable, and that Britain should be ready to make major concessions to the French over the matter, though they would have to make compromises in return. The exit of de Gaulle could only be a cause for rejoicing, but in place of the danger from one man the British were deeply and increasingly worried about the threat to British interests from a collective group of Frenchmen, the Communists. In 1946 France was involved in a dizzy round of general elections and constitutional referenda - three of each in the

417

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

year from October 1945 to October 1946 - and the Foreign Office were fearful of one of these making the Communists strong enough to dominate the French Government, some¬ what on the lines of Czechoslovakia, and perhaps to stage a coup. (Actually French Communist tactics seem to have been to obtain power by exclusively parliamentary means, increasing their own vote and cementing their existing alliance with the Socialists; the Communists and Socialists together won over half the seats in the October 1945 elections.)17 Officials thought that all democratic or patriotic protesta¬ tions by the French Communist Party were lies. Rumbold stated in April 1946 that: ‘I agree with Mr [Frank] Roberts that the party line in France can be changed as easily as the party line anywhere else to suit the convenience of the Soviet Government.’ In September he warned further of the necessity to distinguish between the bulk of Communist voters, who might be patriots or simply concerned with what they imagined to be their well-being, and ‘the Communist machine in France, which blindly follows Moscow’ and was ‘very formidable’. He had already commented on what this might mean if fortune favoured the French Communist Party electorally: There is no chance of the Communist Party obtaining a clear majority, but their influence may well be so increased as to enable them to have the reality if not the appearance of control over the next Government. If that happens it may no longer be possible for us to continue to regard France as a friendly power.18 Rumbold wondered what it might be possible for Britain to do to help the anti-Communist cause in French elections ^rtain/rench Paries had secretly appealed to the Foreign Uttice for financial assistance. That was ‘of course, pre¬ posterous . Such assistance would be ‘contrary to our cus¬ tom and, in any case, many of those requesting it were of the extreme right, whose cause Britain did not support if only because their victory ‘would certainly provoke a violent reaction, and play sooner or later into the hands of the 418

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

Communists’. Apart from money, Rumbold recommended almost every possible form of aid to moderate parties in France, commensurate with the transcendent importance to Britain of the struggle then taking place for control of that country. Britain should meet French requests for 150,000 tons of wheat and 10,000 tons of fats, despite the fact that by any normal criterion it could afford to spare no food at all. (The Soviet Government, despite the half-starved condition of its own subjects, had promised France half a million tons of grain.) France should be promised more coal from the British zone in Germany, even at the risk of jeopardising such economic recovery as was occurring there. A treaty of alliance, ‘probably the easiest step of all, because it would cost us nothing’, should be offered immediately. Perhaps, as a supreme sacrifice, Britain might even decide the fate of the Ruhr in accordance with French wishes, rather than German interests. Hoyer Millar broadly supported Rumbold, certainly on economic aid. Politically, he thought that Britain might have to be somewhat disingenuous by talking favourably about giving France more German coal and accepting French views on the Ruhr even if it did not intend to translate words into action once the election was over. That made it all the more necessary to conclude an alliance with France at once, if the French would agree. Some of the French electorate might be suitably impressed, but, in addition, Britain wanted an alliance with France as a long-term objective and, if the matter were left until after the election, the entire project might founder over Anglo-French difficulties in regard to the Ruhr: If we expect that our attitude over the Ruhr will disappoint and estrange the French, then had we not better try to conclude the alliance now or at least make the offer of it before this happens? Otherwise, if we wait until after we have rejected the French plan for the Ruhr, the French may reject our offer of a treaty.19 Harvey pronounced in favour of an announcement that Britain sought an alliance with France and formal con¬ versations with the French on their wish for more Ruhr coal.

419

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

The French Government seemed unwilling to conclude an alliance until after an agreement on the Ruhr. Harvey accepted that opposition from the domestic ministries to food aid to France was likely to be insuperable, and he turned to another idea; an Anglo-French customs union was a possibility but only for the fairly distant future, and was not something ‘which holds out any prospect of helping us to achieve the short-term objective of influencing the French electorate’. But more limited steps were possible for immediate action in terms of ‘admitting further imports of such goods as scents, wines, vegetables, etc, of which the French have a surplus for export’. He concluded with an apocalyptic forecast of the consequences of a Communist victory in France, in phrases which were later to be immor¬ talised in the South-East Asian context as the ‘domino theory’: If as a result of the elections, France fell under Communist and Soviet control, a most dangerous situation might arise to this country. Belgium would probably also be Communist, whilst a similar regime, probably accompanied by civil war, would be set up in Spain. Great Britain might find herself a democratic outpost facing a Western Europe under Communist and Soviet control. Curiously, Harvey did not mention Italy with its powerful Communist Party.20 No treaty between Britain and France materialised at this time. On the contrary, both countries dug in their heels In April Bidault brusquely told Duff Cooper that an alliance in general terms only would be ‘une embrassade publicitaire sans consequence’. The previous day Bevin had told the French Ambassador, Rene Massigli, that he was not pre¬ pared to link the two questions of an alliance and of policy in Germany, and still less to go very far in meeting French wishes on the latter. In the words of the report sent to Cooper: Either an alliance was right or it was wrong and if it was right, in the interests of our two countries, it must be 420

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

dealt with on its merits. On the other hand, the German problem was not only that of the Ruhr or the Western zones, but the whole future of Germany was being determined and would have to be considered on the widest possible basis. I had been re-examining all the schemes put forward, including the French one, to see how we could evolve proposals which would meet French desires and at the same time produce a settled state of affairs in Germany and which would not involve cost to the British taxpayer. I made it clear that we had not been delaying this discussion but that the more I had examined the French proposal the more it had appeared to me unworkable. At the same time, there were obviously certain basic essentials that the French desired which I thought might be embodied in another plan. The Foreign Secretary was not prepared to run the risk of even worse economic conditions in the British zone and a break with the Soviet Union over Germany simply to please French opinion.21 Since the two governments could not agree on policy, Bevin turned to a different tack, reminiscent of the miasma of goodwill which Churchill and Roosevelt had created between themselves and Stalin during the war, though Bevin was not being insincere, and had infinitely more genuine common ground upon which to build with the French than Churchill had ever had with Stalin. The Peace Conference took him to Paris in the spring, and he and Bidault had a supremely successful social encounter at a dinner at the Canadian embassy on 15 May. As recorded by Pierson Dixon: The Secretary of State spoke of his love for France and of his sympathy with France’s difficulties in 1940. France had suffered terribly in the 1914-18 war and had never been given time to recover. He had always been a friend of France and had done all he could for General de Gaulle. Bidault responded warmly and Bevin, no doubt encouraged, 421

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

went on to let the French Foreign^ Minister know of his ultimate vision of Britain recovering full Great Power status by leading a West European group which would pursue with zeal the development of its many colonies: ‘The Secretary of State next reminded M. Bidault that if our two empires were coordinated we had together the greatest mass of man¬ power in the world.’22 Shortly after this a French general election produced moderately encouraging results from the Foreign Office point of view. The Christian Democratic MRP party over¬ took the Communists as the largest single party, and Bidault became Prime Minister. This helped to make the question of an alliance appear less urgent. In late July Harvey suggested that nothing should be done until after the four Foreign Ministers had made another attempt to resolve the German problem, on which talks would not be held until November. ‘We need not run after the French’, he added. S.H. Hebblethwaite of the West European Department drew up a lengthy list of problems between Britain and France, imply¬ ing a search for solutions to all of them which in turn would have meant a long process of alliance negotiation. He pointed out that the two countries were squabbling over money, with Britain accusing France of something like dishonesty in not adequately compensating British subjects affected by French nationalisation measures, and the French accusing the British of meanness in refusing to meet the sterling cost of training some French naval officers in Britain. Otherwise his memorandum read like something from the classic age of imperialism, with its references to the desirability of frontier rectification between British and French Somaliland and of the absorption by the Indian Empire of at least some of the small French dependencies on the east coast of India.23 Yet more elections were due in France in late October and the jittery mood in the Foreign Office reasserted itself’ though not as strongly as before. Bevin and Bidault had another convivial dinner party at the British embassy in Pans orill October. Bidault was modest in his requests for British help for his party: he would have liked the British Government to issue visas to British people who wished to 422

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

visit France as tourists (and spend money there); to sell France more Ruhr coal; and, less modestly, to support France on the separation from Germany of the Ruhr. Bevin said that the best he could do would be to support French views on the Saar in a speech which he was due to make in the Commons in a week or two - the French being deter¬ mined to detach that small but industrially important area from their zone of Germany and to attach it permanently to France. Bidault said that if there was another war, Western Europe would not be able to rely upon the Americans and that France and Britain would have to bear the brunt of it. Bevin replied that that was a subject on which he wished to talk with Bidault later in strict privacy. To some officials this was beginning to look like the heady and unreal atmosphere of Teheran and Yalta. Hoyer Millar commented that it would be mad for Britain to rely on France, rather than on America, in view of the continuing strength of the French Communist Party and of coalition governments in which the latter was represented: ‘If the elections turn out as we expect there is every likelihood that France will continue to sit on the fence and hesitate to take any action which might range herself with the Anglo-Saxon powers against Moscow.’24 The French, for their part, were worried by speeches by Churchill and Eden, developing the theme of the former’s celebrated Fulton speech in March, which they thought might mean that British policy was taking an extreme course towards the Soviet Union. Hector McNeil sought to reassure Massigli in a conversation in late October: ‘I said that we had no new facts and our policy [towards Russia] was unchanged ... I assured him that Churchill’s speech had been made without consultation with us; indeed, without any formal warning that he was going to ask these questions.’25 In the October elections the Communists polled 28 per cent of the votes and again became the single largest party. However, the Communists and Socialists combined did not have a parliamentary majority, as they had had the previous winter, and it had become clear since then that many Socialists were safely immune from succumbing to Commun¬ ist blandishments. A Communist France therefore looked

423

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less likely to the Foreign Office as matters stood in late 1946, but they were still worried that the Communists seemed to have become firmly entrenched as a party of government. A high-level meeting of officials in December 1946 was of the opinion that no French government in the foreseeable future would be able to pursue a foreign policy which left out of account the wishes of the Communist Party.’ The year therefore ended in mutual Anglo-French mistrust, with the French expressing their fears about being ignored by the British and Americans in their recent deci¬ sion to merge economically their two zones in Germany. Just before Christmas Massigli told Harvey of ‘his fear that as a result of our policy in combining the British and American zones, the financial reasons for which he fully understood, we might find ourselves economically bound up with German economy [j/c] to an extent which would be incom¬ patible with the close economic relations with France which we both desired’. He went on to plead for urgent talks on closer economic links between Britain and France. Bevin had been unwilling to subordinate his views on policy in Germany to French susceptibilities in any serious way, but showed that he did at least have misgivings about that in one of his rare minutes: ‘I felt when we did it it would have this effect all the more reason for getting on with before the German question is too fixed.’26

Ill A theoretical debate: Sir Nigel Ronald The tentative decision taken in November 1945 to aim at an alliance with France and probably not to follow it up with a formal Western group, including the Low Countries and possibly Denmark and Norway, accorded with, and obvi¬ ously to a large extent resulted from, Bevin’s wish not to take a step which the Soviet rulers, however unjustifiably would be likely to declare intolerably provocative Nigel Ronald wrote in that month: ‘The Foreign Secretary is very dubious about a Western group.’ Two months later Harvey was to write: ‘I think it is the Secretary of State’s policy that we should work steadily towards the closest cooperation 424

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

and integration, economically, socially and militarily, with our Western neighbours without at this stage creating any formal regional group.’ Bevin told his officials that he was determined to do all he could to prevent the world dividing into what he called ’the three Monroes’, referring to the Monroe Doctrine by which the young United States had warned the Old World countries to leave the states of Latin America alone, and that the United Nations must have supreme importance in British foreign policy.27 Officials concerned with Western Europe were thus left with having to devise a scheme for a Western group, if there was to be one at all, which could be dovetailed with the United Nations. Nigel Ronald placed himself at the centre of this debate. He was worried that British diplomats abroad, including such key figures as Frank Roberts, had no idea about thinking within the Foreign Office about a Western group. Roberts, for instance, seemed to be under the gross misconception that it was primarily about economics, not security. In fact, there were various opinions within the Office, and Ronald was performing a useful service in clearing some of the air. The officials had difficulty in deciding whether a Western group would be wholly for defence against Germany, or for defence against both Germany and Russia, or for defence only against Russia in everything but name. Some at the end of 1945 still found the last almost unthinkable. In December B.A.B. Burrows wrote: I suggest that the basis proposed for its existence, namely to prevent a renewal of German aggression, has more than merely nominal force. Even if actual aggres¬ sive action by Germany may not be conceivable for a long period, it remains true that the existence of a co-ordinated system between the Powers bordering Germany on the north and west would be likely both to prolong that period and to facilitate the tasks of occu¬ pation meanwhile. It seems likely from the present course of the discussions on the permitted level of German industry that we shall find very great difficulty in reconciling our full industrial disarmament require425

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

merits (and even more the more extreme requirements in this field of other Powers) with a form of German economy which has any chance of independent vi¬ ability. If so we shall.either have to allow Germany to retain certain plant which, from a strict security point of view, we should like to remove, or we shall have to deal with a permanent state of economic depression in Germany, or we shall have to supply funds from outside with the risk that they will, as after the last war, be used for undesirable purposes. In any of these eventualities a co-ordinated policy accepted by a Western group would be a considerable safeguard. This being so we need not scruple to insist that the object of any such Western group is to provide security with regard to Germany and to use these arguments to refute the inevitable suggestions that this is merely a blind to cover more sinister designs. Burrows concluded by advising as strongly as possible against the inclusion of any part of Germany within the group: the Russians would inevitably and rightly be out¬ raged and Germany could more usefully serve as ‘a wide no-man’s land in between’ the Western group and the Soviet ‘sphere of influence’ to Germany’s east.28 • Brimelow was decidedly more clear-headed than some of his colleagues in suggesting that everything now revolved around whether Russia was ‘out for trouble’ or was not. If the former were the case, then the advantages of a Western group were clear, including ‘a Germany of which the western part would have received advantages at our hands and might be disposed to side with us’. If it was not out for trouble, no harm would have been done. ‘After all, neither we nor the USA nor a Western bloc under our leadership are going to attack the USSR.’ The Russian leaders would feel some anxiety, but that was no more than what they deserved in view of their own conduct.29 Ronald’s own reflections, in a memorandum written at the beginning of 1946, were like those of a man with his head in the clouds in comparison with Brimelow’s realism. Ronald seemed to be trying to frame a scheme which would hold

426

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good whether the object of policy towards Germany was to rehabilitate it or to hold it down, and whether Britain and Russia were still allies or were now something more akin to enemies. Although only for internal discussion, his scheme was in a sense the forerunner of many a woolly design for reducing the tensions between the Western and Communist worlds over the post-war decades. He argued that, with the United Nations Charter as their starting-point, Britain and the Soviet Union should take the lead in setting up regional security groups, one in western and one in eastern Europe. Although the initial purpose would be defence against Germany, about which Britain and Russia could certainly agree, the very fact of such groups would make it possible safely to allow German industry to rebuild itself and not keep the country ‘a festering economic sore’. The ‘quite wrong’ Soviet objections to such rebuilding would have to be ignored. Although the existence of the two groups might seem like a formal acceptance of the East-West division of Europe, that would not be so: ‘The less these states [West¬ ern Europe] pull together the less is the likelihood of their being able to meddle individually or collectively in matters which Russia regards as of primary concern to her.’ So it would be the opposite of accepting the division of Europe; the West would be in a stronger position to expound its ideology: We must not blink the obvious fact that the real struggle is fundamentally an ideological one; social democracy versus Communism. To the social democrat of the West the basis of the State is quite definitely will, not force. May not all hope of preserving Western civilisation and Western standards disappear if we once begin to admit that force, not will, is the basis of the State? The reader of this memorandum can feel only dismay at the futility of the proposal to convince the Soviet rulers that Western Europe had to organise itself and treat with Germany in a liberal, enlightened way because of the nature of Western social democratic thought. They would have suspected something very sinister indeed. Ronald may have 427

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been right in saying that Britain would earn respect from Russia if it sought the formation of a Western group in accordance with its national interests and principles, but his ideas on the presentation of the project were arguably much less sound. He concluded with an example of the kind of liberal double-think which non-liberals, including the Soviet leaders, were, and are, likely to find at best incompre¬ hensible: Portugal and Spain should eventually be admitted to the Western group ‘when the latter has adopted a parliamentary democratic government’. The regime of Salazar in Portugal, though on friendly terms with Britain, was no less a dictatorship than that of Franco in Spain. Yet it alone was evidently to be exempt from any requirement that it should democratise itself.30 The question of a Western group came up from time to time in 1946 in connection with the less metaphysical issue of an Anglo-French alliance, which Britain definitely sought. The discussion tended to be on practical lines such as the uselessness of the smaller countries for defence against either Germany or Russia unless they were part of a larger whole and, above all, had British guidance and expertise. Cadogan, now usually remote from the seats of power as British representative at the United Nations, could still make an important contribution on this issue. Echoing Brimelow in favouring a Western group, he wrote early in 1946: If we are arranging insurance against Germany it seems to me only reasonable to bring in the other Western Powers. These individually are not impressive. The only way in which they could be enabled to make a useful contribution would be to integrate them in a Western system, politically, economically and militari¬ ly. That might provide a fairly good insurance against Germany. If Russia chooses to regard it as an insurance against herself, and if the cap fits, let her wear it. If Russia maintains her present status and strength, she cannot really be afraid of any aggression from the West. If on the other hand she is contemplating any herself we had better take such precautions as we can. 428

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Rumbold pointed out that, in any case, the French simply would not agree to an alliance in which the military planning was not exclusively against Germany. An Anglo-French alliance or wider Western group might lessen, not increase, British security since the French government machine, permeated by Communists at every level, would reveal the character of any Anglo-French staff talks to the Russians almost as soon as they occurred.31 In December 1946 Ronald returned to his scheme after an interval of exactly a year. In a letter to Frank Roberts, he cast some light over the scheme in its original and current forms. It had been conceived partly as a means of recovering full Great Power status for Britain, which the Foreign Office had seen slipping since the end of the war and the electoral defeat of Churchill with all his prestige: The UK, supported on a rational and well thought out plan by her neighbours, would, we thought, come to be regarded by the USA and the USSR as more of an equal in any hypothetically agreed over-all plan for the maintenance of world order. (Incidentally, while this consideration weighed heavily in our minds at the time of which I am writing, it weighs even more now, as you can well imagine.) The last sentence was presumably a reference to Britain’s mounting economic difficulties. He concluded that the attitude of the Soviet Union hardly augured well for his scheme if it was adopted as British policy. It had not actually been presented to Bevin ‘whose attitude is one of suspended judgement as to the utility of such an association in any context for any purpose’.32 Although Ronald feared to approach the Foreign Secre¬ tary with a scheme which he might reject as endangering his hopes for improved relations with Russia, it was precisely Bevin’s attitude which impelled Ronald to renew the debate about a Western group, with a view to producing a plan so manifestly fair to the Soviet Union that Bevin might support it and perhaps even Moscow accept it. Ronald felt that it would be disastrous to abandon any idea of Western European organisation in order merely not to provoke 429

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Stalin, and that resting content with- an alliance with France would be a second-best. In a new memorandum of December 1946 Ronald argued that the ‘long-term con¬ tainment of Germany’, should still provide a subject ‘on which we can agree with our Russian allies instead of always disagreeing with them’. Western and Eastern groups under British and Soviet leadership would act together on the control of German industry, at first under the Control Council in Berlin, but later under the United Nations Security Council. This, if successful and if coupled with similar security arrangements around the globe, would even¬ tually enable the Security Council to fix maximum levels of armaments, above which countries would agree to dispose of their surplus military capacity. Ronald felt that his scheme would constitute ‘the right sort of association between the countries of Western Europe - an association which could not with justice be saddled with the opprobrious label of “Western bloc”.’ Perhaps, but Ronald showed his tendency to ascend into flights of fantasy. He remarked that at the United Nations, Russia could continue to ‘sling mud’ at the Western powers if it wished to do so; the reality, not the appearance, of co-operation was what mattered.33 It might be asked whether the Western nations and the Soviet Union could really disarm while the sort of verbal abuse which they were then exchanging continued unabated. The response to Ronald’s revised scheme was not very favourable. Hector McNeil thought that it would work only ‘as long as Germany is a debit quantity’. As Germany recovered, both groups would seek the addition of that country and there would be more tension than ever. Burrows’s view was that it would work only if the Western group occupied a position of towering strength, and for that purpose American membership would be needed. The Western powers might then be able to secure a settlement of the German problem on lines which they favoured. Troutbeck wrote a minute which amounted to almost a groan that a prominent member of the Office could still imagine that the Soviet Union would see a British scheme for mutual co-operation as anything except a cunning trap to deceive and trick it. Later he broadened this into an attack on the 430

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

entire idea of global remedies — in this case, security groups in all parts of the world — and of the notion that an abstract scheme could solve an international problem, rather than schemes being tailor-made for each individual trouble-spot: It seems to me that it is misconceived to regard the world as a kind of jigsaw puzzle in which every piece has to be neatly fitted into its allotted place. Nor do I believe that any mechanical device for peace-keeping can remedy what is essentially a spiritual disease ... We should be on our guard against regarding peace¬ keeping groups or security pacts or model treaties etc. as useful except insofar as they express a genuine desire to make them work. In themselves they are not only useless but positively dangerous in that they give the ordinary man an entirely false sense of security. Nor does even the negotiation of them produce goodwill unless the desire for it is there already. Prophetically, Troutbeck urged that instead of the United Nations having regional security groups, each with a gran¬ diose military staff apparatus, the ‘device of a peace-keeping group’ under the United Nations should be used in those individual ‘danger spots’ where it could serve a purpose, which would not be all the danger spots in the world. A United Nations force along Greece’s frontiers with its north¬ ern neighbours might well be a good idea, but it was doubtful whether there could be any place for a United Nations peace-keeping machinery in Germany. The major powers had too much at stake in Germany, and there would merely be deadlock in the Security Council. Hankey’s frequent references to the scheme as ‘most ingenious’ suggested that he too had his doubts about it. It was ‘ingeniously contrived to emphasise the common German danger which ought to bind us and the Russians together’. The Russians, unfortunately, were almost certain to oppose any scheme to bring Western Europe closer together, ‘even on the excuse that it is necessary to contain Germany’ and despite the ‘illogical’ nature of such oppo¬ sition in view of what they were doing in eastern Europe. He continued:

431

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I am coming more and more to the conclusion that the real Soviet aim is to disintegrate the Western countries and particularly to isolate ourselves. In my view the best answer to this is to go quietly ahead and organise Western Europe in our own way and keep the Russians out and prevent them from using wrecking tactics. This is more or less, I understand, what we are trying to do in Western Europe. I hope therefore that if Sir N. Ronald’s most ingenious scheme is adopted we shall not let it develop in such a way that the Russians will be able to get more of a foot into our camp than they have already and prevent us organising and coordinating Western Europe. Experience in Germany and in the Soviet orbit shows conclusively that even if we have a right to have a say in affairs in their part of Europe, we shall in fact be pushed rudely out and allowed no say at all so that the element of reciprocity which Sir N. Ronald mentions is most unlikely to exist in practice.34 Ronald’s ideas were, then, criticised as being too theoretical and, in particular, as embodying the misconceptions that Britain and the Soviet Union still essentially had the same interests in regard to Germany and that Russia wanted co-operation provided it was to genuine mutual advantage. Brimelow had argued a year earlier that ‘We might as well omit the reference to our value as allies. The Russian conception of a valuable ally is a stooge.’35 Yet Ronald was near to Bevin who remained unwilling to abandon such ‘misconceptions’. At a meeting with some colleagues in December, Ronald modestly explained that his scheme was only a ‘cockshy’ and that it might be one answer to ‘the fact of the helplessness’ of Britain alone if there was a showdown with the Soviet Union. Even without that, ‘his Majesty’s Government are confronted with a crucial question: can the United Kingdom contrive to remain one of the principal second-class powers in the world, or must she sink to the status of a colonial appendage of an American Empire?’ Ronald was at this point being ultra-realistic compared with most of the Foreign Office in his assessment of Britain’s international

432

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position, and here again his thought coincided with that of the Foreign Secretary in seeing Western Europe as the instrument for recovering real Great Power status, even though Bevin might have no time for his particular scheme. Hardly anyone, in fact, had seen much merit in his ideas and, in late 1946, faced with the extreme economic weakness of Western Europe and the Communist menace, particularly in France, officials were beginning to wonder whether Churchill had been right in his wish for an all-out quest for alliance with the United States. Ronald himself was soon writing to Ashley Clarke at the embassy in Paris that his ‘cockshy’ was undergoing radical revision to substitute a modified version of Byrnes’s proposal for a four-power, 25-year treaty against German aggression ‘as the basic instrument on which the suggested association of Western European states should be built up’. If it could be achieved there would be no need for an alliance of Britain and France. The Ambassador, Duff Cooper, alarmed, travelled to London, and renewed his pleas for an alliance with France, even if the Byrnes treaty was signed. Only in that way could Britain ‘attain our real objective, viz., putting ourselves more nearly on a par with the USA and USSR by close association with our neighbours’.36

IV The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Aid and a permanent American role in the security of Western Europe Early in 1947 there were still grave doubts about the reliability of the United States as an ally, as well as a certain repugnance at settling down to the status of America’s junior ally if the country did prove ‘reliable’. The Foreign Office admitted that it was surprisingly difficult to find fault with American foreign policy since Truman had become President, except for some features personally associated with Byrnes, who had just left office. But the United States was still seen as an exceedingly volatile nation. The draft ‘Stock-Taking’ memorandum on East-West relations which was drawn up in January 1947, had this to say:

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The United States In the period following VE-Day, it seemed probable that the Americans would try to avoid committing themselves. There was much talk of mediation, and much fear of becoming involved in what was thought to be an Anglo-Soviet conflict. This phase is apparently over for the present. Most Americans seem to feel now that the dangers of conflict between themselves and the Soviet Union are greater than between the Soviet Union and the British Commonwealth. As a result, they are consciously or unconsciously tending to claim leadership of any forces in the world which are willing to stand up to excessive Soviet pretensions. But the situation is a precarious one. The Americans are a mercurial people, unduly swayed by sentiment and prejudice rather than by reason or even by con¬ sideration of their own long term interests. Their Government is handicapped by an archaic Constitu¬ tion, sometimes to the point of impotence, and their policy is to an exceptional degree at the mercy both of electoral changes and of violent economic fluctuations, such as might at any moment bring about a neutralisa¬ tion of their influence in the world.37 In a sense, the United States could do nothing right as far as the Foreign Office were concerned. As is illustrated by the above quotation, they grossly underestimated the determi¬ nation of Americans, both among the public and in ruling circles in Washington, to resist further Soviet advances. The dying embers of isolationism riveted their attention. In late January the embassy in Washington reported that one of the most powerful of American politicians, Senator Taft, was indifferent to the fate of Britain and wholly concerned with domestic affairs. Rundall commented that the American public would have to be educated to the importance to themselves of international relations as a precondition for politicians like Taft to be ‘intellectually convinced that domestic and foreign affairs are now so interrelated that our economic collapse would inevitably affect his cherished domestic programme’. Yet at the end of 434

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1946 Sargent had finally pronounced in favour of going ahead with the proposed treaty with France, having toyed with the idea of abandoning it in favour of exclusive concentration on the proposed Byrnes treaty (see above, pp. 432-3). This decision was taken in the expectation of strong United States opposition to the British-French treaty, on the grounds that it detracted from the Byrnes plan and that it would be folly for Britain to co-operate with a country whose Government included Communists. ‘AngloAmerican cooperation, especially military’, wrote Sargent, ‘might dry up even if it does not result in a positive slackening off of America’s present very healthy concern with the affairs of Europe.’ He conceded that the treaty would be a godsend to neo-isolationists in America, but it should still be sought because: ... if we make every move in the realm of high policy contingent on American prior approval, our prospects of being able to give a lead to Western Europe will vanish and we shall never attain what must be our primary objective, viz., by close association with our neighbours to create a European Group which will enable us to deal on a footing of equality with our two gigantic colleagues [sic], the USA and USSR. In short, in the eyes of Foreign Office officials, Americans, whether isolation-minded like Taft or among those ‘con¬ sciously or unconsciously’ seeking the lead against Soviet pretensions, left something to be desired.38 Then came the announcement by President Truman which was to become known as the Truman Doctrine. Precipitated by Britain’s decision greatly to reduce aid to Greece in response to desperate economic circumstances at home, Truman, in a message to Congress on 12 March, proclaimed a policy not only of large-scale aid to Greece and also to Turkey, but, in addition, a general policy of resisting the advance of Communism everywhere, if his words were to be interpreted literally. The interpretation of his words became indeed a major Foreign Office preoccupation. Few in the Office felt wholly happy with his sweeping pronouncement, and he was given curiously little credit for repudiating 435

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isolationism so roundly; neither were the American people for responding so favourably to his message. On the con¬ trary, there was fear of the United States producing conflict between Russia and the West for no sufficient reason. This was expressed most outspokenly by Gladwyn Jebb. In a private letter to Dixon he complained about ‘this flat-footed Red Bogey approach’, even if it was ‘the only way to scare the Senators into any form of action’. The ‘manner’ of Truman’s statement was ‘quite lamentable’ unless absolutely essential for that purpose. For more general consumption, a week after the President’s address Jebb complained that: The oecumenical use of the word ‘peoples’ ... even suggests that if any conscious minority (for instance in a constituent republic of the Soviet Union) should show signs of desiring a regime other than totalitarian, the United States, in some way or other, would come to its support. Even if not everything in the address was meant seriously, Truman did seem to envisage ‘an enduring struggle’ between his country and Russia, and also seemed to be saying that the United States would not recognise a ‘legal’ Communist victory, for instance by the French or Italian Communist Parties in a free election. Jebb wondered where that left the United Nations whose raison d’etre had been Great Power co-operation. Both America and Russia would presumably now use it ‘as a stalking horse for the propagation of its own “way of life’’.’ He hoped that Britain would treat the United Nations differently ‘in the hope of better times and of the creation of circumstances in which it may become more of a living reality’. He grudgingly conceded that the declaration was not all bad; ‘on the contrary, something like President Truman’s declaration was undoubtedly necessary if the process of Communist infiltration and penetration was ever to be halted’ in Greece.39 Wilson Young of the North American Department sug¬ gested that Truman was merely using the normal, robust language of American politics, and that the United States would give only financial and economic aid, not military, to anti-Communist elements and then only ‘under certain 436

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circumstances’. Warner was not so sure. The State Depart¬ ment and the American Chiefs of Staff did not appear to be content merely with preventing Qreece and Turkey from ‘succumbing to Slav pressure’. They had approached Britain for a joint examination of what could be done to resist Communism in certain other countries threatened with take-over: Hungary, Austria, Italy, Iran and China. Truman’s speech might include much verbiage, so that ‘Mr Jebb’s detailed analysis may almost be misleading’. Even so, the Americans did seem to be contemplating ‘a policy of resistance to Communist regimes ... over the whole field’, and, at the least, ‘the prevention of the setting-up of Communist-controlled governments in countries where they do not at present exist’. M.E. Dening of the Far Eastern Department reinforced this interpretation by reference to what he understood were the latest developments of American policy in South Korea. The United States were apparently going to make a 600-million-dollar grant to that country. That would mean not only the repudiation of a four-power trusteeship under which the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China would have guided Korea to independence as one country; it would also mean a huge investment in a country totally lacking ‘a competent and farsighted administration’ and with the poorest pros¬ pects of acquiring one. That they were prepared to spend their money in so unpromising a place did ‘suggest that the challenge is of world-wide application’. It was left to Jock Balfour in the Washington embassy to try to reassure his colleagues at home that, in repudiating isolation, the American Administration had in no way taken leave of its senses by going too far in the opposite direction. In a letter to Jebb, he asserted that the ‘reaction’ which Truman promised in every country threatened by Commun¬ ism would vary greatly from country to country. They were indeed ready to act strongly in South Korea as well as in Greece and Turkey, but they were sceptical about giving much more help to Chiang Kai-shek. As a soldier, Marshall believed in concentrating his forces where the prospects of victory were good, and his view was that they were good in Greece and Turkey. Depending on whether it succeeded or 437

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failed in those countries, the Truman scheme might become of worldwide importance, a sort of extended Monroe doc¬ trine, or wither and die like the Stimson Doctrine of 1931 by which the United States had opposed the Japanese conquest of Manchuria solely with gestures. The United States, he went on, had no intention of denying aid to countries merely because they tolerated legal Communist Parties, nor of trying to stir up revolts in countries already under firm Communist control. It was also worth recalling that the Americans had not made their loan to Britain in any way conditional on the British Government modifying its domes¬ tic socialist policies. America was not embarking on a crusade to impose its way of life on others: The American decision was not the opening of an offensive against the Soviet Union, but a reply to aggressive action on the part of the latter. What the United States Government has in effect done, as a result of Mr Truman’s statement, is to serve notice on the Soviet Government that it proposes to exert its influence, not to bring about the abandonment by the latter of its domestic Communism, or even of its search for security, but merely of its attempts to impose the Communist way of life upon countries which are now non-Communist and unlikely to accept Communism excepting under pressure. In the context of SovietAmerican relations the statement is thus to be regarded as an extension of the policy of patient firmness which has been practised for the past fourteen months. It is the hope of the Administration that this new move will serve to convince the Kremlin that intransigence does not pay and that the prospects of an adjustment of interests between the East and West will thus be promoted. American policy was that the United Nations should become more important, not less. The Soviet Union might take it seriously when it could no longer be used as a propaganda talking-shop to distract attention while one country after another was added to the Soviet camp. Why were his colleagues in London not rejoicing ‘that the United States 438

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does not intend to reproduce in regard to the Kremlin the spectacle of indifference to embryonic aggression which it offered to the pre-war Nazi-Fascist dictators when their thrust for world power was gathering momentum’? The Foreign Office were, in fact, somewhat mollified, and even had the grace to concede that the ambiguities in Truman’s address, in so far as they were the result of haste in preparation, might have been partly Britain’s fault for withdrawing so hastily from Greece.40 In fairness, the danger of the United States entering a mood in which it was spoiling for a fight with the Soviet Union did exist, and already exercised some highly-placed Americans. They included George Kennan, somewhat tormented by the knowledge that he had played such an important role in preparing the ground for Truman’s new policy, and Walter Bedell Smith, the Ambassador in Moscow, who told his British counter¬ part, Peterson, in June that he was ‘frightened of the extent to which opinion in the United States has become violently anti-Soviet’41 By that time Europe was in the era of the Marshall Aid project, following the new Secretary of State’s historic speech at Harvard on 5 June (see above, pp. 279-84). It was almost providential that a readiness among the American public, and therefore also in Congress, to give Europe financial aid - albeit largely dictated by a self-interested wish to have allies in the power-struggle with Soviet Communism and by a determination to rehabilitate west Germany economically so that eventually it would need no more subsidies - developed suddenly in 1946-7 at the same time as Western Europe’s need for such aid became acute.42 During the weeks before the conference in Paris at which Molotov turned down Soviet participation in the project, British diplomats found that American thinking on the difficult problem of how Russia and its satellites should be treated under the proposal was gratifyingly similar to their own: the Communist countries could join in, provided they did not make trouble for the others and provided they did not have a controlling voice in whatever body handled the disbursing of aid. On 11 June Dixon recorded officially a conversation with Paul Porter, a senior American diplomat, 439

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in which both agreed on the undesirability of setting up a United Nations Economic Commission for Europe to dis¬ burse the money since ‘the Slav countries’ - a phrase now in fairly frequent use - might, with a few allies, control the voting: ‘This would mean not only that we would have difficulty in securing a design to follow up the Marshall statement to us but we might burden the State Department with a plan which is politically unpalatable because of the Slav share in any share-out.’ Porter suggested an ad hoc body which would not be so afflicted. Later, Balfour reported from Washington talks with Bohlen and Kennan on the State Department’s attitude to Soviet participation. The United States would insist on Russia not adopting a selfish attitude. The Russians could have aid ‘if only they could be induced to call a halt to their own disruptive propaganda on all fronts and to permit their satellites to enter fully into economic relations with their Western neighbours’. If an all-European scheme proved impossible the United States would be satisfied with one for Western Europe only. (It is not clear whether Bohlen and Kennan said so to Balfour, but they advised Marshall that the chances of the Soviet Union accepting aid on American terms were negligible.) The Foreign Office could hardly have put it better themselves, except for one sting in the tail of the Bohlen-Kennan message so far as Britain was concerned: ‘A more economi¬ cally integrated Europe was the only satisfactory long-term solution.’43 The entire problem having been disposed of by Molotov’s boorish intransigence at the Paris Conference, Rundall felt confident that the Administration would be able to over¬ come residual parochial opposition to the aid scheme inside the United States by emphasis on the fact that ‘the possibil¬ ity that Western Europe might fall under Communist influ¬ ence is by far the greatest strategic risk’. It is curious that the British did at least do research on the possibility of them¬ selves and other West European countries giving loans and other aid to Eastern Europe, excluding the Soviet Union, which would have meant that area indirectly receiving Marshall Aid. A Foreign Office memorandum of November 1947 even stated, with remarkable solicitude for the peoples 440

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of Eastern Europe, that their new Communist regimes seemed determined to industrialise at all costs, ‘and if aid were not provided, might do so at the cost of reducing their standard of living’. A report by M.C. Kaser at the end of the year concluded that Eastern Europe was making quite a good recovery in industry and mining, and to some extent in food production, and seemed likely to achieve a tolerable economic level without Western assistance.44 The Marshall Aid plan produced feelings of gratitude and admiration towards the United States where the Truman Doctrine had notably failed to do so. In November a Foreign Office writer made the contrast: ‘The “Truman Doctrine” was a panic move, whereas the Marshall proposals rested on a more sane and thoughtful appreciation of the position.’ Both policies were in essence anti-Soviet, but that did not make them the same: ‘It was the public attitude to the two policies that remained relatively unchanged - i.e. it was the public who by their emphasis on the anti-Communist aspect of each policy gave force to the belief that the Marshall plan was only an extension of the Truman Doctrine.’ He con¬ cluded: ‘The difficulty is that, if the people begin to take a less hysterical attitude towards American foreign policy, their interest in Europe’s plight may wane through the withdrawal of the present acute stimulus of fear.’45 Economic aid was one thing. American participation in the security of Western Europe was another and one for which the Foreign Office in late 1947 still hardly dared to hope. In October Sargent held talks with his French counterpart, Chauvel, the secretary-general of the French Foreign Minis¬ try. Sargent’s chief concern was to persuade France to merge its occupation zone in Germany into the British-American Bizone. Chauvel indicated that Russia would find that so provocative that France would require a formal British and perhaps also American guarantee of its security against the Soviet Union. (The Dunkirk treaty in March was, of course, directed exclusively against Germany.) Sargent hoped that France would not persist with this demand. The United States would have to be coaxed into European security and the best means to do that was still the Byrnes treaty, ostensibly anti-German but now with only three signatories 441

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since the Soviet Union had so unequivocally excluded itself. Indeed, although the treaty in its original form would still be anti-German ‘no doubt it could be adjusted to circumstances as they arose. It would, however, in our opinion be unwise in the extreme to frighten the public by staging Anglo-French military talks prematurely and without reference to the Americans.’46 The failure of the London Foreign Ministers’ Conference on Germany in December (see above, pp. 288-90), with the Americans taking the initiative in terminating what had by any standards become a pointless exercise, decided Bevin that the time had come to abandon any hope of serious negotiations with Russia, and to try to interest both the Americans and the continental West Europeans in strictly defensive arrangements for the security of Western Europe. In an important conversation on 17 December Bevin told Marshall that now that the conference had broken down: His own idea was that the problem should not be isolated into a mere quarrel between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. The issue, to use a phrase of the American ambassador’s, was where power was going to rest. His own idea was that we must devise some Western democratic system, comprising the Americans, ourselves, France, Italy etc and of course the Dominions. This would not be a formal alliance, but an understanding backed by power, money and reso¬ lute action. It would be a sort of spiritual federation of the West. He knew that formal constitutions existed in the United States and France. He, however, preferred, especially for this purpose, the British conception of unwritten and informal understandings. If such a powerful consolidation of the West could be achieved it would then be clear to the Soviet Union that having gone so far they could not advance further. Thinking that the Americans were still very far from ready to commit themselves to the defence of Western Europe, he presented his thoughts on security as chiefly designed to reassure the French, who might be satisfied with a threepower version of the anti-German Byrnes treaty, expanded 442

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to include Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands: ‘The essential task was to create confidence in Western Europe that further Communist inroads would be stopped. The issue must be defined and clear.’ Bevin evidently felt that a treaty against German aggression would be seen, inevitably by now, as applying also against Soviet aggression. He added that, whatever America’s decision, his Government pro¬ posed to authorise staff talks with France, the principal obstacle to which had disappeared some months previously with the departure of Communist ministers from the French Government. These talks would be of trifling importance compared with British military co-operation with the United States, ‘with whom our military conversations were like those between members of one country’. Marshall had no objections provided Britain did not try to make any connec¬ tion between its military links with the United States and any which it might forge with France. Bevin then told Marshall how fortified he felt by the support which he was receiving from the TUC General Council, who had just ‘decided to oppose the Communists resolutely if they attempted to start any trouble here’ as well as supporting his foreign policy. Bevin perhaps did not stop to consider whether Marshall, with his very different back¬ ground, would be much concerned or impressed by trade union support. Bevin concluded rather grandly that now ‘the spiritual consolidation of Western civilisation was possible’. Marshall was equally grandiloquent, if evasive. Bevin’s words, he said, were wise in the extreme. He had done much in the material field with the European Recovery Pro¬ gramme. Now it was time to move on to ‘spiritual aspects’, giving what was being done on the material plane ‘greater dignity’. They should truly reach ‘a clear understanding’.47

V Relations with France and Western Europe in the year of the Marshall Aid Plan Developments during 1947 made it possible to be cautiously optimistic about an American role in West European security. Yet Bevin remained devoted to the concept of 443

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some type of West European unity, formal or informal, under British leadership, both because he did not think that the Americans could be relied upon permanently to defend Western Europe and aid it economically and because he did not want Western Europe in general, and Britain in particu¬ lar, to become merely an appendage of American power. Sargent was echoing his chief when he said in December 1946 that Britain had to carry the project for alliance with France to completion, even at the risk of displeasing the United States and giving a fillip to isolationists (see above, pp. 434-5). He added that the treaty had to be seen not as an end in itself but ‘as a first stepping-stone on the long and difficult road towards the establishment of a world security system, and consequently as a means to create the right sort of association between the nations of Western Europe who share a common civilisation’.48 The Stock-Taking memo¬ randum of January 1947, to which reference has been made several times already, might have been penned by Bevin himself, if he had had any gift for the written word, in asserting that in its relations with Western Europe Britain now had a priceless asset, the existence of a Labour, and not a Conservative, Government: Finally, the regime [s/c] should provide a useful pattern for Europe. Since the war the Right has been un¬ fashionable on that Continent, and the existence of a workable alternative to Communism on the Left is now demonstrable. But owing to the weakness of most European Social Democratic parties not much advan¬ tage has been taken of this. In particular, largely owing to the strength of Communism in France, it has been impossible to make much headway with the building up of a bloc of Western Democratic states in Europe under British leadership.49 The internal Communist menace in Western Europe came to appear somewhat less threatening in 1947. In France, by far the most important country, Communist ministers left the Government in May, not, as it transpired, to return for thirty-four years, and a wave of purely political, Communistordered strikes late in the year was on balance a failure. 444

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944—7

As in France, so in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy the Foreign Office had to accept the advice of their ambassadors in those countries that there was nothing Britain could do to lessen the influence or popular support of the Communist Parties, apart, in Brimelow’s words, from ‘publicising our own experiments and achievements’ - the marvellous asset of a Labour Government once again. With the French showing signs of coming to their senses about Communism unaided, and with negotiations for an alliance with France at an advanced stage following a visit to Britain by the French Prime Minister, the veteran politician Leon Blum, Bevin asked the Cabinet in late January to think favourably about the promotion of a closer association between Britain and the Commonwealth and Western Europe. He drew attention to a problem which for decades was to show few signs of diminishing. As to this closer association: ... it seemed likely that this could best be achieved by creating a community of commercial interests. It could not, however, be assumed that such an arrangement would necessarily be of economic advantage to the United Kingdom; and it might be that economic dis¬ advantages would have to be weighed against political advantages.50 The first formal step in the grand design was taken on 4 March 1947 with the signature by Bevin and Bidault of the Treaty of Dunkirk for joint resistance to renewed German aggression. A few days later Truman’s message to Congress on aid to Greece and Turkey dispelled any fears that the United States might soon revert to isolation. As an added bonus, the Soviet reaction to the Dunkirk Treaty, while it was still in the negotiation stage and for some time after¬ wards, was muted or, as Roberts put it, ‘gingerly’, accusing Britain of seeking to exploit and dominate France but not of directly threatening Russia.51 The treaty led to another bout of minor embarrassment with Belgium, which, under the redoubtable impetus of Spaak’s leadership in foreign policy, requested an Anglo-Belgian treaty to parallel that with France. The British refused, partly - a genuine reason 445

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

because the Dutch Government was not ready to sign a treaty with Britain, even against German aggression, for fear of annoying either Russia or the United States; but also because, as the Dominions were informed, ‘Soviet Govern¬ ment might interpret this as beginning of a Western bloc, and it might prejudice conclusion of four-power treaty proposed by United States, to which we attached utmost importance.’ The British saw the treaty with France as simply too important for either Soviet or possible American misgivings about it to be allowed to prevail. They were prepared to cold-shoulder little Belgium in the interests of another attempt at better relations with Russia. Even the fact that Bevin, on a visit to Brussels, had remarked expan¬ sively both to Belgian journalists and to the Belgian Foreign Ministry that they could have a British-Belgian treaty whenever they liked was not allowed to make any differ¬ ence.52 During the spring, in what, with hindsight, was the inter¬ lude before Marshall’s offer of aid, the Foreign Office felt obliged to devote some attention to the discouragement of Churchill’s agitation for a United States of Europe. Implicitly, officials’ comments also indicated caution about Bevin’s call to the Cabinet in January for closer links between Britain and the Commonwealth and Western Europe. In April the Foreign Office advised the relevant British embassies not to encourage Churchill’s ideas, both because of the need not to provoke Russia if it could be avoided, and because of the danger of Germany dominating such a scheme (see above, pp. 279 and 336). But the latter consideration went hand-in-hand with an assertion that, ‘It seems unlikely that, with her overseas commitments and her special relationship with America, the United Kingdom could ever agree to merge her own in some European sovereignty.’ British diplomats should say that Britain did favour a regional grouping, confined to Western Europe, provided it was ‘a natural and gradual growth of the idea of mutual assistance, and, therefore, in harmony with the regional concept of which the United Nations Charter takes account’; plus also a United Nations Economic Commission for Europe - an idea which, as noted above, was to cease to 446

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

find favour after Marshall had enunciated the need to give Europe aid; and, below the level of state-to-state dealings, ‘close relations between those parliamentary parties and non-political institutions in the United Kingdom and other countries who advocate and wish to defend Social Demo¬ cratic principles against totalitarian attack’. Yet again the Foreign Office had no time for democratic parties which were not also socialist. The circular concluded that any Soviet objections to these modest proposals should be disregarded since they could not ‘reasonably be regarded as provocative or aggressive’.53 In May Churchill paid a visit to Paris in which he combined his attendance at ceremonies at which he received various French honours, including a military one which was awarded only to private soldiers and exceptionally distinguished generals, with exuberant publicity for a United States of Europe. Duff Cooper, British Ambassador and a former political colleague, tried to discourage him, and in particular advised him that it was necessary to be careful what one said about Germany. Churchill’s appeal to the French to grant Germany ‘the great part to which her population and the qualities of her people entitled her’ might not have gone down well among a French people still reeling from the suffering and humiliation of the war years. On the other hand, Cooper also argued against Churchill’s view, which certainly would have gone down well in France, that Germany should be a federation of separate states, by which he presumably meant a confederation. Cooper pointed out that that bore little resemblance to the German policies of the ‘three great powers’ - the British Ambassador to France evidently did not regard France as a great power which all favoured German unity of some kind, and that, in any case, ‘the recreation of the separate states of Germany was almost as impossible as would be in England the recreation of the Heptarchy’ of Anglo-Saxon times. Cooper added that Churchill was ‘very unwilling’ to listen to criti¬ cism. Officials in London expressed a sort of respectful exasperation about Churchill’s latest venture. E.E. Tomkins contrasted the ‘practical basis on which a European group¬ ing could be formed’, and which the Foreign Office sought, 447

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

with Churchill’s wish for ‘a sublime act of faith’ and ‘a sort of religious profession’ which ‘could not serve as a foreign policy for His Majesty’s Government or for [Churchill] himself if he were in power’. John Wilson saw a similarity between Churchill’s idea and the 1930 plan for a united Europe by the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, which ‘was woolly in the extreme and was torn to pieces in a minute of Sir A. Cadogan’s’.54 Marshall’s offer of aid inevitably put Churchill’s doings into the shade. There seemed a fortunate possibility that the American insistence that the European countries had to draw together and produce joint plans could be made to fit in with Bevin’s personal inclination to travel along that same road. Besides his more general reasons, the Foreign Secre¬ tary also sought reassurance if the conference on Germany due in London in November failed, and with it ended the last hope of co-operation with the Soviet Union. In September he held talks with the French Prime Minister, Ramadier, in which he repeatedly reverted to the theme that Western Europe could and should present a front of unity towards the United States. He also mentioned his firm conviction that the key to raising their two countries economically to a point where they would be on equal terms with America lay in the joint development of their vast colonies. During the war he had been struck by the large number of raw materials which the United States lacked. The British and French colonies had those raw materials, he said. Britain and France together would ‘form a very rich whole, and no other country could compete with them in experience’: If it were possible to achieve a real common front, the two countries in unison could almost immediately occupy in the world a place equivalent to that of Russia and of the United States. It was only because they were separated that the Western democracies, hampered by their traditions and their national pride, could not occupy the preponderant position in the world which was due to Western Europe. 448

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

Mr Bevin emphasised the importance of our position on the map of Europe to the west of the regrettable but definite line of partition constitlited by the Oder and northwards from the Mediterranean. A few days later Bevin told a meeting which included Hall-Patch, an economist, that Russian policy was such that the division of Europe into two halves might be inevitable, ‘and it therefore became necessary to attempt to organise the Western states into a coherent unity. The Marshall Plan offered an opportunity of making the first step in this direction by endeavouring to form a customs union.’ HallPatch made some mundane remarks about French goods being uncompetitively-priced. Bevin merely continued to expound his vision: The Secretary of State then developed the thesis that by creating vested interests of each Western state in the other Western states a union could be built up which would have natural cohesion and political reality. It might be possible to make economic arrangements of the kind which he had in mind not only with France, but also with Italy, which could offer much needed food¬ stuffs, Ireland and the Benelux countries. In such a combination the Western states would be more nearly independent of the United States and would be able to exercise a strong influence on Eastern Europe. The Secretary of State then referred to military cooperation, which in the case of France was compli¬ cated by the backwardness of French training and organisation, and then passed on to cultural relations. He felt that a good deal more could be done by broadcasts to Western European countries and from the Western countries to the United Kingdom, by making paper available for the export of books and by promoting personal contacts between Frenchmen and Englishmen of those classes which hitherto have had no opportunity of mixing.55 The French seemed anxious to follow up Bevin’s approach to their Prime Minister. On 2 October Massigli brought up 449

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the need for a joint approach on Middle East oil as a practical avenue to increased co-operation. Britain and France ‘were becoming increasingly dependent on Middle East oil’, and yet Britain seemed poised to withdraw troops from Egypt and Palestine. It was surely necessary to give these ‘essential supplies’ ‘adequate protection’. British offi¬ cials were predictably alarmed that their chief was going too far and too fast. The French might even think that he was reviving Churchill’s offer, made in 1940, of a union between Britain and France. John Wilson commented on 10 October that at present Britain was concerned solely with economic co-operation. Political union could not be undertaken ‘with¬ out a very considerable education of public opinion, and we are not yet at all sure whether a union would in fact be either workable or advantageous’. Even economic co-operation was running into heavy weather. Two days earlier, at an inter-departmental meet¬ ing, officials from the economic ministries and the Colonial Office had shown themselves notably lacking in any sense of Bevin’s purpose. Lintott of the Board of Trade said that if there was a pooling of resources with France, ‘We should be the losers. We should be in the position of holding up France.’ Harvey reminded them that his chief ‘was thinking in terms of economic association for political reasons, such as the combatting of Communism’. Ellis-Rees of the Treasury said that Britain could not afford to send its best exports to France ‘if we only got back tourists and wine’. Sir Sidney Caine of the Colonial Office remarked that the British and French empires were broadly comparable in resources; there was little to be had from the French colonies which Britain could not get from its own. (Several months earlier, W. Blanch of the Foreign Office had brought up a political difficulty about Bevin’s cherished vision of British-French colonial co-operation: As regards harmonising our Moslem and African colonial policies with the French, the difficulty is surely that we are quite definitely committed to a policy of ultimate independence for all our colonial territories and are genuinely prepared to endeavour to fit them 450

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

for self-government. There is, on the other hand, no evidence that the French, in fact if not in form, afe not still continuing a policy of political sterilisation and the retention of all effective power in their own hands. If Bevin had read this, which is unlikely, it would have cut little ice with him. His hopes for colonial development were not primarily concerned with the interests or wishes of the colonial peoples.)56 The other ministries had reluctantly to proceed with examining means of translating the Foreign Secretary’s idea into reality. However, it was the Foreign Office which soon found itself in retreat. The problem lay in the absolutely serious nature of Britain’s economic circumstances. P.M. Crosthwaite, head of the West European Department, wrote at the end of October that Britain’s economic position was ‘really critical’, and that that presented great obstacles to Anglo-French economic co-operation since: ‘France wants to get from us goods in short supply and to let us have in return goods which are not essential to us. We cannot at present afford to do business on this basis.’ An AngloFrench standing committee on trade was about to start meeting, but during the coming winter the British side would have to base themselves on the hardest commercial bargain¬ ing. After that it might be possible to make concessions such as releasing foreign exchange to British people who wished to visit France as tourists, something which the French were known particularly to want. Norman Hogg, another member of the Department, wrote in early November that he was in a quandary whether the current economic talks with France were being approached from a primarily economic or politi¬ cal angle, and asked for instruction on what he should say to Duff Cooper, who was sending impassioned pleas from Paris for the political approach. Bevin signed a letter to Cooper on the lines of Crosthwaite’s minute: the economic approach now, the political later perhaps. It might be added that Cooper, who was due to leave the Paris embassy at Christ¬ mas, was urging staff talks as well as a customs union, and on that Bevin was able to give him more than a crumb of 451

Britain and the Cold Wqr 1941-1947

comfort with the news immediately before he retired that since the Foreign Ministers’ Conference had failed, BritishFrench staff talks could now take place.57 By then France’s stock in the eyes of British officials had risen appreciably with the French Government’s successful breaking of a wave of Communist-inspired strikes. Those, beginning in November, had been the work of the Commun¬ ist trade unions in France. They reinforced, if that was possible, the Foreign Office belief that the leaders of the French Communist Party were at the absolute beck and call of the Soviet Union. John Wilson noted how easily the Communist leader, Thorez, had set aside the Popular Front approach which he had been advocating in one form or another since the mid-1930s, as had his deputy, Duclos: Thirteen years of work by these two has now been scrapped by the inscrutable men in the Kremlin. The middle classes and the peasants are now given up as useless. The Socialists are denounced as violently as de Gaulle himself. There is no more talk of ‘United Action’. Wilson added five days later: The situation is very serious. The Communists are making every effort (including violence and intimida¬ tion where necessary) to prevent the ordinary workers who now want to return to work from doing so or from making themselves heard. Mr Ashley Clarke [minister at the embassy in Paris] told me yesterday that the French themselves thought that they could handle the situation. But the Commun¬ ists are clearly making an all-out effort to wreck the life of the country, and it is not going to be an easy task to prevent them. Wilson wondered: ‘Is this the great test, which will decide the future of France, or is it merely a worsening of the mess the country is in already?’ The former interpretation was suggested by Peterson in Moscow, for whose advice Wilson was grateful: 452

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

His Majesty’s ambassador at Moscow is in a position to speak authoritatively and we have here his support for the view that the current strikes in France and Italy are: 1. Coordinated by Moscow. 2. Designed to prevent effective United States assist¬ ance to Western Europe. 3. Possibly aimed at outright revolution. It was gratifying, then, that the strikes petered out in early December. Harvey thought that the Communists’ only remaining hope was of de Gaulle returning to power depen¬ dent on the ultra-Right. France would then be polarised, and the Communists might again hope to increase their support. Ashley Clarke spent part of his Christmas Day in 1947 writing with satisfaction about the failure of Communist strategy in France. He was convinced that at the Cominform conference the French Party had been given absolute orders to embark on ‘new and aggressive tactics’ and no latitude to adapt the orders to French conditions. Happily, France had not been in a revolutionary mood when the orders were carried out with the launching of the strikes. The latter had been quite successful economically. Losses in production inflicted by them ‘represent at a conservative estimate half the value of the interim aid granted to France by the United States’. That was vastly outweighed by the political damage which the French Communists had done to themselves; ‘faced with the choice between a degrading capitulation and a suicidal insurrection’, they had chosen the former. They had lost some of their working-class support, and the French Government now felt emboldened to protect those workers who wished to work. France now stood a good chance ‘of being able to steer the ship of state safely between the Scylla of General de Gaulle and the Charybdis of Communism’.58 To return to the mainstream of British dealings with France in late 1947, with the failure of the London Foreign Ministers’ Conference Bevin felt able to soar above mere economic co-operation into the realm of high politics. On 17 December he had important talks with Bidault and then with Marshall. As already noted, he had become a sufficientlyaccomplished practitioner of the diplomatic art to give each 453

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

the impression that his country was of supreme importance to Britain. In reality, of course, both of them were of vital importance, and if America had had to be chosen as the more important, it would have been a difficult decision. Bevin interrupted Bidault’s rejoicing that the conference was over to say that Britain and France should encourage the Americans to do the right thing in Europe, ‘while letting the Americans say and think that it was they who were acting’. At the same time they should ‘avoid, if possible, giving the Russians a slogan or a plan with which to come out against the Western powers and embarrass all three of them’. Bevin was ‘anxious not to lay ourselves open to charges of appearing too aggressive towards the Soviet Union until we had our plans ready, and he did not wish to act ostentatiously’. He went on to outline his beliefs about the organisation of Western Europe and the role of the United States: The Secretary of State said that Europe, as he saw it, was now divided from Greece to the Baltic and from the Oder to Trieste. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate the countries east of those lines. Our task was to save Western civilisation. He himself felt that we should have to come to some sort of federation in Western Europe whether of a formal or informal character. It was no use pretending that we could withstand the Eastern pressure by our traditional methods. As an Englishman, he hoped it would not be necessary to have formal constitutions. Everything should be flexible, but we should act quickly. The Americans must be brought in and he proposed to warn Mr Foster Dulles, who [s/c] he was seeing at lunch today [and who was spokesman on foreign policy for the Republican Party], that matters could not be drawn out indefinitely. He had warned him already that the Russians could walk around the Americans as long as the Americans allowed themselves to be entangled in their lengthy Congressional procedures. He would add that America must now face the situation. If we and the French played our part it would not be good enough 454

Britain, the USA and Western Europe 1944-7

for the Americans to expect us to take action while they themselves were not ready to take any risk until a much later stage. They had to be persuaded that we were all in this together as allies and that was the goal towards which we must now strive. As regards Britain, he did not fear Communist or Soviet propaganda here. He drew M. Bidault’s attention to a leader in today’s Daily Herald, and added that the trade unions were now acting vigorously against Communist infiltration. These remarks may be contrasted with the much more wishy-washy ones to Marshall on the same day, though alike in his proud reference to trade union support for his policies (see above, pp. 442-3). Bevin felt exasperated doubt about an American commitment to West European security, so that France really did loom as the principal partner. He suggested to Bidault that urgent military talks had become an absolute necessity: Britain and France must agree on their best line of defence. Somehow or other military talks between them must be begun quite soon, but in the most confidential manner, and we should try to bring the Americans in later, remembering, however, that America would never agree to military alliances or treaties. There were ways and means of bringing the American Chiefs of Staff to work with us. One had to build up their confidence and not rush matters. He suggested that in absolute secrecy Britain and France should send a small joint team of officials to Washington for talks with American officials. The chief topic would be policy in Germany, though presumably Bevin envisaged that agreement on that would serve on a wider scale as the ‘ways and means’, to which he had referred, of involving the United States in West European defence. At this stage many details remained vague in Bevin’s own mind: The Secretary of State said that at this early stage he could not be very definite with M. Bidault about details, but he could assure him that he was approach¬ ing the problem with a very firm spirit and will. The 455

Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947

problem was to find expression for that spirit through the best organisation. In his view friction between Eastern and Western Europe was inevitable until Western Europe was as powerful as Eastern Europe. Until that date there would be no real peace. When Western Europe had been built up, there would, in his view, be no danger of war. But Russia would never go to war. In fact, he doubted whether Russia was as great a danger as a resurgent Germany might become. It is not wholly clear what Bevin meant by his statements that there was ‘no real peace’ but also ‘no danger of war’. A possible interpretation and the last word may be left with an official, P.M. Crosthwaite, writing on the penultimate day of the eventful year 1947: ‘We do not ourselves think that a crisis will come in the immediate future, or indeed for some years, and believe that we have therefore time to put our house in order.’ What stands out is that those who shaped British foreign policy, above all Ernest Bevin, had by that time abandoned virtually all hope of co-operation with the Soviet Union and had turned to an exclusive concentration on relations with the United States and the West European countries, without in any way falling into a despairing mood that a new war was inevitable and that all that remained was to prepare for it.59

456

Appendix The Foreign Office Staff

Foreign Office officials are, and are meant to be, somewhat shadowy figures to the outside world. The list below com¬ prises most members of the Office, or persons attached to it, whose statements have been drawn upon in writing this book. Primarily, it is intended to shed light on their activities between 1941 and 1947. However, high points, if any, in their later careers are mentioned as part of the general endeavour to make them more real as personalities. The Foreign Secretaries, Eden and Bevin, are excluded, as are three very famous politician-ambassadors, Sir Stafford Cripps (Moscow, 1940-42), Lord Halifax (Washington, 1941-6) and Duff Cooper (Paris, 1944-7). Beneath the Foreign Secretary and setting aside his junior ministers, the Office hierarchy consisted of the Permanent Under¬ secretary of State, two or three Deputy Under-Secretaries of State, about ten Assistant Under-Secretaries of State, whose duties often included the supervision of batches of departments each, and a larger number of Counsellors. Below them were the mass of clerks who were, even so, in a different world of information and influence from clerical staff in the normal sense of the term. The most import¬ ant departments of the Foreign Office for this study were: during the war, Central (including German affairs), Northern (including the Soviet Union), Southern (the Balkans and Italy) and Economic and Reconstruction (whose duties were as much political as economic); after the war, Northern and Southern remained, but Economic 457

Appendix: The Foreign Office Staff and Reconstruction disappeared and Western and German Departments were set up to handle relations with the West European countries, tfreir independence now restored, and policy in Germany and Austria. By the end of 1947 the German Department was sub-divided into no less than eleven separate departments, of which the German Political Department under Patrick Dean was the most important. Chief sources: the annual Foreign Office List and Who’s Who.

allen, roger. Worked in Foreign Office, 1940-46; Moscow embassy, 1946-7; Ambassador to Greece, Iraq and Turkey, 1957-69; died 1972. allen, wm denis. Worked in Central Department, 1943-4; Northern Department, 1945-6; posted to Washington, 1946; Ambassador to Turkey, 1963-7. balfour, sir john. Head of North American Department, 1941; Lisbon, 1941-3; Moscow, 1943-5; Minister, Washington, 1945-8; later, Ambassador to Argentina and Spain. BENNETT, john sterndale. Worked in Foreign Office, 1944-7; Political Representative (later Minister) to Bulgaria, 1947Head of British Middle East Office, Cairo, 1953-5; died 1969.’ brimelow, THOMAS (later LORD brimelow). Moscow embassy, 1942-5; Northern Department (with special responsibility for Soviet affairs), 1945-8; Permanent Under-Secretary, 1973-5. burrows, b.a.b. Cairo, 1937-45; Foreign Office, 1945-7; British Representative to nato, 1966-70. butler, sir nevile. Washington, 1939-41; Head of North American Department, 1941-4; Assistant Under-Secretary, 1944-7; Ambassador to Brazil and the Netherlands 1947-54died 1973. BUTLER, R.a. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1938-July 1941; Cabinet Minister, 1941-5 and 1951-64 (including Foreign Secretary, 1963-4), and leading Conservative politician. cadogan, sir Alexander. Permanent Under-Secretary, 1938-46; British Representative to the United Nations, 1946^50; Chair¬ man of the BBC, 1952-7, among many other activities following retirement from the Foreign Office; died 1968. cavendish-bentinck, victor. Worked in Foreign Office, 1937-45, including Chairman of Joint Intelligence Committee, 1944Ambassador to Poland, 1945-7; then retirement.

458

Appendix: The Foreign Office Staff Worked in Foreign Office, 1938-44; Lisbon, 1944-6; Minister, Paris, from 1946; Ambassador to Italy, 1953-62; Director of the Royal Academy of Music since 1973. collier, sir Laurence. Head of the Northern Department in 1941; Ambassador to the Norwegian Government-in-exile in London, 1941-5; returned with it to Oslo in 1945; died 1976. Colville, john. Wartime service with the RAF; worked in the Southern Department, 1945-7, at first with responsibility for Yugoslavia and later for ‘all subjects’; departed to become Private Secretary to Princess Elizabeth, October 1947. coulson, j.e. Worked in Foreign Office, 1942-6; then Paris embassy; Secretary-General of the European Free Trade Area, 1965- 72. crosthwaite, p.M. Moscow, 1943-6; Madrid, 1946-7; Head of Western Department, 1947-8; Ambassador to Sweden, 1963-6. cullis, m.f. Worked in Ministry of Economic Warfare during the war; Head of Austrian Section in Foreign Office, 1945-7, and Political Adviser on Austrian peace treaty negotiations, 1947-50; Director of Arms Control and Disarmament at the Foreign Office, 1967-74. dean, Patrick. Joined Foreign Office in 1939, specialising in legal work until appointment as Head of the German Department and then the German Political Department, 1946-8; British Representative to the United Nations, 1960-64, and Ambas¬ sador to the United States, 1965-9. dew, armine. Worked in the Northern Department, 1941-5; killed in an air crash while on official business, February 1945. dixon, pierson. Southern Department, 1941-3; Private Secretary to Eden and Bevin, November 1943-December 1947; Ambas¬ sador to France, 1960-65; died soon after retirement. donnelly, j.c. British Consulate, Chicago, 1938-43; Foreign Office, including a period in the North American Department, 1943-6; transferred to Lima, 1946. fitzmaurice, Gerald. Senior legal work in the Foreign Office from 1943; many appointments in international law after the war. franklin, a.a.e. German Department, 1945-January 1947 when appointed a consul in China; Consul-General at Los Angeles, 1966- 74. fry, n.h. Service with the armed forces, 1942-5; joined Foreign Office 1946 and worked in Northern Department, specialising in Czechoslovakia. CLARKE,

henry ashley.

459

Appendix: The Foreign Office Staff

Central Department, 1944-5; Northern Department, 1945. haigh, Austin. Foreign ^Office, 1943-5; then transferred to the embassy in Turkey; Director of Educational and of Cultural and Scientific Affairs, Council of Europe, 1962-8. hankey, r.m.a. (later lord hankey). Foreign Office, 1943-5; charge at Warsaw, 1945—6; Head of Northern Department, 1946-8; British Representative to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1960-65. HARRISON, GEOFFREY. Central Department, 1942-4, and German Department, 1944-5; Brussels, 1945-7; Moscow, October 1947; Ambassador to Brazil, Iran and the Soviet Union 1956-68. HARVEY, SIR Oliver. Private Secretary to Eden, 1941-3; Assistant Under-Secretary, 1943-6; Deputy Under-Secretary, 1946-8; Ambassador to France, 1948-54; died 1968. HAYTER, william. Washington, 1940-44, then in Foreign Office; Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1953-7; Warden of New College, Oxford, 1958-76. hebblethwaite, s.H. Lisbon, 1942-5; Western Department 1945-7; Consul at Florence, 1970-74. hogg, william. Baghdad, 1943-6; Western Department, 1946-8, dealing with France. HOLMAN, ADRIAN. Diplomatic appointments in the Middle East during the war; Political Representative (later Minister) Bucharest, from March 1946; died 1974. HOOD, viscount samuel. Early career in India Office; Economic and Reconstruction Department of Foreign Office, 1942-6, with special responsibilities for peace treaties after’ the warposted to Madrid, 1947; Deputy Under-Secretary, 1962-9. hope-jones, r.c. Service in armed forces, 1940-46; Northern Department, 1946-7, dealing with Soviet affairs; Paris, August 1947; Ambassador to Bolivia, 1973-7. houstoun-boswall, william. Worked in Foreign Office, 1943—4; British Political Representative in Bulgaria, 1944^6; died 1960. Howard, Douglas. Head of Southern Department, 1941-5; then posted to Madrid; British Envoy to the Vatican, 1953-7. Jebb, gladwyn (later lord gladwyn). Ministry of Economic Warfare, 1940-42; then Head of Economic and Reconstruction Department of Foreign Office till 1945; Assistant Under¬ secretary, 1946; Ambassador to France, 1954-60; prominent in t e counsels of the Liberal Party and the European unity movement since then. gatehouse, miss a.f.c.

460

Appendix: The Foreign Office Staff

German Department, 1945-8; later became a Conservative politician; Leader of the House of Lords, 1970-73.

jellicoe, earl.

KERR, SIR ARCHIBALD CLARK (LORD INVERCHAPEL). Ambassador tO

the Soviet Union, 1942-6; to the United States, 1946-8; died 1951. king, c.e. Career in the Consular Service, 1934-61, except for a short spell in the North American Department during the war; returned to diplomatic work in the 1960s; Ambassador to the Lebanon, 1967-70; died 1981. Lambert, A.E. Northern Department, specialising in Soviet affairs, 1946-8; Ambassador to Tunisia, Finland and Portugal, 1960-70. laskey, denis. Southern Department, 1943-5; Ambassador to Romania and Austria, 1969-75. law, richard (later lord Coleraine). Parliamentary Under¬ secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1941-3; Minister of State for Foreign Affairs with Cabinet rank, 1943-5; Minister of Education, 1945; did not hold ministerial office in the Con¬ servative Governments of 1951-64 despite general admiration for his contribution to wartime foreign policy; died 1980. leeper, sir Reginald. Ambassador to the Greek Government in Cairo, 1943-4, and in Athens, 1944-6; Ambassador to Argen¬ tina, 1946-8; died 1968. MCDERMOTT, Geoffrey. Turkey, 1941-3; Foreign Office, 1943-6, including a period in the Southern Department, specialising on Turkey, 1945-6; posted to Cairo, 1946. MACK, SIR william. Foreign Office, 1940-45; Political Adviser to Commander of British Forces in Austria, 1945-7; Minister to Austria, September 1947; died 1974. maclean, fitzroy. Was working in the Northern Department in 1941 when he resigned; Conservative MP, 1941-74; wartime service with Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia; distinguished writer. mcneil, hector. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1945-6; Minister of State at the Foreign Office, 1946-50; Secretary of State for Scotland, 1950-51; died 1955. makins, Roger (later lord sherfield). Head of Central Depart¬ ment, 1941-2; service in West Africa and the Mediterranean area, 1942-4; Minister at the embassy in Washington, 1945-7; Ambassador in Washington, 1953-6; Joint Permanent Secre¬ tary to the Treasury, 1956-9. malcolm, angus. Washington, 1938-42; North American Department, 1942-4; Rome, 1944-7; died 1971. 461

Appendix: The Foreigri Office Staff sir william. Legal Adviser to the Foreign Office, 1929-45 when he was killed in an accident while on official business. marjoribanks, James. Assistant Political Representative in Romania, December 1944; Reconstruction Department with responsibility for work on peace treaties, 1946; German Politi¬ cal Department, 1947-8; Ambassador to the European Economic Community, 1965-71; Director, Scottish Council (Development and Industry) thereafter. mayhew, Christopher. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, October 1946; a Labour MP until 1974. millar, f.r. hoyer (later lord inchyra). Washington, 1939-44; Head of Western Department, 1945-7; Permanent Under¬ secretary, 1957-61. nichols, sir philip. Minister and then Ambassador to the Czechoslovak Government in London and then in Prague 1941-8; died 1962. o’malley, sir owen. Ambassador to the Polish Government in London, 1943-5; Ambassador to Portugal, 1945-7; died 1974. o’neill, con. Employed on secondment from the Army in the Foreign Office, in the Central Department, 1943-5, and the German Department, 1945-6; worked as a leader-writer for The Times, 1946-7, before returning to the Foreign Office on a permanent basis; well-known as an exponent of the merits of British entry into the European Economic Community both before and after his resignation from the Foreign Office in 1968. PEAKE, CHARLES. Consul-General at Tangier, 1945-6; Ambassador to Yugoslavia, 1946-51, and to Greece, 1951-7; died 1958. perowne, victor. Counsellor in Foreign Office, 1941-7; then Minister to the Vatican; died 1951. peterson, sir Maurice. Officially listed as ‘unemployed’, 1941-2; reinstated into the Foreign Office as an ambassador but without an embassy, 1942-4; Ambassador to Turkey, 1944—6, and to the Soviet Union, 1946-9; died 1952. pinsent, r.p. Service in the armed forces, 1940-46; then joined the Foreign Office where he had responsibility for Turkey and Albania in the Southern Department in 1947; Consul-General at Sao Paulo, 1970-73. reddaway, norman. Service in the armed forces, 1939-46; then joined the Foreign Office, where he worked in the German Department; Ambassador to Poland, 1974-8. rendel, sir george. Ambassador to the Yugoslav Government in London, 1941-3; worked within the Foreign Office, 1943-7; Ambassador to Belgium, 1947; died 1979. malkin,

462

Appendix: The Foreign Office Staff Roberts, frank. Central Department, 1941-5 (Acting Head,

1943-5); Minister at the embassy in Moscow, January 1945— January 1948; Ambassador to the Soviet Union and to West Germany, 1960-68. RONALD, SIR nigel. Worked in the Foreign Office, 1936-47 (Acting Assistant Under-Secretary from 1942); Ambassador to Portugal, 1947-54; died 1973. rose, e.m. Southern Department, 1941-5; posted to Copenhagen, 1945; Deputy Secretary, Cabinet Office, 1967-8. rumbold, sir Ei.a. (Bart.). Western Department, 1945-7; then posted to embassy in Prague; Ambassador to Austria, 1967-70. rundall, f.b.a. British Consulate-General, New York, 1941-6; North American Department, 1946-8; Ambassador to Israel and then a Deputy Under-Secretary, 1957-63. sargent, sir orme. Deputy Under-Secretary of State, 1939-46; Permanent Under-Secretary, 1946—9; addressed by his friends as ‘Moley’ in reference to his ‘burrowing’ activities against the policy of appeasement before the war; died 1962. savery, frank. Consular service in Poland, 1919-39; attached to embassy of Polish Government-in-exile from 1939 with transfer to Diplomatic Service; died 1965. Scott, sir david. Assistant Under-Secretary, 1938-44; then Deputy Under-Secretary in charge of administration until his retirement in 1947. steel, c.e. (‘Kit’). Deputy, 1945-7, and successor, 1947, in Germany to Sir William Strang (see below); Ambassador to West Germany, 1957-63; died 1973. Stevenson, sir Ralph. Ambassador to the Yugoslav exile Government in Cairo and then to Tito’s Government in Bel¬ grade, 1943-6; Ambassador to China and then to Egypt, 1946- 55; died 1977. strang, sir william (later lord strang). Worked in London throughout war; British Representative on the European Advisory Commission with the rank of Ambassador, 1943-5; Political Adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of British occu¬ pation forces in Germany, June 1945; returned to the Foreign Office as Joint Permanent Under-Secretary (German Section), October 1947; full Permanent Under-Secretary, 1949-53; died 1978. troutbeck, J.M. First head of the German Department, 1945-6; Assistant Under-Secretary, 1946-7; Head, British Middle East Office, Cairo, and then Ambassador to Iraq, 1947-54; died 1971.

463

Appendix: The Foreign. Office Staff Worked during the war in the Ministry of Economic Warfare and later in the Foreign Office on plans to set up the Control Offjce for Germany and Austria (COGA) of which he became Under-Secretary in 1945; returned to his pre-war career in the City of London following the absorption of COGA into the Foreign Office in 1947; died 1980. ward, j.g. Central Department, 1941-2; General Department, 1942-3; Economic and Reconstruction Department, 1943-6; posted to Rome, 1946; Ambassador to Argentina and Italy, 1957-66. Warner, c.f.a. Elead of Political Intelligence Department, 1941; Head of Northern Department, 1942-6; Assistant Under¬ secretary, 1946; Ambassador to Belgium, 1951-5; died 1957. warr, g.m. Northern Department specialising in Czechoslovakia, 1946-7; Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1967-70. watson, j.h. Moscow, 1944-7; then Foreign Office in London; Director-General of the International Association for Cultural Freedom since 1974. whitehead, professor a. north. Leading British mathematician with extensive teaching experience at American universities; worked in the North American Department for a time during the early part of the war; died 1947. williams, M.s. Worked in Foreign Office, 1939-47; then posted to Rome; Minister to the Vatican, 1965-70. wilson, duncan. Control Office for Germany and Austria, 1945-6; German Department, 1946-7; Ambassador to Yugo¬ slavia and the Soviet Union, 1964—71; Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, since 1971. wilson, Geoffrey. Moscow embassy and then Northern Depart¬ ment, 1940—45; later worked in several branches of government including the Cabinet Office; Chairman of Race Relations Board, 1971-7, and of Oxfam since 1977. WILSON, JOHN (later the second lord moran). Son of Churchill’s doctor; wartime service in the Royal Navy; joined Foreign Office, 1945; worked in Western Department specialising in France, 1947; Ambassador to Portugal since 1976. woodward, professor e.l. Historian; worked in the Foreign Office during the war both to give advice on the historical background to current problems and to compile material for his study of wartime foreign policy in the official History of the Second World War; died 1971. turner, sir mark.

464

4

Sources and References

The abbreviation CAB refers to Cabinet Office papers in the Public Record Office. The book is, however, primarily based on the papers of the Foreign Office about which, in another context, an American historian with experience of a number of archives has written, ‘For colour, wit and penetrating analysis they are unsurpassed.’* I can only hope that I have done justice to them. All the references are to the general series, FO 371, and so, to avoid vast and unnecessary repetition, the invariable 371 has been omitted. Likewise, since many of the books referred to below were published in London, the place of publication is given only where it was other than London. * George Alexander Lensen, The Damned Inheritance: the Soviet Union and the Manchurian Crises 1924-1935 (Talla¬ hassee, Florida, 1974), p. x.

Introduction 1 P.N. Loxley to Alexander Cadogan, reporting Butler’s views, 14 January 1943, FO 34482/3138. 2 Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations (1951), pp. 203-5. 3 Jebb, 17 July 1942, FO 32429/8748; see also his minute of 30 June 1943, FO 35397/2889, on the need for the world powers to be firm in enforcing their primacy in international organisation. 4 Leon D. Epstein, Britain - Uneasy Ally (Chicago, 1954), p. 113.

465

Sources and References 5 Thomas E. Hachey (ed.), Confidential Dispatches: Analyses of America by the British Ambassador 1939-1945 (Evanston, Illinois, 1974), pp. 218-19. 6 Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton, New Jersey, 1973). 7 For instance, V.G. Kiernan, America: the New Imperialism (1978). 8 A.J.P. Taylor in the Observer, 20 September 1964, and the Listener, 18 August 1977. 9 Minutes in FO 26179/4091; Loxley, 8 July 1941, FO 26221/5327. 10 Butler, 3 April 1941, FO 26149/1893. 11 Whitehead, 21 March 1941, ibid.; 21 September 1941, FO 26151/7415; 3 April 1941, FO 26179/2752; 21 March 1943, FO 30655/2492; Perowne and Balfour, 24 and 26 April 1941, FO 26179/3295. 12 Whitehead, 24 December 1941, FO 26180/10546; minutes by officials and correspondence with the embassy in Washing¬ ton, January-April 1942; Churchill to Eden, 22 February 1942, FO 30655/1207, 1874, 2492, 3698. 13 Butler, 21 May 1942, FO 30724/4694; Butler to Law, 23 June 1942, and minute by Butler, 31 July 1942, FO 30656/8566 and 7436; Butler, 9 December 1942, FO 31088/12148; King, 15 June 1942, FO 30656/4913; Law, 21 May 1942, FO 30655/4410. 14 King, 20 May 1942, FO 30724/4694; Butler, 31 July 1942, FO 30656/7436. At the end of 1941 the British Government had no less than 12,000 employees in the United States, most of them American citizens. Hachey (ed.), op. cit., p 41 15 Butler, 18 May 1942, FO 30655/4410; memorandum, 19 February 1942, Cooperation between Great Britain and the United States’, and minute by Ashley Clarke, 3 Julv 1942 FO 30685/1684 and 5545. 16 King, 26 June 1942, FO 30685/5545, and 18 March 1942, FO 30655/2492. On the decolonisation issue in British war¬ time relations with the United States, see Wm Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay (Oxford, 1977); on British-American relations in the Far East, Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind (Oxford, 1978). 17 A.C.E. Malcolm, 26 December 1942, FO 30656/1183L (committee), FO 30685/7112; Hachey (ed.), op. cit., pp! 95-8. In January 1944 Malcolm expanded his argument and wrote that American opinion wanted social change in Britain, combined with the retention of traditional symbols: ‘As long 466

Sources and References

18

19

20

21

22 23

24 25 26

27

28 29

as we keep a king, a peerage and such decorative adjuncts as Beefeaters few serious Americans will think us dangerously socialistic.’ Minute, 29 January 19.44, FO 34114/711. Jebb, 2 November 1942, FO 31521/1211; various minutes, late 1942 to early 1943, including Eden, 17 January 1943, FO 31531/ especially 1920; Butler, 26 July 1943, FO 32429/8805. Butler, Law and Scott, 19-21 January 1944, FO 38504/33; Dudley, March 1944, FO 38522/1064; Hachey (ed.), op. cit., pp. 194-6. Hood to Gore-Booth, 22 May and 28 July 1944, FO 40601/1900 and 5925; Sir Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (1962), pp. 395-401. Butler, Jebb, Ronald, Sargent and Cadogan, 19 May-9 June 1944, FO 40740/4379, 4424, 6253; Cadogan, 28 June 1944, FO 40741A/6254. Donnelly, 2 January 1946, FO 46736/10182; 24 February 1945, FO 50838/1247; 14 May 1946, FO 51639/1413. Memorandum by the Economic Relations Department of the Foreign Office, 2 October 1945, FO 45705/5043; Hachey (ed.), op cit., p. 271; Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy (Oxford, 1956), pp. 183-253; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (1978), pp. 87-94. B.I. Gage, 2 April 1946, FO 51719/968; minutes, May 1946, FO 56840/5583; Scott (see note 19 above). Taylor, article in the Listener (see note 8 above). Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (Reprint Society edition, 1950-56), vi, 184; Stalin as quoted in Teddy J. Uldricks, Diplomacy and Ideology: the Origins of Soviet Foreign Relations 1917-1930 (London and Beverly Hills, 1979), p. 149. Strang, 16 November 1941, FO 30928/1047; W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946 (New York, 1975), p. 99. David Irving, Hitler's War (1977), pp. 209-10. Earl Winterton, Fifty Tumultuous Years (1955), pp. 213-15. The Soviet authorities seem to have had frequent problems with visiting foreign aircraft. When General Ismay was ready to fly out of Russia in November 1943 after attending the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers as an adviser to Anthony Eden, his hosts would not let his plane leave the ground because of alleged bad weather, though the RAF pilots thought flying conditions perfect. In the end the Russians admitted that anti-aircraft guns on the plane’s route

467

Sources and References

30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37

had not been warned. See Ismay’s diary, 1 November 1943, Ismay papers (King’s College, London), 111/5. Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret (1974); Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta ((977). S.M. Shtemenko, The Last Six Months (1978), pp. 419-20. Tolstoy mustered such evidence as there is about the Soviet response to the entire policy of forcible repatriation to suggest that it was one of contempt, not gratitude, towards the British. Tolstoy, op. cit., pp. 163-6, 236, 241-2. A future British diplomat who observed the Cossacks in Austria on the eve of their repatriation felt ‘a little sorry’ for them, but was largely consumed at the time with admiration for the Red Army. Sir David Hunt, On the Spot (1975), p. 3. Sir John Colville in the Guardian, 16 April 1979; Tolstoy, op. cit., pp. 444-5, 452-3, 529-40. This point was emphasised by Lord Hankey, who, as head of the Northern Department of the Foreign Office from 1946, did much to make the repatriation policy less harsh, in a BBC Television discussion on 8 April 1978; see also Tolstoy, op. cit., pp. 26, 69, 76, 427, 435, 520-1; figures on repatriation from a Soviet source in The Times, 25 October 1978. Leonard Schapiro in the New York Review of Books, 7 December 1978. Brimelow, 18 March 1947, FO 66439/3014; Maurice Peter¬ son, Both Sides of the Curtain (1950), p. 282. Brimelow, 19 January 1948, FO 66297/14902. M.F. Cullis, 29 December 1947, FO 66467/14585.

1 The German Problem 1 Henry Pelling, Britain and the Second World War (1970), pp. 47-8, 90-2; V. Trukhanovsky, British Foreign Policy during World War II (Moscow, 1970), pp. 39-44, 52; Sir Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (1962), pp. 8, 41-2, 79, 81; Paul Addison in A.J.P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: Twelve Essays (1971), pp. 380-3. 2 Roy Douglas, The Advent of War 1939-40 (1978), pp. 147-8. 3 Grey, 16 January 1941, FO 26542/324. 4 Churchill, 20 January 1941, FO 26542/610. The reference was to a meeting between Lord Halifax, then Foreign Secre¬ tary, and one of Goering’s Swedish friends, Baron Bande, in late 1939. See Roger Makins to Sir Noel Charles (Lisbon), 28 February 1941, FO 26542/1705. 5 Strang and Grey, 12 February and 13 March 1941, FO

468

Sources and References

6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20 21

26542/1402 and 1884; Grey, 5 August 1941, FO 26543/8499. Foreign Office to Robert Craigie (Tokyo), 24 February 1941, FO 26542/2189. Roberts, 23 November 1941, FO 26544/12966; G.W. Harri¬ son, 26 November 1941, FO 26585/13723. W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946 (New York, 1975), pp. 27-30. Polish Government memorandum and minutes by Roberts, Ronald, Vansittart and Woodward, October-December 1940, FO 26419/14. Makins, 8 February 1941, and extract of parliamentary speech by Attlee, 12 February 1941, FO 26419/1375 and 1415; minutes of Cabinet committee on war aims (Attlee chairman) in CAB 87/90. On Attlee’s dealings with the Peace Aims group and his views on war aims, see T.D. Burridge, British Labour and Hitler’s War (1976); for later Foreign Office displeasure with Churchill, see the Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (1965), pp. 350, 441-2. Roberts, 26 September 1941, FO 26424/10584. Text of speech in The Times, 30 July 1941. Roberts, 17 June and 6 August 1941, FO 26559/7108. Grey, 19 August 1941, and Harrison, 26 November 1941, FO 26585/8903 and 13723. Eden, undated minute with the last four words underlined, and Cadogan, 8 January 1942, FO 30928/493. Eden, November 1942, and Jebb, 11 January 1943, FO 30928/10942 and 12163. Harrison, 14 May 1942, and extract from War Cabinet minutes, 11 May 1942, FO 30912/4956 and 4968. Strang, 16 November 1941, FO 30928/1047; Harrison, 20 May 1942, Cadogan, 22 June 1942, and Cripps-Eden corres¬ pondence with minutes by Harrison, June 1942, FO 30912/5099, 5428, 6185, 6307. See also Christopher Sykes, Troubled Loyalty: A Biography of Adam von Trott (1968). Roberts, 24 January 1942, FO 30936/2680; Harrison, 6 January 1942, FO 30928/493; Makins, 10 May 1942, FO 31083/4789; Roberts, 16 December 1942, FO 31091/12169. On the question of the expulsion of the inhabitants of any transferred areas and of other Germans in eastern Europe, see section on Czechoslovakia below. Meeting, 21 April 1942, FO 31083/4605. Cf. minutes in FO 30928/12163.

469

Sources and References 22 Roberts, 1 December 1942; Ministry of Economic Warfare memorandum, 20 December 1942, and minutes thereon, including Jebb, 4 January 1943, FO 31519/1464 and 1904. 23 Minutes and memoranda, FO 34460 and FO 34461. 24 Daily Telegraph, 31 July 1978. 25 Cf. Harvey’s comment in the privacy of his diary, 23 April 1943: Churchill wanted to make Eden Viceroy so that there would be nothing at all to stop him from ‘botching’ the peace. John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (1978), pp. 248-9. 26 Memorandum by Churchill and Jebb’s response, 1 and 3 February 1943, FO 35363/549. See also Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (Reprint Society edition, 1950-56), iv, 644-8. 27 Selbome (Minister of Economic Warfare) to Law, 12 November 1943. FO 34462/13599. Selborne’s keen interest in the future of Germany is indicated by his production of a memorandum on the subject, 8 April 1943, for the edification of his War Cabinet colleagues; copy in FO 34457/4354. 28 Ward, 8 March 1943, FO 34456/2233; Jebb, 19 September 1943, FO 34460/10982. 29 Memorandum by E.L. Woodward, ‘The German Reich’, 15 December 1943, and minute by T.H. Marshall, 4 January 1944, FO 34463/15375. 30 Memorandum by Attlee, 19 July 1943, FO 34460/10653. Yet a few days later Attlee presided at a Cabinet committee meeting which agreed that there should be more industrialisa¬ tion in the Danube valley to help free the area from depen¬ dence on German exports (minutes of meeting, 5 August 1943, in FO 34459/9220). The Foreign Office certainly did not want south-east Europe to remain economically depen¬ dent on Germany. Cf. minute by unidentified author, 28 July 1943, FO 34460/10653. By July 1944, Attlee was taking a wider view of the German problem. He complained that planning for that country was becoming obsessed with the needs of administrative convenience, with the aim of as rapid a return as possible to normal conditions. This ignored the fact that ‘There had been no normal Germany for fifty years or more, except one governed by a centralised and militaristic machine. ‘A certain amount of chaos and inefficiency’ in post-war Germany would be positively beneficial. Attlee and Eden duelled verbally about the need to do ‘everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevo¬ cability of their defeat’ (Attlee), and about the need to carry 470

Sources and References

31

32

33

34

out demilitarisation, denazification and the exaction of repa¬ rations in a ‘business-like way’ (Eden). Memoranda by Attlee and Eden, 11 and 19 July 1944, fop Armistice and Post-War Committee, CAB 87/67. See also records of this committee, 20 July 1944, CAB 87/66 and Burridge, op. cit., Chapter II. It might be added that on the most crucial issue of all, that of the enforced dismemberment of Germany, Attlee was as good as gold in the eyes of the Foreign Office. In July 1944 he distinguished between the ‘forcible disruption’ of Germany, to which he was opposed, and ‘decentralisation’, which he would support as, gladly, would have the Foreign Office. Armistice and Post-War Committee, 27 July 1944, CAB 87/66. Allen and Roberts, 22-3 January 1943, FO 34456/770; Lord Hood, Harrison and Nevile Butler, March-April 1943, FO 34457/3328, 3667 and 4055; Cadogan, Eden and T.H. Marshall, 14 May, 17 June and 4 July 1943, FO 34458/4611 and 5604; minutes of Attlee committee, 11 August 1943, FO 34461/12172. Memorandum, ‘Possible Divisions in Germany before and after a Military Collapse’, February 1943, FO 34456/1818; for Eden’s attitude, see his minute of 4 July 1943, FO 34458/4611, and Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 16 March 1943; Jebb, Strang and Harrison, March-April 1943, FO 34457/2863 and 3121. At the Quebec Conference in Sep¬ tember 1943 Churchill expressed opposition to any but ‘voluntary’ dismemberment of Germany, but that was an aberration. In the case of Stalin also there was room for hope. When Cordell Hull outlined extremely generous peace terms for Germany at the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference the next month, Molotov, completely under Stalin’s thumb, did not demur from them and hinted that the Soviet Union would agree to them in return for large-scale reparation payments. The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (1948), ii, 1,233-4, 1,284-7, 1,303-4. Ronald, 3 May 1943, FO 35453/2399. It is interesting to note that after the war France attempted unsuccessfully to forge some such relationship with the Saar. Jebb, 1 May 1943, FO 34458/4611. Yet six weeks later Jebb was writing that any danger of Russia embarking on a phase of ‘imperialistic expansion’ after the war could safely be dismissed. Minute of 13 June 1943, FO 36983/3547. Equally curious is that in his memoirs (The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn, 1972, pp. 113-14) Jebb described himself as the only 471

Sources and References

35

36

37

38 39 40

41 42

43

person in the Foreign Office who was ready to see possible merit in the dismemberment of Germany. (That he did see such merit at the time is proved by his minute of 27 July 1944, FO 39079/9626.)’ It is not clear whether he thought that British pursuit of such a policy could be compatible with ‘not burning our boats’ with the Germans. Cabinet minutes, 5 October 1943, CAB 65/40; memorandum by Eden for this meeting, 27 September 1943, copy in FO 34460/11296. Foreign Office memorandum of reasons against dismember¬ ment, April 1943, FO 34457/3667; Roberts, 24 April and 9 June 1943, and Harrison, 26 May 1943, FO 34458/4585, 4611 and 5756; Foreign Office summaries of views on the future of Germany of exile governments in London, FO 34462 (several numbers) and 34463/14672; Committee on Post-War Settlement, 11 August 1943, FO 34461/12172. On British public attitudes towards Germany during the war see Michael Balfour and John Mair, Four-Power Control in Germany and Austria 1945-1946 (1956), pp. 27-34; also Derek Hudson, Writing between the Lines: an Autobiography (1965), pp. 146-7. Woodward to Strang, 15 December 1943, FO 34463/15375; Sargent, 28 October 1943, FO 34460/11913; O’Neill, 21 December 1943, FO 34462/14581, and 18 October 1943, FO 34461/12352; Cadogan and Eden, 14 May and 4 July 1943, FO 34458/4611; for Churchill’s attitude see Roger Parkinson, A Day’s March Nearer Home (1974), p. 143, and Elisabeth Barker, Churchill and Eden At War (1978), p. 210. Troutbeck, O’Neill and Roberts, 30 November-15 December 1943, FO 34462/13985. Roberts, 16 April 1943, FO 34396/3518. Report of committee on control of German war potential, with minutes by Troutbeck and Hood, October 1943, FO 34460/11962. H.N. Brailsford, Our Settlement with Germany (Penguin, 1944), pp. 87-95. Memoranda and minutes, October 1943, FO 34460/11913; Strang, 19 March, FO 34396/3518; Roberts, 27 September 1943, FO 34355/11244; Moscow embassy to Foreign Office, 27 December 1943, FO 34341/15161. Harrison, 17 December 1943, FO 34463/14812; O’Neill at first meeting of inter-departmental committee on transfers of German population, 7 December 1943, FO 34462/14581; Sargent, 30 May 1944, FO 39092/6398.

472

Sources and References 44 Memorandum by Churchill, 15 January 1944; Attlee to Churchill and Churchill’s reply, 25-6 January 1944, FO 39024/1236 and 1859. 45 Roberts, Troutbeck and an anonymous minute (‘all’ under¬ lined in original), 21-6 January and 2 February 1944, FO 39122/1820; Eden, January 1944, FO 39079/1866; F.L. Loewenheim, H.D. Langley and M. Jonas (eds.), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (1975), document 447. 46 O’Neill, 14 November 1944, FO 39226/16074. 47 Armistice and Post-War Committee, 23 August 1944, CAB 87/66; (on Kennan), FO 39079/3355. 48 Foreign Office memorandum on partition of Germany, November 1944, CAB 87/68; Roberts, Troutbeck and Sargent, 28-30 July 1944, FO 39079/9626; Sargent, 9 Sep¬ tember 1944, FO 39080/12404. 49 ‘Anglo-Soviet Political Conversations at Moscow, October 9-October 17 1944’ (record of meetings on 9 and 17 October), copy in Ismay papers (King’s College, London), VI/10. 50 Eden, 31 December 1944, FO 46871/387, and his The Reckoning, p. 505; for a statement of the ‘unvarnished’ case against dismemberment see the unsigned memorandum of 23 January 1945 in FO 46871/292. 51 Minutes of committee, Foreign Office scheme for the parti¬ tion of Germany, 19 March 1945, and minutes by Troutbeck, Strang and Eden, February-March 1945, FO 46871/692, 873-9, 1113; also memorandum 40 in CAB 87/69. 52 Troutbeck, Strang, Eden and Cadogan, and an unsigned memorandum, March-April 1945, FO 46872/1352, 1354, 1489, 1491; see also Trukhanovsky, op. cit., pp. 428-9, 432-3; and Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: the History of Soviet Foreign Policy from 1917-1967 (1968), pp. 441-2, 445-7, for Soviet views on the future of Germany in early 1945. 53 Correspondence and minutes, including minute by Eden, 12 July 1945, FO 46872/2370, 2435, 4618, 5059. 54 Memorandum by Churchill, 15 January 1944, and Churchill to Cadogan 19 April 1944, FO 39024/1236 and 5183. 55 Minutes and memoranda, January-March 1944, FO 39091/876, 2261, 2575, 2869; Harvey, 19 May 1944, FO 39092/6398; Foreign Office Research Department (FORD) paper on the eastern frontier of Germany, 20 November 1944, FO 39139/2570.

473

Sources and References 56 FORD memorandum as in note 55 above; Roberts, 17 March 1944, FO 40733/2819. 57 FORD memorandum and Harvey as in note 55 above. The statement about Stalin’s intentions is conjectural. 58 On Potsdam see Churchill, op. cit., vi, 535; Eden to Attlee, August 1945, replying to a letter from Attlee, Attlee papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, box 2; Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (1961), p. 76; James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (1947), p. 79. On the transfer of the Oder-Neisse lands to Polish administration, and population expulsions before the Potsdam Conference, see Wolfgang Wagner, The Genesis of the Oder-Neisse Line (Stuttgart, 1957), pp. 129-30, 135-6; and G. Rhode and W. Wagner (eds), The Genesis of the Oder-Neisse Line: Sources and Documents (Stuttgart, 1959), nos. 127, 134, 139A, 140. 59 Allen, 27 July and 12 September 1945, and O’Neill, 30 October 1945, FO 46961/5351, 4476, 4404; on the London Poles’ belated acceptance of the Oder-Neisse and Curzon lines, see Churchill, op. cit., vi, 393-4, 397. 60 Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam (1977), p. 101. 61 Cavendish-Bentinck, Woodward and correspondence between Lord Hood and Mack, June-October 1945, FO 50858/7093 and 8731. By the spring of 1946 Britain had definitely decided not to support the cession of more than small parts of the South Tyrol to Austria. See minute by Cullis, 29 April 1946, FO 55257/4618. 62 Harvey, 9 July 1944, FO 39122/9306; O’Neill, November 1944, FO 39226/16074; Chaplin, May 1944, FO 40640/4661. 63 Pierson Dixon’s diary for 1944, 6 and 22 July and 5 Sep¬ tember. 64 Roberts, 20 September 1944, FO 39116/12405. 65 Colonel J.J. Llewellin (Ministry of Food) at Armistice and Post-War Committee, 27 July 1944, CAB 87/66. 66 Churchill, 15 January 1944, and Churchill to Cadogan, 19 April 1944, FO 39024/1859 and 5183. Stalin, man of sur¬ prises, amazed and no doubt pleased Churchill at their next meeting in Moscow in October by taking ‘an unexpectedly ultrarespectable line’ on the treatment of German war crimi¬ nals. He said that there should be no executions without trials, and that if difficulties about evidence and so on prevented convictions at the end of a trial, there should be no death sentences then, ‘only lifelong confinements’. Churchill to Roosevelt, 22 October 1944, Loewenheim, Langley and Jonas (eds), op. cit., document 447.

474

Sources and References 67 Armistice and Post-War Committee, 20 July 1944, CAB 87/66 (for Gusev); Harrison, Cadogan, Allen, Eden and Churchill, and memorandum by Chiefs of Staff, JanuaryApril 1944, FO 39024/1860-1, 1865, 3029-30, 5183. 68 War Cabinet minutes, 13 March 1944, Churchill to Cadogan, 19 April 1944, Roosevelt to Churchill, 20 May, and Churchill to Roosevelt, 25 May 1944, ibid., 3517, 5183, 6776, 7294; John W. Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War (1972), p. 64; Woodward, op. cit., pp. 480-3; on actual British propaganda to Germany during the last year of the war, see Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 48-51. 69 Hood, Troutbeck, Jebb and O’Neill, January 1944, FO 40612/392, 433; Malkin, 23 February 1944, FO 40620/1613; Dean and Malkin, both 19 April 1944, FO 40630/3146; memorandum by Eden, 19 July 1944, FO 39079/9627; Troutbeck, 4 October 1944, FO 39080/13746. 70 This debate in December 1943, with a memorandum by Moss, 11 February 1944, can be found in FO 40728/327-8. 71 This may be compared with the fears of the Government’s Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee in September 1944 that a sort of Nazi resistance would be set up after the war, probably biding its time at first but later ‘presenting the Allies with a formidable problem’. Document 80 in CAB 87/68. 72 Foreign Office memoranda, 9 January 1944, FO 40611/196, and 15 July 1944, FO 39116/9330. 73 For Foreign Office research on land reform in Germany, see FO 39092/16827 and 17772, including minute by Troutbeck, 14 December 1944; Armistice and Post-War Committee, 20 July 1944, CAB 87/66. 74 Roberts, 10 July 1944, FO 40741A/6283; Hudson and others, November 1944, FO 40672/8027 and 8052; papers of the German Science and Industry committee, late 1944, FO 40967. 75 Economic and Industrial Planning Staff memorandum and minute by Coulson, September 1944, FO 39080/12029 and 12073; Hull, op. cit., n, 1613-22; Wheeler-Bennett and Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 174-84; Parkinson, op. cit., pp. 374-6; minutes of Churchill’s talk with Stalin, 17 October 1944, copy in Ismay papers, VI/10; Cabinet message to Foreign Secre¬ tary in Quebec, opposing any tendency to leave Germany to ‘stew in her own juice’, FO 39116/12560; Armistice and Post-War Committee minutes, 31 August and 21 September 1944, CAB 87/66; Foreign Office memorandum for the

475

Sources and References

76

77

78 79

80 81

82

83

84

85

committee, 27 December 1944, CAB 87/68; minutes of the committee, 4 January 1945, CAB 87/69. Waley and Roberts, 20 September 1944, FO 39116/12405; Economic and Industrial Planning Staff papers cited in note 75 above. Harrison, 11 September 1944, FO 39211/14245; German Department memorandum, 15 July 1944, FO 39116/9330; Harrison and Roberts, 9 December 1944, FO 39226/16074; Sargent, 14 July 1944, FO 43335/4956; Ward, Coulson and Harrison, 29 February-7 March 1944, FO 40620/1577, 1692. Compare all this with the fears expressed in October 1944 by Sir Paul Butler, a former consular official in Japan and Manchuria, of the Japanese turning to ‘a form of “Nipponised Communism’” if Russia was allowed after the war to dominate Manchuria. Minute, 7 October 1944, FO 40741A/7658. Tony Sharp, The Wartime Alliance and the Zonal Division of Germany (Oxford, 1975). Ibid., pp. 33-5, 55-8, 79-80, 146; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 226-8; George Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (1968), pp. 164-74; Post-Hostilities Planning Sub-committee report, 1 January 1944, FO 40611/104. Sharp, op. cit., pp. 91-9. Ward and Roberts, 10 and 12 December 1943, FO 40611/263; Post-Hostilities report (see note 79 above); Alexander, 22 March 1944, FO 39030/3771. Harvey, Sargent, Cadogan, Eden and Jebb, 13-29 December 1943, FO 40611/263. On 8 June 1944 the Armistice and Post-War Committee of the Cabinet reaffirmed that Britain must have a north-western zone. ‘Our vital interests were engaged in the north-west of Germany, and it was essential that we should hold the North Western European Powers closely to us.’ CAB 87/66. Ward and Butler, both 20 July 1944, FO 40650/6437; Jebb (on the machinations of American Big Business), 21 December 1943, FO 40611/263. Harvey, 12 January 1944, FO 40680/8716; unsigned and undated minute, mid-1944, FO 40741A/6283; Ward and Strang, 20-24 July 1944, FO 40650/6444; Sharp, op. cit., pp. 75, 93. On reparations at Yalta and Potsdam see the summaries in Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (Oxford, 1970), pp. 13&-9, 158-72; Charles L. Mee Jr, Meeting at Potsdam (1975), pp. 255-68, 272-3.

476

Sources and References 86 Troutbeck, 23 February and 10 March 1945, FO 45775/962 and 1118. 87 Waley, 2 August 1945, FO 45786/3514; (on French mem¬ bership), Coulson, 11 March 1945", ibid. 1083, and minutes, late May 1945„ FO 45778/2104; (on Soviet wish for largescale reparations from Austria), Hood, 2 July 1945, FO 50828/5191. Echoing what was to become a familiar theme in relation to Germany, Hood wrote that Austria would be incapable of paying any reparations from its own resources, so that Britain and America would have to supply relief for any payments made, ‘which in practice would mean that the British and Americans would pay for the reparations col¬ lected by Russia’. 88 Fitzmaurice, 19 January 1944, FO 40733/588. 89 Cecil papers, British Museum Add. MSS 51087; Makins and Strang, 9-27 January 1942, FO 30910/158 and 1282; Harri¬ son, 30 September 1942, FO 30911/9972. The pre-October 1943 British ‘declarations of an official determination to restore Austrian independence’ cited by John Mair (Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 273-4) were, quite simply, nothing of the sort, and an unbiased reading would show them to be only expressions of goodwill which committed the British Government to nothing. See pp. 295-6 of Mair’s generally valuable account for the Austrian organisations in wartime London. 90 Makins and Eden, 27-31 January 1942, FO 30910/1282. 91 Roberts, 29 July 1942, FO 30928/7283; Polish Government memorandum, December 1942, FO 31091/12841; Roberts and Ronald, 10 and 18 August 1942, FO 33134/4813. For Churchill’s views on Austria see his The Second World War, iv, 725; v, 319; vi, 205. See also Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Knaves, Fools and Heroes (1974), pp. 127-8. 92 Roberts, 1 May 1943, FO 34464/4907; P.N. Loxley to Sir C. Hambro, 9 June 1943; extract from War Cabinet minutes, 16 June 1943; minutes by N. Butler and Eden 5 and 12 August 1943, all in FO 34465/6772 and 7012. 93 Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 280-2. 94 Harrison (on Smuts), 5 October 1943, FO 34466/11389; (on Keynes’s ‘absurd and unjust’ proposal), memorandum by Keynes and comments by Harrison and E.M. Rose, November 1943, FO 34467/15240. 95 Strang and Law at Armistice and Post-War Committee, 20 July and 17 August 1944, CAB 87/66; F.P. King, The New Internationalism (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 137-8; Balfour

477

Sources and References and Mair, op. cit., pp. 283-90. 96 Memoranda and minutes, November-December 1943, FO 34467/14065, 14085 and 15240; O’Neill and Troutbeck, 14—15 February 1944, FO 38832/1818; minute by Troutbeck, 1 August 1944, and Foreign Office memorandum, 5 October 1944, FO 38840/9694 and 13993; see also Attlee at Armistice and Post-War Committee, 23 November 1944, CAB 87/66. 2 Britain and the Soviet Union During the War 1 Roy Douglas, The Advent of War 1939-40 (1978), p. 88. 2 Douglas Clark, Three Days to Catastrophe (1966); Douglas, op. cit., pp. 80-99; Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy 1933-1940 (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 361-4; a Soviet account in V. Trukhanovsky, British Foreign Policy during World War II (Moscow, 1970), pp. 65-8, 74-9. 3 Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany and the Soviet Union 1939-1941 (Leyden, 1954), p. 100; Sir Llewellyn Wood¬ ward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (1962), pp. 141-2. 4 For the Cripps appointment see Eric Estorick, Stafford Cripps (1949), pp. 240-1, 249, and Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (Reprint Society edition, 1950-56), iv, 118; Grigory Deborin, Thirty Years of Victory (Moscow, 1975), p. 318; Alaric Jacob, A Window in Moscow (1946), pp. 298-9. 5 Seweryn Bialer (ed.), Stalin and His Generals (1970), pp. 127-8; also cited in Churchill, op. cit., n, 463. 6 Collier, 31 January, and Maclean, 19 February 1941, FO 29463/373 and 639. 7 For a recent account of the 1939 negotiations see Douglas, op. cit., pp. 22-3, 34—40; also, Woodward, op. cit., pp. 143-4; Collier, 7 April 1941, FO 29464/386. 8 Collier, Butler, Sargent, Cadogan and Eden, 26 March-15 April 1941, FO 29464/1229 and 1386; the Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators (1962), pp. 162-3; David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (1971), entry for 30 May 1941. 9 Churchill to Eden, 22 April 1941, FO 29465/1941. 10 On Stalin’s wilful unpreparedness see Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: the History of Soviet Foreign Policy from 1917-1967 (1968), pp. 292-3; for the dis¬ regarded British warnings, Churchill, op. cit., m, 288-92, 478

Sources and References

11

12

13 14

15 16

17

18

19

297-8; also, F.H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, i (1979), chapter 14, and Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War (1978), pp. 103-4, 107-10, 184. Cripps, 18 June 1941, FO 29466/3099. Cripps told Dalton that Russia’s defeat was absolutely certain. Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs 1931-1945 (1957), p. 365. The Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (1965), p. 267: Trukhanovsky, op. cit., pp. 149-50; Gunnar Hagglof, Diplomat (1972), pp. 170-1. Warner, early July 1941, FO 29466/3231. For recent discussions of this celebrated theme, see Bill Jones, The Russia Complex (Manchester, 1977), pp. 66-8; Joan Beaumont, Comrades in Arms (1980), p. 97; Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (1975), pp. 134-41. Churchill, op. cit., in, 299-301; see also Theodore Wilson, The First Summit (1970), p. 43. Warner, 15 November 1941, FO 29470/6288; Ulam, op cit., pp. 319-21; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945 (New York, 1979), pp. 295-6; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (1978), pp. 55-8, 69, 71; George C. Herring, Aid to Russia 1941-1946 (New York, 1973), pp. 21, 29, 47, 56, 60-1, 74, 282, 286-7. On the Soviet obsession with Hess during the war, see Trukhanovsky, op. cit., pp. 150-4; Churchill, op. cit., iv, 468; Avon, The Reckoning, p. 257; John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (1978), entry for 26 October 1942; Harold Macmillan, The Blast of War 1939-1945 (1967), p. 472; Piers Dixon, Double Diploma: the Life of Sir Pierson Dixon (1968), pp. 174-5; A.J.P. Taylor, Beaverbrook (1972), p. 485. For a non-paranoid treatment of the Hess episode, see James Douglas-Hamilton, Motive for a Mission (1971). Woodward, op. cit., p. 153; Churchill, op. cit., iii, 307; W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941—1946 (New York, 1975), pp. 86-95; S.M. Shtemenko, The Last Six Months (1978), pp. 19-24; Beau¬ mont, op. cit., pp. 52-8, 61-9, 96-7; Taylor, op. cit., pp. 485-91. Eden to Cripps, 21 October 1941, FO 29469/6125; on Romania, see minute of 25 August 1941, FO 26755/7590; Elisabeth Barker, British Policy in South-East Europe in the Second World War (1976), pp. 69-70, 128, 205. For the revelation of a Finnish peace probe to the Soviet Govern¬ ment, see Eden and Cadogan to A.V. Alexander, 2 March

479

Sources and References

20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27

and 3 April 1943, Alexander of Hillsborough papers (Churchill College, Cambridge), 5/8/6 and 12. Strang, 15 August 1941, FO 26758/8965; Roberts, 14 Sep¬ tember 1941, FO *26775/9671. Warner, 15 November 1941, FO 29470/6288; memorandum on meeting of 18 November 1941, FO 29472/6839. Minute on Baltic States, 2 August 1941, FO 26755/7590; Dew, 1 December 1941, FO 29269/6756. Woodward, op. cit. (multi-vol. edn), n (1971), 45-6; Churchill, op. cit., hi, 416-17; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entries for 28 July, 10 August, 7 October and 4 November 1941; Stalin’s Correspondence with Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt and Truman 1941-1945 (Moscow, 1957), document 19. Avon, The Reckoning, pp. 285-8; Dilks (ed.), op. cit., entry for 14 December 1941. Churchill, op. cit., hi, 367; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entries for 26 October and 3 December 1941; minute on Eden’s con¬ versations with Stalin, 15 February 1942, FO 32876/897. Woodward, op. cit. (multi-vol. edn), n (1971), 44-5, 58; Churchill, op. cit., hi, 368-9, 375; extract from War Cabinet minutes, 13 October 1941, and minute by Law, 24 October 1941, FO 26760/11419 and 11837. Churchill, op. cit., in, 491-4; Woodward, op. cit., n, 235; Avon, The Reckoning, pp. 299-303. In October 1944, when the question of war with Japan arose again in talks with the British, Stalin repeated his argument that the Soviet people would not approve. Ibid., p. 488. This raises an interesting point. Stalin’s persistent use of the argument about Soviet public opinion may mean that he took it with some serious¬ ness. On the other hand, he once admitted to a Western visitor that he used public opinion as a convenient smoke¬ screen. Yergin, op. cit., p. 102. The Soviet declaration of war on Japan in August 1945 was in any case to be totally unprovoked. Stalin told Harriman in 1944 and Eden at some date during the war that there was no active opinion in the Soviet Union, and that he had no intention of permitting one since it might take the form of a revolution against Soviet rule. Harriman and Abel, op. cit., p. 316; the Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: Full Circle (I960), pp. 328-9. Also interesting is the British wish for Soviet entry into the war with Japan, which differed little in intensity from that of the Americans. After his visit to Moscow with Eden, Cadogan remarked that there was a general anxiety in the British Government to bring Russia into the Far Eastern war, though 480

Sources and References

28 29

30 31

32 33 34

he personally would be content to use Soviet non-entry as a British counter-grievance since ‘one must be uneasy with Stalin as an ally. He is always reinsuring and ... manufactur¬ ing grievances’. Cadogan, 20 February and 4 March 1942, FO 32876/939 and 1156. See also Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 27 January 1942. Two years laters, in early 1944, Britain was still so anxious to bring Russia into the war with Japan that the Post-Hostilities Planning Committee of the War Cabinet considered recommending offering the Soviet Union not only the islands north of the Japanese homeland which Roosevelt was to promise Stalin at the Yalta Conference, but also Hokkaido, one of the four main islands of Japan, with a population of several millions, to give Russia ‘greater security of approach to Vladivostock’. This was, however, omitted from the Committee’s final report. Interim and final reports, 17 February and 6 June 1944, FO 43384/1120 and 3791. Warner, 31 December 1941, FO 29655/7469. Sargent and Cadogan, both 3 December 1941, FO 29472/6893. On British planning for the mission and the mission itself, see Woodward, op. cit., ii, 220-36, and Avon, The Reckoning, pp. 289-303. Mark A. Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front 1941-1943 (Westport, Connecticut, 1977), pp. 24-5. Woodward, op. cit., n, 234—5; Churchill, op. cit., m, 493, 541-2; Eden to Churchill (draft message), December 1941, FO 32874/108. See FO 29470, especially 6354, minute by Cadogan, 5 November 1941. Stanislaw Kot, Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia (1963), p. 176; Ulam, op. cit., pp. 317-18. Wilson, 25 November 1942, FO 32961/5965. The statements in the text are based on the documents in FO 32942 and FO 32961. On Koch, see Gerald Reitlinger, The House Built on Sand (1960). The belief of the British Military Mission in Moscow early in 1942 that the Germans in the occupied parts of Russia were being no more brutal than was necessary to safeguard their lines of supply (cf. message from General MacFarlane, 16 March 1942, FO 32942/1411) was an early expression of a curious tendency in British military circles, which continues to this day, to refuse to believe the mountain of evidence about Nazi criminality in eastern Europe. F.W. Winterbotham, chief of air intelligence from 1930 to 1945, for example, has sung paeans of praise for Koch, whom he 481

Sources and References

35

36 37

38

39 40

knew before the war, in memoirs written long afterwards {Secret and Personal, 1969, pp. 122-4, and The Nazi Connec¬ tion, 1978, pp. 174-5), making the mistake of claiming that his friend was executed by the Russians after 1945. In fact, Koch lives on in a prison in Poland, a fact occasionally noted by the British press {The Times, 29 August 1977; Daily Telegraph, 2 July 1979). A curiosity of early Soviet denuncia¬ tions of German behaviour was the inclusion of references to atrocities against prisoners-of-war, as well as against civilians. In the Soviet view, both in theory and practice, the former were, by definition, traitors who could only expect further punishment if they survived German captivity. The Foreign Office were aware that the Soviet Government were doing nothing at all on behalf of these prisoners. Setting the scene for the later policy of forced repatriation, the Office in 1942 told the Conservative MP Sir Waldron Smithers that Britain could do nothing for these men in the way of sending food parcels or anything else whatever. See the documents in FO 33000. Sargent, 4 March 1942, FO 32876/1157; Strang, 12 May 1942, FO 30834/4668; Wilson, 6 August 1942, FO 32918/3953, and 19 July 1942, FO 33019/3685. Warner, Strang, Sargent and Cadogan, 16-28 February 1942, FO 32876/927. Carr’s memorandum, and Warner and Sargent, 19-20 Janu¬ ary 1942, FO 32740/611; see also E.H. Carr to the Foreign Office, 16 January 1942, FO 32918/419. In Moscow in December, Stalin, hoping that the Turks would be as blindly greedy for territory as he had been in August 1939, said to Eden that Turkey should be coaxed out of neutrality by the offer of part of Bulgaria, suitably rewarding that country for its neutrality in the Soviet-German war, and of the Dodecan¬ ese islands, then an Italian colony. The Foreign Office were mildly shocked since the population of the islands was almost entirely Greek and Greece, as a victim of German and Italian aggression, clearly had a strong moral claim to them. Record of meeting, 21 April 1942, FO 31083/4605; memorandum by Pierson Dixon, 30 March 1942, FO 32879/1946. Foreign Office draft messages to Washington, February 1942, FO 32875/798; Herring, op. cit., p. 59; Dallek, op. cit., pp. 337-41; The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (1948), n 1,167-70; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 135-6. Wilson, 21 June 1942, FO 32961/3227. Minutes, early February, FO 32875/785; and April 1942, FO 482

Sources and References

41 42 43

44

45 46 47

48 49

50

32879/1939; Churchill, op. cit., iv, 271-2; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., 6 and 9 March 1942. Memorandum by Dixon and minptes by Sargent and Eden, 30 March-20 April 1942, FO 32879/1946 and 2102. Dixon’s memorandum (see note 41 above); minutes of meet¬ ing, 21 April 1942, FO 31083/4605. Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entries for 23 April, 7 and 21-26 May, 9 June 1942; Churchill, op. cit., iv, 277-9; Trukhanovsky, op. cit., pp. 254-5; Robert Rhodes James, Victor Cazalet (1976), pp. 275-7; George V. Kacewicz, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the Polish Government in Exile (1939-1945) (The Hague, 1979), pp. 124-35; George Racey Jordan, From Major Jordan’s Diaries (New York, 1952), p. 30; text of treaty in W.P. and Z.K. Coates, A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations (1943), pp. 774-7. Makins and Dew, 7 and 9 May 1942, FO 30834/4668; Sargent, 21 June 1942, FO 31106/6013; Eden, 28 October 1942, FO 30828/10670. Stoler, op. cit., pp. 37-9, 54-62; Dallek, op. cit., pp. 344-50, 532-3; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 143-4. On aid, see the excellent Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 108-42; also Harriman and Abel, op cit., pp. 139-42, 146-50. Churchill’s account in The Second World War, iv, 386-408; Lord Moran (formerly Charles Wilson), Winston Churchill: the Struggle for Survival (Sphere Books, 1968), pp. 66, 74-82; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entries for 13 and 17 August 1942; Ulam, op. cit., p. 337; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 152-64; Dailek, op. cit., pp. 351-2; Shtemenko, op. cit., pp. 37-8, 352-3, 362-3; A.H. Birse, Memoirs of an Interpreter (1967), pp. 97-105. A detailed and valuable account by Graham Ross appears in David Dilks (ed.), Retreat from Power: Studies in Britain’s Foreign Policy of the Twentieth Century: Volume II After 1939 (1981), pp. 101-19. Quoted in Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune (1969), p. 701. Cadogan and Dew, 29 December 1942 and 19 April 1943, FO 36954/66 and 2377; Churchill, op. cit., iv, 606; Jebb, The Memoirs of Ford Gladwyn (1972), pp. 104—5; Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 137-9; Herring, op. cit., pp. 115-18. Roger Parkinson, A Day’s March Nearer Home (1974), pp. 131-2, 196-7; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 196-7; Stoler, op. cit., pp. 76-7, 86-91, 96, 105-6; Dallek, op. cit., pp. 503, 507-8, 515, 533-4. The assertion of a Soviet historian (Trukhanovsky, op. cit., p. 309) that after Stalingrad

483

Sources and References

51

52

53

54 55

the Soviet Government ceased to feel great anxiety about the absence of a Second Front can only be described as preposterous. Law, 24 August 1943, FO 36992/4717; Dew, 14 August 1943, FO 36955/4591; Helphand’s memorandum and minutes by Dew, Sargent and Cadogan, 15-20 October 1943, FO 37031/6851. Ibid., Cavendish-Bentinck, 16 October 1943; David Irving, Hitler’s War (1977), p. 571. Soviet-German peace contacts are discussed at length in this book, according to which Stalin continued to make peace overtures of some sort to Hitler till the very end of 1944, with Hitler always turning a deaf ear. Ibid., pp. 610, 699, 706, 731, 747. Against this must be set the fact that after the Normandy landings, Soviet propaganda belatedly endorsed the Unconditional Surrender doctrine proclaimed by Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. V. Mastny, ‘Stalin and the Prospects of a Separate Peace in World War II’, American Historical Review, vol. 77 (1972), 1,365-88. Also, G. Warner in Inter¬ national Affairs, vol. 54 (1978), 291; and Ulam, op. cit., pp. 332-3. Clark Kerr to Warner, 28 February 1943, and the Moscow Chancery to the Foreign Office, 11 March 1943, FO 36954/1508 and 1836; minute by Churchill, 2 July 1943, FO 36955/3894; Wilson, 17 August 1943, minutes on telegram from Clark Kerr of 28 August 1943, and Clark Kerr to Warner, 10 August 1943, FO 36956/4630, 4929 and 5158. In his letter of 10 August Clark Kerr wrote that ‘in his heart’ he felt that the Soviet complaint about British aloofness producing a Russian inferiority complex was ‘right’: ‘We have not yet let them into the club. They are still scrutinised by the hall-porter, stared at by the members and made to feel that they do not really belong.’ See also Harvey (ed.), op cit., entry for 30 August 1943. Dew, 4 June 1943, FO 37019; R.A. Butler to Eden, and minute by Eden, 2 and 16 June 1943, FO 36983/3547. Conversation between Harry Hopkins and Eden, 19 August 1943, FO 36992/5060; Donnelly, 29 October 1943, FO 37005/6151; Malkin, 8 October 1943, FO 36777/6854; Hull op. cit., ii, 1,251-2.

56 This paragraph is based on a perusal of FO 36983 and 36985. 57 Roberts, 15 February and 5 March 1943, FO 35396/628; Eden interview with Maisky and minutes by Dew, Warner and Sargent, 10-12 March 1943, FO 36991/1605. 484

Sources and References 58 Correspondence with the embassy in Moscow and minutes, July 1943, FO 36955/4006, 4102 and 4280; and August 1943, FO 36956/4691, 4843 and.,5015; Avon, The Reckon¬ ing, pp. 425, 427. 59 Roberts, Sargent and Flarvey, 2-15 September 1943, FO 36956/5015. 60 Record of interview, 10 March 1943, FO 36991/1605. 61 V. Mastny, ‘Soviet War Aims at the Moscow and Teheran Conferences of 1943’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 47 (1975), 481-504; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 22 October 1943. 62 Dew, 29 July 1943, FO 36991/4271; Philip Nichols (on Turkey) to Sargent, 20 October 1943, FO 37030/6165; Lord Strang, At Home and Abroad (1956), p. 200; Elisabeth Barker, Churchill and Eden at War (1978), pp. 173-4; Woodward, op. cit. (single-vol. edn), pp. 233, 237, 402-3. 63 Hariiman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 244-6; Parkinson, op. cit., pp. 194-5; Avon, The Reckoning, pp. 414-18; an amusing anecdote in Churchill, op. cit., v, 239; Foreign Office to the embassy in Washington (Eden’s report on the conference), 4 November 1943, FO 37030/6447; short account of the conference in Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin (Princeton, 1957), pp. 217-34, usefully updated by Mastny’s article (see note 61 above). 64 Strang (on spheres of influence), 28 December 1943, FO 34340/13709; Hull, op. cit., ii, 1,174, 1,282, 1,297; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (1973), pp. 128-9; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 235-9. 65 Mastny, op. cit., p. 493; Bohlen, op. cit., p. 153. Accounts of the Teheran and Cairo Conferences are numerous. Two able ones, one by an American historian and the other by two British, are Feis, op. cit., pp. 237-79, and John W. WheelerBennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War (1972), chapters 7 and 8, while the article by Mastny cited above is essential reading. Particularly useful accounts by participants are, on the United States side, contained in the memoirs of Bohlen, op. cit., pp. 138-53, and of Averell Harriman, Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 262-83. On the British side, one may refer to Birse, op. cit., pp. 155-62, and the relevant entries in Lord Moran’s published diaries, as well as to Churchill’s account in The Second World War, v, chapters xvm-xxm. See also Parkinson, op. cit., pp. 214—27, and Stoler, op. cit., pp. 142-52. 485

Sources and References 66 Moran, op. cit., entry for 30 November 1943. 67 Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York, 1975), p. 182. For a much earlier report on somewhat these lines see Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 9 March 1942. 68 Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 275-6. 69 This essential aid was almost entirely American. If British aid to Russia ever played a really important part in the Soviet war effort, it was in 1942. By late 1943 United States aid was not only ten times greater than British in quantity, but was also supplying Russia with items which it largely lacked or which were in desperately short supply, something which Britain could never do: motor vehicles, railway equipment, tele¬ phones and telegraph wire, enough food to provide a halfpound of nourishment each day for an army of twelve millions. Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 153, 202-3, 212-17. 70 Moran, op. cit., entries for 5, 10 and 12 December 1943. 71 Wilson, 12 December 1943, FO 37064/7274; Harrison, Sargent and Eden, 24 and 29 November 1943, FO 34340/13709. 72 Jebb, 19 February 1944, FO 40740/1751. 73 Chiefs of Staff, ‘Policing of Europe after German Surrender’, 3 April 1944, FO 40769/2315; Chiefs of Staff memorandum on Germany, 12 December 1943, CAB 87/83. 74 Grigg at Armistice and Post-War Committee, 20 July 1944, CAB 87/66; John Kennedy, The Business of War (1957), p. 147; Trukhanovsky, op. cit., pp. 179, 426-7, 456-7. 75 Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 159-60, 165; Ward, 15 August 1944, FO 43306/5792. 76 Burrows to Ismay, 14 April 1944; Clark Kerr to Eden, 16 July 1944; Ismay to Burrows, 10 May 1944, Ismay papers (King’s College, London), IV/Bur. 77 Birse, op. cit., pp. 66-72; Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 158-67; Jacob, op. cit., p. 138. 78 Wilson and Eden, 19 April and 15 May 1944; Wilson and Skaife, 6 August and 4 October 1944, FO 43305/3554 and 4686; Skaife, Wilson, Warner and Eden, 24 September-5 October 1944, FO 43306/6144 and 6214; minutes on poss¬ ible removal of Brigadier Firebrace, November 1944, FO 43307/7013; Clark Kerr to Eden and minute by Wilson, 31 August and 23 September 1944, FO 43336/5598. 79 Clark Kerr to Eden as in note 78 above; Balfour to Warner, 17 March 1944, FO 43304/2068; Cadogan, 14 May 1944 FO 43305/3554.

486

Sources and References 80 Sir Horace Wilson had been Neville Chamberlain’s adviser on foreign policy in 1939 and an arch-exponent of the appease¬ ment of Germany. Minutes, August-October 1944, FO 43306/5126, 5792, 5795; Cavendish-Bentinck and Warner, 16 June and 20 September 1944, FO 40741A/6254 and 7618. 81 Jebb and Roberts, 28 and 31 July 1944, and Warner, 15 September 1944, ibid., 6793 and 7841; Sargent, 30 July 1944, FO 39079/9626; Sargent, 18 August 1944, FO 43306/5126. 82 Butler, 23 May 1944, FO 40740/4379; Harvey, 12 August 1944, FO 39079/10845. Butler’s fears were far fron ground¬ less in relation to the views of American military planners. See Stoler, op. cit., pp. 81-4. 83 Ward, 28 August 1944, FO 39080/11933; Wilson’s proposal and responses to it, August-October 1944, FO 43306/5792 and 5795; Butler, 28 August 1944, FO 43319/5122. 84 Memoranda by Eden and Chiefs of Staff and minutes, 20 September-12 October 1944, FO 39080/13577, 13519, 14202; minutes of meeting, 4 October 1944, FO 43336/6177. 85 Jebb’s note on committee paper (44)27, 9 November 1944, and Warner, late December 1944, FO 40741B/8181 and 8672. 86 Warner, 25 January 1944, and Eden’s minute on Clark Kerr to Foreign Office, 12 February 1944, FO 43304/776 and 937; Woodward, op. cit., pp. 290-1, 294n; Dilks (ed.), op. cit., entry for 17 January 1944; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., p. 296. 87 Wilson, 20 February 1944, FO 38920/2068, and 9 March 1944, FO 43304/1449; Eden and Sargent, April 1944, ibid., 1908; Dixon diary for 1944, 7 March. 88 Churchill-Foreign Office exchange, 1-5 April 1944, FO 43304/2128; Dixon diary for 1944, 4, 5, 6 and 17 April. 89 Churchill, 30 May 1944, FO 43305/3440; Moran, op. cit., entry for 21 August 1944; Parkinson, op. cit., p. 297. 90 On the Soviet reaction to the opening of the Second Front see Bohlen, op. cit., p. 158; Shtemenko, op. cit., pp. 29-30; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., p. 314; Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution (1979 reprint), pp. 270-1; minutes, June 1944, FO 43305/3757; Sargent, 14 July 1944, FO 43335/4956; Clark Kerr to Warner and minutes, 17 April-4 May 1944, FO 43322/2616; Haigh, 24 September 1944, FO 43336/5598; (on BBC) minutes, late 1944 to early 1945,

487

Sources and References FO 43307/7884. 91 Minutes and memorandum, W.P. (44) 436, FO 43335/4956. 92 ‘Anglo-Soviet Political Conversations at Moscow, October 9-October 17 1944’ (record of meetings on 9 and 10 October), Ismay papers, VI/10; on Tito see Churchill, op. cit., vi, 197, 200. 93 Ibid., 195-200; Yergin, op. cit., pp. 59-61; Loewenheim, Langley and Jonas (eds), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (1975), documents 435-48; Lynn Etheridge Davis, The Cold War Begins: SovietAmerican Conflict over Eastern Europe (Princeton, New Jersey, 1974), pp. 157-9. The abortive nature of the agree¬ ment was certainly a matter for relief to the Foreign Office in dealing with public opinion both at home and in the United States. The Wilsonian disdain for secret treaties was as strong as ever in America, and Britain was in danger of tying itself into knots over the issue. There had been a Secret Protocol to the British-Polish treaty of August 1939, yet in May 1942 Eden had refused any secret addendum to the Anglo-Soviet treaty which was then being negotiated, on the grounds that Britain ‘had for some time excluded such procedure from their diplomacy’. Stalin of all men would not have been shocked when Churchill proposed what had been refused thirty months earlier, but the danger was always of a leak to the press, especially in the United States. With the percen¬ tages deal a dead letter, the Foreign Office staff were to agonise early in 1945 whether to exercise their right to terminate the treaty with Poland at six months’ notice, which they were entitled to do now that it was more than five years old. Its objectives, which were exclusively against German aggression, had by then been realised almost completely and, after abrogation, the Foreign Secretary would be able to say honestly that Britain had no secret agreements. W.D. Allen, 28 May 1945, FO 39435/5598; Eden, Cadogan and others, January-February 1945, FO 39436/18169. 94 Jacob, op. cit., p. 255. 95 Pierson Dixon’s diary of the Moscow Conference, 10 October 1944. The following passages are based on this diary except where otherwise indicated. 96 Birse, op. cit., p. 174. 97 Jacob, op. cit., pp. 246-7. 98 Birse, op. cit., pp. 173-5. 99 U.J. — Uncle Joe — was Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s familiar designation for Stalin.

488

Sources and References 100 Ismay to Douglas, 5 December 1944, Ismay papers IV/Dou; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 16 October 1944. 101 Jacob, op. cit., p. 259. 102 Parkinson, op. cit., pp. 388-96; Shtemenko, op. cit., p. 258; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 353, 362. 103 The GPU was the same body as the NKVD and the KGB the Soviet security police. Eden to Clark Kerr, 6 November 1944, FO 39417/15381; see also minutes, late October 1944, FO 43307/6567; Warner, 5 November 1941, FO 29470/6317. 104 Allen, 14 December 1944, FO 39420/17580. 105 Minutes of meeting, 23 November 1944, CAB 78/28. See Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 178-80, 199-201 for the fizzling out of these hopes. 106 Troutbeck, 27 December 1944, FO 39420/17671. 107 Strang, 23 January 1945, FO 50828/473; Strang at Armistice and Post-War Committee, 8 June 1944, CAB 87/66. Strang wrote a detailed account of his work on the EAC in his At Home and Abroad, pp. 203-25. 108 Armistice and Post-War Committee, 4 January 1945, CAB 87/69; Bohlen, op. cit., p. 168. 109 Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (Oxford, 1970), was one of the better products of the ‘revisionist’ historiography of the 1960s on the origins of the Cold War. Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton, New Jersey, 1973), chapter 6, offers a useful critique. As with the Teheran Conference, Wheeler-Bennett and Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 215-50, and Feis, op. cit., pp. 489-558, offer accounts of a decidedly non-revisionist nature. Many British and American participants in the conference wrote memoirs or diary accounts, a few of which are cited below. 110 Ismay to Burrows and Burrows to Ismay, 19 March and 13 April 1945, Ismay papers IV/Bur; Avon, The Reckoning, p. 522; Moran, op. cit., entries for 6 and 11 February 1945. 111 Dallek, op. cit., pp. 504—9, 513. 112 Churchill, 14 May 1945, FO 46872/2435. 113 Bohlen, op. cit., p. 193; Woodward, op. cit., pp. 487-8; Dilks (ed.), op. cit., entry for 13 February 1945; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 424-6. 114 See, for example, Lev Bezymensky in New Times (Moscow, 1980), nos. 18 and 19. In view of what is known about Soviet dealings with Germany during the war and British and American innocence in that respect, it ill-behoves this author to write about ‘unsavoury’ British and American dealings

489

Sources and References which violated ‘the principle of unconditional surrender, which excluded any possibility of negotiating with the Nazis’; interestingly, no examples of such dealings are given. On the north Italian surrender, see Bradley F. Smith and Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise: the Secret Surrender (1979). 115 Ward, 6 February 1945, FO 50828/736; Dixon diary for 1945, 28 March. 116 Shtemenko, op. cit., p. 388; Parkinson, op. cit., p. 469; Sharp, op. cit., pp. 127-9. 117 Churchill, op. cit., vi, 375-7, 411-17; Sharp, op. cit., pp. 122-5; Parkinson, op. cit., pp. 463-78, 482-5, 488-9; Avon, The Reckoning, pp. 532-3; Wheeler-Bennett and Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 317-18; Harvey (ed.) op. cit., entries for 28 April, 5, 6 and 9 May, 10 June and 16 July 1945. 118 Churchill, op. cit., vi, 456-60, 479-85; Sharp, op. cit., pp. 143-5, 149-64; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 477-8; Walter Bedell Smith, Moscow Mission 1946-1949 (1950), p. 10; Arthur L. Smith Jr, Churchill’s German Army (Beverly Hills and London, 1977). 119 Notes, and extracts from House of Lords debates, 25 April 1945, FO 50824/3038. 120 Orme Sargent, ‘Stocktaking after VE Day’, 11 July 1945 and minutes thereon, FO 50912/5471. 121 Accounts of Potsdam, as of the other conferences, are legion. Woodward, op. cit., pp. 536-75, and Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: the Potsdam Conference (Princeton, 1960), supplemented by the same author’s Japan Subdued (Prince¬ ton, 1961), offer official or semi-official British and American accounts. Charles L. Mee, Jr, Meeting at Potsdam (1975) is a very different treatment, all too anxious to find fault with Truman. The books by Sherwin and Yergin are of great value. Among British participants besides Churchill, the diaries or memoirs of Birse, Cadogan, Dixon, Eden and Moran have been published. A less obvious but interesting account by a junior member of the British delegation is George Mallaby, From My Level: Unwritten Minutes (1965), pp. 129-35. A particularly valuable American memoir is Bohlen’s book. 122 Trukhanovsky, op. cit., p. 437. 123 Dilks (ed.), op. cit., entries for 29 July and 2 August 1945; Piers Dixon, Double Diploma: the Life of Sir Pierson Dixon (1968), p. 170; Avon, Full Circle, p. 66. 124 Avon, The Reckoning, p. 545; Moran, op. cit., entries for 19 and 20 July 1945; Yergin, op. cit., pp. 101, 104-5, 119, 141. 125 Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (1961), 490

Sources and References pp. 59-60, 71, 75-8; Birse, op. cit., p. 208; Bohlen, op. cit., p. 228. 126 Ibid., p. 234; Woodward, op. cit., pp. 549-58. 127 Avon, The Reckoning, pp. 546-7; James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (1947), pp. 76, 92; Mee, op. cit., pp. 197-8, 275-6.

3 Britain, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe During the War I Poland 1 Makins, 18 April 1941, FO 29465/1902; Eden and Makins, 7 and 9 February 1941, FO 26755/3226; Strang, 11 July 1941, ibid., 7591; memorandum by Eden, 22 January 1941, WA(41)2, CAB 87/90. 2 Stanislaw Kot, Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia (1963), p. 67; Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (Reprint Society edition, 1950-56), in, 314-16; Antony Polonsky, The Great Powers and the Polish Question 1941-1945 (1976), documents 18 and 19; George V. Kacewicz, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the Polish Government in Exile (1939-1945) (The Hague, 1979), pp. 92-110 - a useful book but one which was written without consulting Foreign Office records. 3 Strang, 21 July 1941, FO 26756/8306; Makins, 21 December 1941, FO 26763/14078; Makins, 1 July 1941, FO 26755/7016; Makins, 5 October 1941, FO 26760/10502; Roberts, 11 August 1941, FO 26757/8774; Kot, op. cit., pp. xvi, 43-4. 4 Records of Sikorski’s conversations with Eden and Bevin, 3 July 1941, and with the Soviet Ambassador, 5 July 1941, FO 26755/7458 (published as document 15 in Polonsky, op. cit.) and 7492; Cadogan, 28 July 1941, FO 26756/8306; Robert Rhodes James, Victor Cazalet (1976), pp. 261-3. This book indicates (especially pp. 270, 283) that Sikorski had genuine illusions about Soviet goodwill until the discovery of the Katyn graves lifted the scales from his eyes. Sikorski has received the doubtful accolade of praise in recent Soviet publications, e.g. S.M. Shtemenko, The Last Six Months (1978), p. 46. 5 Roberts, 8 August 1941, FO 26758/8803; John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (1978), entry for 12 July 1941; on Katyn I have relied on J.K. Zawodny, Death in the Forest (1971), and Louis FitzGibbon, Katyn Massacre (1971), as well as the FO records from 1943 onwards (on which see below). 6 Minutes, August 1941, FO 26758/9255; minutes etc., 491

Sources and References

7

8 9

10

11 12

13

14 15

16 17

18

September-October 1941, FO 26760/10960, 11419, 11581; Polonsky, op. cit., document 24. On Sikorski’s mission and the deployment of the Polish forces in Russia, see FO 26762/12982 and 13550 (including Makins, 7 December 1941); FO 26763/13664, 13838, 14401; Kot, op. cit., pp. 140-55, 163-6; Polonsky, op. cit., document 30. See Wilson, 22 June 1943, FO 37045/4905. Eden-Sikorski conversation, 19 January 1942, FO 31077/794; minutes and correspondence, May-June 1942, FO 31106/5961, 5985, 6013; FO to Polish embassy, 17 April 1942, FO 31081/3438. Sikorski’s talk with Eden in note 9 above; Roberts, 21 March 1942, FO 31079/2708; Savery, January 1944, FO 39012/1002. Minutes etc., FO 31083/5000 (including Roberts, 13 May 1942); Wilson, 8 February 1942, FO 31078/1370. Eden, 18 January 1942, and Soviet-Polish correspondence, with minutes by Dew, Warner, Sargent and Eden, JanuaryFebruary 1942, FO 31077/347 and 1071; Dew, 7 February 1942, FO 31091/2118; Polonsky, op. cit., document 35. Warner, 9 February 1942, FO 31091/2118; Sikorski-Eden conversation, 4 March 1942, FO 31078/2488; Roberts, 13 April 1942, FO 31082/3924; Polonsky, op. cit., documents 33-4, 36; Kacewicz, op. cit., pp. 136-9. Warner, 31 December 1942, FO 31091/12841; V. Cavendish-Bentinck, 18 May 1942, FO 31083/5000. Savery, February 1942, FO 31091/2118; Roberts, 20 Janu¬ ary 1942, FO 32942/294; Polish-Ukrainian enmity in pre-war eastern Poland is discussed in Elizabeth Wiskemann, Un¬ declared War (second edition, 1967), pp. 204-11, 232-6. Eden-Sikorski conversation, 22 January 1943 FO 37173/801. Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs 1931—1945 (1957), p. 418; see Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 5 July 1943, for a typical lament about Sikorski’s death. Allen, 24 March 1943, FO 34566/3157; Warner, 23 March 1943, FO 36991/1748; Polonsky, op. cit., documents 44, 48, 61, 73.

19 Gerald Reitlinger, The House Built on Sand (1960), p. 242. 20 Warner, Roberts and Dew, April 1943, and extract from War Cabinet minutes, 19 April 1943, FO 34569/4396, 4454, 4404, 4518; Churchill to Eden and Eden’s reply, 15-16 July 1943, FO 34584/8429; Harvey (ed.) op. cit., entries for 25 492

Sources and References

21 22

23

24 25

26

27

28 29 30 31

32 33

34

and 29 April 1943; FitzGibbon, op. cit., p. 179; Roger Parkinson, A Day's March Nearer Home (1974), pp. 91-5, for the Cabinet’s reaction to the Katyn affair; Churchill’s dignified treatment in The Second World War, iv, 609-12; relevant documents in Polonsky, op. cit., nos. 50-7, 70. Kot, op. cit., p. 271; Kacewicz, op. cit., p. 141. O’Malley to Roberts, 14 May 1943, FO 36575/5480; see also A. Polonsky and B. Drukier (eds), The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (1980), pp. 5-10. Wilson, Warner and Allen, 25-8 July 1943, FO 36991/4447; Roberts, Cadogan, Strang, Sargent and Eden, June 1943, FO 37045/4905. Roberts, 23 September 1943, FO 34561/11633; minutes and memoranda in CAB 65/40 and 66/41. Eden, 29 September 1943, FO 34561/11633; Eden, 9 October 1943, FO 34562/11657 (published in Polonsky, op. cit., document 73); Roberts, 22 October 1943, ibid., 12044. Roberts, 2 October 1943, FO 36587/11279; Harrison, 23 September 1943, FO 34561/11491; Roberts, 17 December 1943, FO 34463/14812. See above, p. 112; on Hull, see W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946 (New York, 1975), p. 236; on Roosevelt see also John W. Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War (1972), pp. 81-5; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 16 March 1943; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945 (New York, 1979), pp. 400, 436-7; Polonsky, op. cit., document 47. Dallek, op. cit., pp. 437-8; Polonsky, op. cit., document 78. Roberts and Eden, 26-8 December 1943, FO 36590/15378. Dixon diary for 1944, 14 February. Roberts, 21 April 1944, FO 43408/2340; Reuter reports, February and November 1944, O’Malley dispatch, and Foreign Office minutes, April 1944, FO 39510/2624, 4736, 15639. Edward Crankshaw, The Shadow of the Winter Palace (1976), pp. 127-8; see also Roberts, 20 May 1944, FO 39400/6694. Dixon diary for 1944, 19 and 27 January; Allen (with marginal note by Eden), 7 January 1944, Eden to Churchill, 6 January 1944, and minutes by officials, FO 39385/253, 303, 409; Malkin, Roberts and Eden, 24-29 February 1944, FO 39434/2401; Kacewicz, op. cit., p. 157. Churchill to Foreign Office, 30 January 1944, and report by 493

Sources and References

35 36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

O’Malley, 11 February 1944, FO 39390/2096 and 2099; Dixon diary for 1944, 7 February; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entries for 10, 17 and 21 February 1944; Churchill’s dealings with the Polish problem in 1944 are the subject of many of the documents in Polonsky, op. cit., chapter 4. Churchill to Eden, 31 March 1944, FO 40733/3321. Susanne S. Lotarski in Thomas B. Hammond (ed.), The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers (New Haven, Con¬ necticut, 1975), pp. 348-9; Allen and others, May 1944, FO 39400/6903; Polonsky and Drukier (eds), op. cit., pp. 13-19 on the organs of Polish Communism at this time, and pp. 12, 33-4, 55-63 on the Polish Red forces which depended heavily on officers seconded from the Red Army. Clark Kerr to the Foreign Office, and minute by Roberts, 15-16 February 1944, FO 39390/2137; Alaric Jacob, A Window in Moscow (1946); p. 172; Polonsky and Drukier (eds), op. cit., pp. 20-5. Wilson and Warner, 29 and 31 May 1944, FO 43305/ 3246; Harvey, 21 May and 11 June 1944, FO 39400/6694, 7186; see also Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 30 July 1944. Dixon diary for 1944, 24-5 July, 7 August; minutes and correspondence, July 1944, FO 39405/9699, 9700-1, 9736, 9750, 9810, 9814; Roberts, 5 August 1944, FO 39408/10529; Allen, 29 December 1944, FO 39420/17691; on the attitude of the War Cabinet to the rising, see Parkin¬ son, op. cit., pp. 351-64. Churchill message from Moscow, 12 October 1944, FO 39414/14115; Polonsky, op. cit., document 112; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 347—8; George Kennan, Memoirs 1925—1950 (1968), pp. 210—11; see also Polonsky and Drukier (eds), op. cit., p. 44. Roberts, Harvey and Eden, 7-8 August 1944, FO 39408/10710; Eden, O’Malley and Roberts, September 1944, FO 39411/12125, 12604, 12791, 12803, 12910; Roberts and Eden, 2 and 5 October 1944, FO 39414/13958-9; Kacewicz, op. cit., pp. 189-92. Churchill to Foreign Office (for Hopkins), 13 October 1944, FO 43647/16726; see also Churchill, op. cit., vi, 194, 201-3; A.H. Birse, Memoirs of an Interpreter (1967), pp. 170-2; Dixon’s diary of the Moscow Conference, 13 October 1944; on Osobka-Morawski see Polonsky and Drukier (eds) op cit., pp. 87-8, 173. Dixon’s diary, 14 October 1944.

494

Sources and References 44 Dixon’s diary, 14-15 October 1944; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entries for 15 October and 4 November 1944. 45 Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 316-27, 342-4; The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (1948), ii, 1,447-8; Kacewicz, op. cit., pp. 198-205; Lynn Etheridge Davis, The Cold War Begins: Soviet-American Conflict over Eastern Europe (Princeton, New Jersey, 1974), pp. 137-8, writes about Roosevelt’s ‘obvious sympathies for Soviet demands’ con¬ cerning Poland in 1944, and about his ‘primary’ concern in matters Polish with securing the Polish-American vote in the presidential elections. 46 Churchill’s meeting with Polish Government, 3 November 1944; record by Harvey of interview with Polish Ambas¬ sador, 4 November 1944; Stalin message for Churchill, November 1944; record by O’Malley of interview with Polish Foreign Minister, 24 November 1944, all in FO 39417/15255, 15280, 15315, 15642, 16359; Polonsky, op. cit., document 117; Dixon’s diary for 1944, 15 December. 47 Allen, 7 January 1944; Eden to Churchill, 6 January 1944, FO 39385/253, 303; Foreign Office draft of message for Churchill to send to Stalin, and minute by Harvey, February 1944, FO 39390/2021; Polonsky, op. cit., document 81; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 10 February 1944. 48 Roberts, 5 August 1944, FO 39408/10529; Roberts, 4 October 1944, FO 39414/14017; Gatehouse, 22 December 1944, FO 39420/17671; Allen, Harvey, Sargent, Cadogan and Eden, 16-17 November 1944, FO 39436/15747; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 26 November 1944. 49 Eden, 27 December 1944, FO 39420/17671; Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam (1977), pp. 50-1. 50 Warner, 13 January 1945, FO 47575/273; Warner, 25 Janu¬ ary 1945, FO 47576/679; Eden-Mikolajczyk meeting, 22 January 1945, ibid., 749; extract from War Cabinet minutes, 30 December 1944, FO 47575/166; Polonsky and Drukier (eds), op. cit., pp. 89-90. 51 Memorandum and minute by Miss F. Gatehouse, 29 December-6 January 1944-5; BBC report, 5 February 1945, FO 47696/841 and 1522. 52 See references to these conferences in Chapter 2 above. Particularly useful on Poland at Yalta is chapter 5 of Cle¬ mens’s book. Polonsky, op. cit., documents 120-49, cover 1945, with a heavy emphasis on the conferences. 53 The Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (1965), pp. 525-7; Arthur Bliss Lane, / Saw Freedom 495

Sources and References

54

55 56 57

58 59

Betrayed (1949), pp. 59-60; Polonsky and Drukier (eds), op. cit., pp. 93, 108. Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 426-31, 450-4, 459-70, 480-2; Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York, 1975), pp. 156-60; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (1978), pp. 79-86, 104. Churchill, op. cit., vi, 480; see also pp. 345-58, 391-405, 464-6 in the same book. Ibid., pp. 519-20, 527-30, 535. Allen, Arnold Toynbee and others, April 1945, FO 47644/3465; Allen and Sargent, 28 and 30 May 1945, FO 47696/5862. Correspondence between the War Office and the Foreign Office, 6-25 July 1945, FO 51066/5335. Bevin (actually written by Allen) to Dryden Brook, MP, 12 September 1945, and minute by Miss Gatehouse, 29 Sep¬ tember 1945, FO 47646/12583.

II Czechoslovakia 60 Roberts, 20 January 1942, FO 30834/1101; Roberts, 28 June 1941, and Makins, 11 July 1941, FO 26410/7140 and 7680. 61 Strang, 24 August 1942, FO 30827/8171; Roberts, 1 November 1942, FO 30835/10581; Cadogan, 10 June 1942, FO 30848/5663. 62 Josef Korbel, The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia 1938-1948 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1959), pp. 77-8; a detailed, if dated, treatment in P. Wandycz, Czecho¬ slovak^ olish Confederation and the Great Powers 1940-1945 (Bloomington, Indiana, 1956); for British views see Wheeler-Bennett and Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 96-7, and Avon, op. cit., pp. 365-7, 371, 488. 63 Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Knaves, Fools and Heroes (1974), pp. 133-4; Korbel, op. cit., pp. 49-50, 80, 83, 91, 99 on Benes’s attitude towards the Soviet Union; Makins, 10 Janu¬ ary 1942, FO 30827/151. 64 Makins and Eden, 7 June 1942; Strang, 24 August 1942 (reporting Sikorski’s views on the Czechs), FO 30827/5534 and 8171; Korbel, op. cit., pp. 79-81. 65 FO 30827/6122, 6364, 7654; FO 30828/9209, 9427, 12165 (June—December 1942) for the Teschen problem. 66 Makins and Eden, 12 June 1942, FO 30834/5797; Roberts 27 October 1942, FO 30828/10145.

496

Sources and References 67 Roberts, 14 September 1942, FO 26775/9671; record of Eden’s talks with Stalin, FO 31077/800; Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution (1979 reprint), p. 177. 68 Eden-BeneS meeting, 21 January 1942; Eden minute, 10 April 1942, FO 30834/845 and 3484; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 25 October 1941. 69 Roberts and Makins, 16-17 June 1942; Eden memorandum for War Cabinet, 2 July 1942, FO 30834/6447, 6671; War Cabinet minutes, 6 July 1942, FO 30835/6788; WheelerBennett, op. cit., p. 148. 70 ‘Guilt’ debate, August-October 1942, FO 30835/8119, 9161, 10043, 10220. 71 Roberts, 26 September 1942, FO 30827/9136. 72 Roberts, 8 December 1942, FO 30828/12165. 73 Sargent, 5 July 1943, FO 34338/7700; Korbel, op. cit., pp. 84-7; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 287-91; V.V. Kusin in Martin McCauley (ed.), Communist Power in Europe 1944^1949 (1977), p. 75. 74 Leo Amery (reporting a conversation with BeneS) to Eden, 19 January 1943, FO 34334/1020; Nichols (British Ambas¬ sador to the Czech Government) to Roberts, 9 June 1943, FO 34338/6653; Roberts, 27 September 1943, FO 34355/11244; Zayas, op. cit., pp. 33-4; Korbel, op. cit., pp. 77-8, 85. 75 Amery to Eden (see note 74 above); Nichols to Roberts, 22 and 24 June 1943, FO 34338/7155; Nichols dispatch, 20 May 1943, and memorandum from the Polish embassy, 27 May 1943, FO 34335/5639 and 6067. 76 Eden to Nichols, 25 June 1943, FO 34338/7363; Polonsky, op. cit., document 65. 77 Eden, 6 August and 16 September 1943, FO 34339/8752 and 10733; see also many of the documents in FO 34340, including 12124 (Czech pilots). 78 Harrison, 1 December 1943, and Roberts, 4 January 1944, FO 34341/14338, 15065. 79 Eden and Roberts, 17 and 22 January 1944, FO 38920/268 and 924; FO 34341/14912 (American opposition to the treaty). 80 Harvey and Roberts, 24 and 27 September 1944, FO 38945/12885 and 13122. 81 Roberts, 18 April 1944, FO 38945/4585; Roberts, 5 October 1944, and letters and minutes on Ruthenia, FO 38921/14122, 16851, 17201, 17863, 17903; Korbel, op. cit., pp. 100-8.

497

Sources and References III South-east Europe 82 E.L. Rose, 6 November 1942, FO 33134/6423. 83 Dixon, 31 October 1942, FO 31535/1742; R.G.D. Laffan to Dixon and minute-by Rose, 26 and 30 January 1942, FO 33144/669. 84 Dixon and Howard, 8 and 11 January 1942, FO 33133/474. 85 Sargent, 11 January 1942, FO 33133/216; on 23 January 1942 Dixon referred to a military expedition to the Balkans as the ‘only certain wav’ of preventing Soviet expansion. FO 33142/396. 86 Eden and Rose, 12 and 21 January 1942, FO 33133/216 and 735. 87 Minute by Sargent and Sargent to Rendel (British Ambas¬ sador to the Yugoslav Government), 27 July and 5 August 1942, FO 33132/4725; Elisabeth Barker, British Policy in South-East Europe in the Second World War (1976), p. 187. 88 Greek Government memorandum, 28 April 1942, FO 33134/2880. 89 Dixon, 30 March 1942, FO 33113/2125; Foreign Office discussions on the Albania declaration, NovemberDecember 1942, FO 33107/7685, 7817, 8016, 8174, and FO 33108/8655. 90 Warner, 4 November 1942, FO 31535/1742; Roberts, 14 November 1942, FO 33134/6423. 91 Sargent to Rendel, 30 April 1943, FO 37173/1894. 92 On Hungary, FO 34495/6684 and 10907, and FO 34504/1421 and 11310 (including Eden minute, 12 February 1943); Howard, 9 August 1943, FO 37173/6753. 93 Laskey, 31 July 1943, FO 37232/6844. 94 Dixon, Howard and Sargent, 4 and 6 April 1943; Leeper to Eden, 21 July 1943; Laskey, 10 November 1943 FO 37232/2455, 6844, 11260. 95 C M.^Woodhouse, The Struggle for Greece 1941-1949 96 Ibid., pp. 38, 50-2, 58, 73-4. 97 Ibid., pp. 31-2; Woodhouse and B. Sweet-Escott in Phyllis Auty and Richard Clogg (eds), British Policy towards War¬ time Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (1975) pp. 10-13 19, 126-7; Churchill, op. cit., v, 415. 98 Barker, op. cit., p. 121; for a much earlier expression of the same idea see Rose’s remarks at a meeting on 13 January 1943, FO 35363/391. y 99 F.W.D. Deakin, ‘The myth of a Balkan Landing in the Second World War’, in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., 498

Sources and References

100 101

102

103

104

105

106

107

pp. 93-116; Mark A. Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front 1941-1943 (Westport, Connecticut, 1977), pp. 125-8, 131-4, 138-9. Clogg in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 167-205; discussion in ibid., pp. 262-4, 274-5, 288. Myers and discussion in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 147-66, 268, 273; Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 42-3; Parkinson, op. cit., pp. 204-5; Howard, 20 November 1943, FO 37173/13912. Mark. C. Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia 1940-1943 (New York, 1980), p. 1. This book, for all its painstaking research, shows the distortions which can result from a perspective strictly limited in space or time. The author’s conclusion (p. 243) that Britain feared the triumph of Communism in Yugoslavia primarily out of a belief that it would lead to anarchy and chaos, not because it would aid the expansion of Soviet power, is, not to mince words, nonsense. Wheeler, op. cit., pp. 123-4, 128-9, 150-4, 161-2; Barker in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 46-8; Barker, South-East Europe, p. 154; Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches (1949), pp. 446-8; David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (1971), entries for 20 and 22 December 1943, 15 January 1945; minutes, January 1943, FO 37578/16; Dew, 21 December 1943, FO 37619/13467; minutes on the Yugo¬ slav Government’s territorial claims, July 1943, FO 37638/6770. For a more objective assessment of the Government see Stevan K. Pavlowitch, ‘Out of Context - The Yugoslav Government in London [s/c] 1941-1945’, Journal of Contemporary History, xvi (1981), 89-118. Rose, 5 April 1942, FO 33134/2211; Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 257-8; F.W.D. Deakin, The Embattled Mountain (Oxford, 1971), pp. 206-10. Wheeler, op. cit., pp. 65-7, 99-102, 110-13, 115-17; article by Barker and discussion in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 22-58, 249, 253, 257-8, 279; Barker, South-East Europe, pp. 160-1. Eden and Cadogan, 3-4 January 1943, and Rose, 5 March 1943, FO 37578/3 and 987; Dew, 21 December 1943, FO 37619/13491; Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 276-7, 285-7; Deakin, op. cit., pp. 106-7, 187-9, 200-1; Wheeler, op. cit., pp. 175-82, 187-8, 192-3. On relations between leaders and led among the Partisans, see Basil Davidson, Partisan Picture (Bedford, 1946), pp. 27-37, 99-100. Wheeler, op. cit., pp. 168-70, 211-12; Barker, South-East 499

Sources and References Europe, pp. 159-60; Deakin,'op. cit., pp. 204-5; V. Trukhanovsky, British Foreign Policy during World War II (Moscow, 1970), pp. 342-4; Churchill, op. cit., v, 363-4; Howard, 30 December 1942, FO 37578/3. To be just, in October 1941 the Soviet Union had suggested to Britain joint aid to the Yugoslav guerrillas under Mihailovich’s leadership, and for a time after that Moscow radio called on the Partisans to subordinate themselves to Mihailovich. Deakin, op. cit., pp. 139-44, 161; Wheeler, op. cit., pp. 94-7. 108 Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 210-11, 231-2, 291-2; Wheeler, op. cit., pp. 220-33; Deakin, op. cit., pp. 73-7. 109 Bailey in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 59-90; Howard, 9 July 1943, FO 37588/5884. 110 Deakin, op. cit., p. 226. On the prehistory of Churchill’s interest in the Yugoslav resistance see Wheeler, od cit nn 173-4, 194-5. ’’ ’ 111 Barker, Woodhouse and Maclean in Auty and Clogg (eds) op. cit., pp. 38-9, 143-4, 220-8, 252; Maclean, Eastern Approaches, pp. 280-1, 329-38, 389-90, 401-3. 112 Maclean, op. cit., p. 403; Barker, South-East Europe, pp. 165—6. 113 P. Nichols, 17 December 1943, FO 37591/13954; Southern Department memorandum, 21 September 1943, and Rose 15 October 1943, FO 37613/9962 and 10152; Rose,’ November 1943, FO 37636/12119. 114 Rose, 30 November 1943, FO 37616/12404; Sargent 11 December 1943, FO 37591/12562; Rose, 24 December 1943, FO 37619/13633. 115 Howard, October 1943, FO 37636/10198; Rose, 17 November 1943, FO 37616/11783; Cadogan, 17 December 1943, FO 37591/13954; Wheeler, op. cit., p. 239; Deakin, op. cit., p. 257; Barker, South-East Europe, p. 168. 116 Ibid., pp. 178-83; Laskey (on King Zog), 6 August 1943 FO 37138/6925. 117 Hood, Dew and Harrison, 29-30 January 1944 FO 40733/491. y 118 Law to Jebb, 17 March 1944, and Ward, 19 March 1944, FO 40733/2768; committee minutes, 17 March 1944 and memoranda 16 and 23, CAB 87/84. 119 Ward and Jebb, 19 and 21 March 1944, FO 40733/2768 120 Leeper, Laskey and Sargent, 30 March-13 April 1944, FO 43755/5118; Law at Armistice and Post-War Committee 23 A^gust 1944’ CAB 87/66; memorandum 16 (see note 118). 121 FO memorandum for War Cabinet, no date but presented in

500

Sources and References

122

123

124 125 126 127

128

129

130 131 132 133 134

135

136

April, and minute by Hood, 19 March 1944, FO 40733/2769 and 3322. Jebb, 2 April 1944, and memorandum in note 121 above; minutes of Anglo-American discussions at the Foreign Office, 19 March 1944, FO 40733/2769 and 3385; Chiefs of Staff memorandum, 3 April 1944, FO 40769/2315; memorandum 20, CAB 87/67. Law and Eden at Armistice and Post-War Committee, 23 and 31 August 1944, CAB 87/66; Piers Dixon, Double Diploma: the Life of Sir Pierson Dixon (1968), p. 109; Avon, The Reckoning, pp. 459-60; Parkinson, op. cit., p. 352. Barker, South-East Europe, p. 143. Armistice and Post-War Committee, 8 June 1944, CAB 87/66. Barker, South-East Europe, pp. 209-11. The various peace feelers are discussed fully in Barker’s book. FORD memorandum, 23 March 1944, FO 43659/5229; N. Butler, 11 April 1944, FO 43661/6128; Allen, 1 May 1944, FO 40598/4322; Barker, South-East Europe, pp. 232-6. Churchill to Eden and Eden’s reply, 4 and 9 May 1944; Churchill to Eden: ‘You are right’, 2 May 1944, FO 43636/7380; Harold Macmillan, The Blast of War 1939-1945 (1967), p. 711. Minutes and correspondence, June-August 1944, FO 43636/10133, 10483, 11010, 11212, 11276, 11761, and FO 43646/8988; Hull, op. cit., n, 1,453; Churchill, op. cit., vi, 72-9, 179-80; Avon, The Reckoning, p. 459; Woodward, op. cit., pp. 291-4. W.P. (44) 304, 7 June 1944, and Warner, 31 May 1944, FO 43646/9092. Grigory Deborin, Thirty Years of Victory (Moscow, 1975), pp. 237, 283. Barker, South-East Europe, p. 145. Ibid., pp. 242-3. Bailey in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 81-6; Barker, South-East Europe, pp. 170-1; Maclean, op. cit., pp. 402, 412-13, 418-19, 437-8; Churchill, op. cit., v, 365-72; Dixon’s diary for 1944, 21 January and 16 February. Minutes of meetings, 28 March and 18 April 1944, FO 40733/2769 and 3385; memorandum for War Cabinet, 7 June 1944, FO 43646/9092; Maclean, op. cit., pp. 446-8. Avon, The Reckoning, pp. 470-1,482-3; Shtemenko, op. cit., pp. 212-14, 231-2 (for a Soviet account of Tito’s visit to Moscow); Maclean, op. cit., pp. 498-501, 518-20, 539; 501

Sources and References Barker, South-East Europe, p. 145; Deakin in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., pp. 246-7; memorandum cited in note 135 above. 137 FORD memorandum, 23 March 1944, FO 43659/5229; Foreign Office draft paper accepted by War Office, 7 October 1944, and minutes by Ward and others, mid-December 1944, FO 40601/7780 and 8364; Law at Armistice and Post-War Committee, 23 August 1944, CAB 87/66. 138 By Clogg, in Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit.; by Barker, op. cit.; and above all in Woodhouse, op. cit. 139 Auty and Clogg (eds), op. cit., p. 199; Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 77, 108-10. 140 Dixon diary for 1944, 2 January and 12 and 21 July; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., p. 350; Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 88, 92-3, 144; Barker, South-East Europe, pp. 142, 146. 141 Churchill, op. cit., v, 428; Parkinson, op. cit., pp. 424-5. 142 Dixon’s diary for 1944, 16 November, 3 and 4 December. 143 Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 131-2; Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: the Struggle for Survival (1968), p. 230; Churchill devoted two chapters of his war memoirs (vi, 237-69) to his role in Greek affairs at this time. 144 Dixon, Double Diploma, pp. 123-4; Georges Bidault, Resis¬ tance (1967), p. 66; D.G. Kousoulas in Hammond (ed.), p. 297; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (Vintage Books, New York, 1970), p. 192. 145 Churchill, op. cit., vi, 269; minutes by Dew and others, late December 1944, FO 43739/21728. For the assumption that EAM consisted of a handful of ‘bullies’, see also Avon, The Reckoning, p. 492. 4 Bevin and Foreign Policy 1 On Bevin’s life until 1945, see Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin (2 volumes, 1960-7). The biographical essay on Bevin by Roy Jenkins in The Times, 7, 8 and 9 June 1971, is well worth reading. On the domestic background to his foreign policy, see Leon D. Epstein, Britain - Uneasy Ally (Chicago, 1954); C.R. Rose, ‘The Relation of Socialist Prin¬ ciples to British Labour’s Foreign Policy 1945-1951’ (unpub¬ lished thesis, Oxford, 1959); Michael R. Gordon, Conflict and Consensus in Labour’s Foreign Policy 1914-1965 (Stan¬ ford, 1969); Bill Jones, The Russia Complex: the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (Manchester, 1977). 2 Butler to Bevin, 12 August 1940, and memorandum on the ‘Diplomatic Service’, October 1940, Bevin papers (Churchill 502

Sources and References

3

4 5

6

7

8 9

10 11

12 13

College, Cambridge), 6/59 and 2/1; Bullock, op. cit., n, 199-202. Bevin to Eden, 8 December 1942, Bevin papers 3/2 (also Bullock, op. cit., ii, 204—5); Bevin to Cranborne, 1 February 1944, Bevin papers 3/1; memorandum on war aims, 6 November 1941, Bevin papers 2/2; Armistice and Post-War Committee, 22 March 1945, CAB 87/69. T.D. Burridge, British Labour and Hitler’s War (1976), pp. 59-60. Bevin at Armistice and Post-War Committee, 18 May, 20 July, 23 August and 21 September 1944, CAB 87/66, and 4 January 1945, CAB 87/69; correspondence between Bevin and the Foreign Office, July 1944, FO 39092/9710; W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946 (New York, 1975), p. 486. Armistice and Post-War Committee, 29 June 1944, CAB 87/66 (on trade unions); Bevin to Eden, 12 July 1944, FO 39116/9684. John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (1978), entries for 27 October and 11 November 1941, 7 May 1942, 24 May 1943. Bullock, op. cit., i, 508, 559, 639. Memorandum, November 1941, Bevin papers 2/2; Bevin to Eden, December 1942 and June 1943, Bevin papers 3/2; minutes and correspondence between Eden and Bevin, February 1942, FO 32875/828 and FO 32876/1087. Meeting, 27 April 1944, CAB 87/66. Elisabeth Barker, Churchill and Eden at War (1978) pp. 108-9; Roger Parkinson, A Day’s March Nearer Home (1974), p. 305; C.R. Rose, op. cit., p. 157; Bullock, op. cit., n, 342-7; file on Greece in Bevin papers 6/35. Rose, op. cit., p. 160; Konni Zilliacus, I Choose Peace (Penguin, 1949), p. 102. Avi Shlaim, Peter Jones and Keith Sainsbury, British Foreign Secretaries since 1945 (Newton Abbot, 1977), p. 64; works by Epstein, Rose, Gordon and Bill Jones cited in note 1 above. Gordon makes out a strong case that discontent with Bevin’s foreign policy in the Labour Party, inside and outside Parlia¬ ment, was not confined to the fifty to seventy-five MPs who were persistent critics, and produced a veritable explosion of dissent, led by Aneurin Bevan, after Bevin’s death in 1951. Gordon, op. cit., pp. 209-12, 286-9. However, Bevin was undoubtedly able to contain this discontent without making major changes to the foreign policy which he would have 503

Sources and References pursued in any case. On conscription, see Jones, op. cit., pp. 138-43, 153-4, 199; and Rose, op. cit., pp. 299-302, 306-7, 480-3. On Bevin and his critics, see Lord Strang, At Home and Abroad (1956), pp. 293-4. 14 Burridge, op. cit., especially p. 169; Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (1961), pp. 71, 149-51; Rose, op. cit., pp. 401-9; Roy Jenkins in The Times, 8 June 1971. 15 Sir Roderick Barclay, Ernest Bevin and the Foreign Office (privately published, 1975), pp. 39, 102; Sunday Telegraph, 2 January 1977; Hugh Dalton, High Tide and After: Memoirs 1945-1960 (1962), p. 106; Williams, op. cit., p. 87. 16 Joe Haines, The Politics of Power (Coronet Books, 1977), pp. x-xi; on Bevin’s posthumous political usefulness, see also Epstein, op. cit., pp. 141-2. 17 Piers Dixon, Double Diploma: the Life of Sir Pierson Dixon (1968), p. 90; the Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (1965), pp. 506, 550-1, and his Full Circle (1960), p. 5; Rose, op. cit., pp. 506—9. A selection of largely favourable references to Bevin by officials would include: David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (1971), entries for 28, 29 and 31 July, 10, 13 and 14 August 1945; Pierson Dixon’s diary for 1944, 29 April, and for 1945, 24 October, Dixon papers, and Piers Dixon, op. cit., pp! 166-74, 181; John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (1978), entries for 17 and 29 September 1941, 10 February 1942; The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (1972), pp. 175—7, Trefor E. Evans (ed.), The Killearn Diaries 1934-1946 (1972), entries for 5 and 13 September 1945; Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle (1959), pp. 202-5; George Mallaby, From My Level: Unwritten Minutes (1965), pp. 185-9; Strang, op. cit., p. 288. 18 Harvey, 26 October 1946, FO 59955/9452. 19 The short book by Barclay cited in note 15 above is particu¬ larly revealing. 20 Bevin minute, FO 55592/11463. 21 R.B. Pinsent, 9 September 1946, FO 59228/13230 22 Meeting, 11 October 1946, FO 55844/12582. 23 Meeting between Bevin and Bidault, 17 December 1947 FO 67674/11010. 24 Bevin minute, FO 67242/14469. 25 Old Men Forget: The Autobiography of Duff Cooper (Vis¬ count Norwich) (1953), p. 361; Barclay, op. cit., pp. 35-44; Dilks (ed.), op. cit., entry for 31 July 1945; Sargent 5 November 1946, FO 55592/11995; Troutbeck, 12 February 504

Sources and References

26

27 28 29

30

31 32

1946, and Sargent to Bevin, 13 February 1946, FO 55586/3216. Strang, op. cit., p. 294; Dixon’s diary for 1946, 20 February, Dixon papers; Dixon, Double Diploma, p. 216, for another incident; Roy Jenkins in The Times, 7 June 1971. Charles Thayer, Hands Across the Caviare (1953), p. 136. Hansard, vol. 419, 1,359, 14 March 1946. Williams, op. cit., pp. 59-60; John Connell, The ‘Office’: a Study of British Foreign Policy and Its Makers 1919-1951 (1958), p. 317; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (1973), p. 255; Dixon, Double Diploma, pp. 236, 238; James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (1947), pp. 134, 152, 163; Dalton, op. cit., pp. 155-6. Stanislaw Kot, Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia (1963), p. xviii; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 97-8. Alexander Nekrich in Survey, vol. 22, nos. 3/4 (1976), pp. 318-19. Princess Zinaida Schakovskoy, The Privilege Was Mine (1959), p. 80.

5 Britain and the Soviet Union After the War 1 Minutes of Bevin-Molotov meeting, 1 October 1945, FO 50919/7853. 2 Ward, 8 October 1945, ibid., 7856. 3 Exchange of remarks between Bevin and Molotov at con¬ ference, 26 September 1945, FO 50918/7620; meeting on 1 October as in note 1 above. 4 James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (1947), pp. 92, 95-6, 105-6; W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946 (New York, 1975), p. 507; Piers Dixon, Double Diploma: the Life of Sir Pierson Dixon (1968), pp. 183-93; memorandum by Clark Kerr, 1 October 1945, copy in Dixon papers, file on London Conference 1945; Clark Kerr’s record of Bevin-Molotov meeting, 1 October 1945, FO 50919/7853; J. Knight, ‘Russia’s Search for Peace: the London Conference of Foreign Ministers, 1945’, Journal of Contemporary History, xm (1978), 137-63. 5 Dixon diary as cited in Dixon, Double Diploma, pp. 194-8; Hansard, vol. 415, 1,342, 7 November 1945. 6 Foreign Office to the embassy in Washington, 6 October 1945, FO 50826/7784; William Ridsdale to Sargent, 4 October 1945, FO 50921/8510; Donald McLachlan, In the

505

Sources and References Chair: Barrington-War d of The Times 1927-1948 (1971), pp. 245-7. 7 Ward, 8 October 1945, FO 50826/7784; Ward, 5 October 1945, FO 50917/7478; Brimelow, 16 October 1945, FO 50920/8110. 8 Minutes by Ward, 12-19 October 1945, FO 50919/7976-7, 8090, 8112; annex III to memorandum by Sargent, 11 July 1945, FO 50912/5471; Flarriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 509, 530-1. 9 Draft message by Ward for Halifax, 18 October 1945, FO 50920/8353. 10 Halifax to the Foreign Office, 25 October 1945, FO 50917/7478; Donnelly, 21 October 1945, FO 50919/7831. 11 Roberts to Sargent, 23 and 30 October, and Warner, 1 November 1945, FO 50921/8658; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 488, 510-17. 12 Ibid., pp. 544-5. 13 Roberts to Sargent, 27 October 1945 as in note 11 above; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., p. 515; Adam B. Ulam, Expan¬ sion and Coexistence: the History of Soviet Foreign Policy from 1917-1967 (1968), pp. 396-8. This raises an interesting point. Perhaps Stalin was sincere in his professed belief in a vast Soviet role in the defeat of Japan, and he was almost certainly so in arguing that the necessity of maintaining a large army in the Far East had imposed a severe additional burden on the Red Army in its war with Germany. See Grigory Deborin, Thirty Years of Victory (Moscow, 1975), pp. 160-1, 296. However, these troops had been kept in the Far East to serve Russian interests, not as a favour to the Western allies. Also, the nature of the American—Japanese war in the Pacific, consisting mostly of operations on small islands and naval engagements, was such that the release of the Japanese forces in Manchuria would not have helped Japan much against America. Perhaps the real beneficiaries were the British defenders of India and the Chinese forces, whether Kuomintang or Communist. 14 For a remarkable first-hand example of how closely Stalin really controlled Soviet actions in eastern Europe at this time, see Malcolm Mackintosh in T.L. Hammond (ed.), The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers (New Haven, Con_ necticut, 1975), pp. 239-40. 15 Moscow embassy to the Foreign Office, 31 October 1945, FO 50921/8686. Modem Soviet accounts praise the Polish forces in Italy, but mar this tribute with the absurd assertion that 506

Sources and References

16

17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

those troops hated the ‘landlords’ of the London Polish Government. S.M. Shtemenko, The Last Six Months (1978), pp. 55-7. The same reasoning which led to the policy of forcibly repatriating Soviet prisoners-of-war, and which has caused all British governments since 1943 to be mealymouthed about Katyn, led the Attlee Government to deny a place in the 1946 Victory Parade to the Polish army. Harold Macmillan, The Blast of War 1939-1945 (1967), p. 697. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (1978), pp. 131-2, 143; James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (1947), pp. 93, 102, 104, 108, 214—19; Ulam, op. cit., p. 398. Hood, 16 November 1945, FO 50921/9028; Dixon, Double Diploma, p. 197. Ibid., pp. 199, 204; Ulam, op. cit., p. 407; Byrnes, op. cit., p. 109; George Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (1968), pp. 286-7; special file on Moscow Conference, 20 December 1945, Dixon papers. Byrnes, op. cit., pp. 111-24; Yergin, op. cit., pp. 147-53, 158-62; John W. Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War (1972), pp. 424-30, 491-2; Harriman and Abel, op. cit., pp. 523-7; on Iran, Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East (Princeton, New Jersey, 1980), pp. 282-91; Duff Cooper (Paris) to the Foreign Office, 23 December 1945, FO 50922/10303. Roberts, 14 March 1946, FO 56763/4065. Kennan, op. cit., pp. 288-9; Walter Bedell Smith, Moscow Mission 1946-1949 (1950), p. 95. Roberts to Warner, 2 March 1946, FO 56840/3369. Brimelow, 14 February 1946, FO 56780/1965. Roberts, 16 January 1946, FO 52327/797. Roberts as cited in note 20 above, and dispatch of 18 March 1946, ibid., 4157. Brimelow and Warner, 29 March and 5 April 1946, FO 56763/4156-7. Dixon diary for 1946, 10 February, Dixon papers; ministerial meeting, 3 April 1946, FO 55586/3997; Malcolm, 12 Oct¬ ober 1946, FO 55593/12014. Brimelow and Warner, 14 February 1946, FO 56780/1965. Memorandum by Cripps, 13 February 1946, and minutes by Brimelow and Warner, 25 February 1946, FO 56780/2300. Noel Baker, one of the junior Foreign Office ministers, was receptive to Vyshinsky’s arguments: see his minute of 22 February in this file; Macmillan, op. cit., p. 474. 507

Sources and References N

30 Roberts to Sargent, 23 February 1946, and minute by Brimelow, 8 March 1946, FO 56780/3039; Hankey, 15 March 1946, FO 56840/3369; Dixon diary for 1946, 6 March, Dixon papers; McDermott, 28 February 1946, FO 59232/2956. 31 Memorandum by Warner, 2 April 1946, FO 55581/9927. 32 Attlee, 19 July 1946, FO 56908/10435. The reply from A. Gascoigne of the British Liaison Mission, Tokyo, to Bevin (dated 31 August but not received till 2 October 1946) is interesting in its own right, and, probably quite accurately, saw Soviet policy in Japan and Korea as following separate lines in the three separate units. In North Korea, which was under Russian military occupation, ‘the familiar pattern observed in the liberated areas of Europe’ was taking place, with a Communist regime being set up gradually but with the use of force. In South Korea, under American occupation, Russia was conducting subversion and espionage at a merry pace. In Japan, where its position was weak despite a Soviet ‘liaison mission’ 476-strong, the Russians were keeping a low profile for the time being. The American diplomat Charles Thayer tells a tale about barefaced Soviet trickery in Korea just after the war in his Diplomat (New York, 1959), p. 103. On Korea generally, see Robert M. Slusser, ‘Stalin’s Goals in Korea 1945-50’, in Y. Nagai and A. Ariye (eds), The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Tokyo and New York, 1977), pp. 123-46. 33 Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (1961), pp. 162-3; Alexander Werth, Russia: the Post-War Years (1971), pp. 110-14; C.R. Rose, ‘The Relation of Socialist Principles to British Labour’s Foreign Policy 1945-1951’ (unpublished thesis, Oxford, 1959), pp. 112-15, 119; Dixon, Double Diploma, p. 229; Bevin to Attlee, 26 September 1946, Attlee papers, box 5, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 34 Roberts and Warner, 21 April and 2 May 1946, FO 56840/5195 and 5583; Allen to Warner, 14 June 1946, FO 56763/7937. 35 Balfour to Warner, 24 June 1946, ibid., 8694. 36 J.H. Watson to Hankey and Hankey to Watson, 10 and 28 October 1946, FO 56842/13250; Kennan, op. cit., pp. 304, 310. 37 Joseph Frankel, British Foreign Policy 1945-1973 (Oxford 1975), p. 295. 38 Peterson dispatch, 28 May 1946, FO 66279/39. 39 The Times, 6 May 1977; on the delegation and Laski, see also 508

Sources and References

40 41

42 43

44 45

46

47 48

49

Bill Jones, The Russia Complex: the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (Manchester, 1977), pp. 131-2, 135. Brimelow, 8 August 1946, FO 56841/10134; Yergin, op. cit., pp. 183-7, 192, 196-200. Roberts to Dean, 30 September 1946, FO 55593/12014; Roger Allen to Hankey, 25 October 1946 and minutes thereon, FO 56764/13871; Hankey, 25 October 1946, FO 55592/11995; Bevin to Attlee, September 1946, Attlee papers, box 5, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Sargent, 24 September 1946, FO 56763/12214. Nichols to Hankey, 29 July 1946, and Peterson to Hankey, 8 August 1946, FO 56016/10148 and 10462; Byrnes, op. cit., pp. 64-5. Peterson, Lambert and Warner, 31 October-13 November 1946, and text of interview, FO 56842/13868 and 13939. Dixon diary for 1946, 25 April and 27 June, Dixon papers. On the ‘unimportance’ of the Paris Peace Conference see Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (1972), pp. 191-4; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (1973), p. 254; Wheeler-Bennett and Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 436-8; Old Men Forget: The Autobiography of Duff Cooper (Viscount Nor¬ wich) (1953), pp. 367-8. Cf. Yergin’s view in Shattered Peace (pp. 132-7,140) that the bomb was so blunt an instrument as to be useless to United States foreign policy at that time. Bevin’s famous comment ‘I won’t have the bomb in the Foreign Office’ - is worth recalling. Draft memorandum, January 1947, FO 66546/76. File of information for Montgomery, 30 December 1946; Peterson to Sargent, 13 January 1947; lecture by Montgom¬ ery, 20 January 1947, FO 66279/39, 839, 1127; Peterson to Foreign Office, 20 January 1947, FO 66370/7458; Mont¬ gomery’s own account in The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery (Fontana, 1960), pp. 453-63. It is interesting to note that in 1961, after retiring from the army, Montgomery succeeded in obtaining a similar invitation to visit Peking as the guest of the Chinese Government in an effort to cut through some of the ice which then existed in Sino-British relations. On the Russian visit see also Hugh Dalton, High Tide and After: Memoirs 1945-1960 (1962), p. 201, and for a sour Soviet comment, Shtemenko, op. cit., pp. 34-6. Copy of Pravda article and minute by Hankey, 16 January 1947, FO 66279/503; Peterson to Foreign Office, 29 January 1947, FO 66363/1193.

509

Sources and References 50 Hankey, 5 February 1947, ibid., 1373. 51 Report from the embassy in Moscow and minute by Brimelow, 17 November 1947, FO 66434/11987. 52 ‘Summary of Soviet Tactics’, monthly reports for April and May 1947, FO 66295/4798, 6016; Warner, 2 February 1947, and correspondence with the Americans on revised AngloSoviet treaty, FO 66363/1541, 1631, 1670, 1748, 1869; Warner, 25 June 1947, FO 66370/7458; Hankey, 26 June 1947, and Warner to Sargent, 9 July 1947, in ibid., 7532 and 8231; Jebb to Dixon, 10 April 1947, folder of miscellaneous papers, 1947, Dixon papers; F.S. Northedge, British Foreign Policy 1945-1961 (1962), pp. 62-3; Michael R. Gordon, Conflict and Consensus in Labour’s Foreign Policy 1914-1965 (Stanford, 1969), p. 160. 53 Hankey, 27 October 1947, FO 66434/12662. 54 Brimelow’s lecture in FO 66439/3014; Brimelow, 12 June 1947, FO 66433/6298. 55 Text of Bevin’s speech, 29 May 1947, in FO 66452/6417; Wilson and Hope-Jones, 21 and 29 May 1947, FO 67579/2991. 56 Record of meeting, 5 June 1947, FO 62399/4781. 57 Dixon diary for 1947,17 and 19 June, Dixon papers; see also Georges Bidault, Resistance (1967), pp. 150-1 58 Warner and Hankey, 25 June 1947, FO 66370/7458. 59 Notes on the Paris Conference, 27-8 June, 2 July 1947; Dixon s general diary for 1947, 3 July, all in Dixon papers. 60 Will Paynter, My Generation (1972), pp. 124-5; Dixon’s diary for 1947, 19, 25-6 July, Dixon papers. 61 Hankey, July 1947, FO 64499/9768. 62 Roberts to Sargent, 29 August 1947, FO 66467/10328; ‘Summary of Soviet Tactics’, report for August, FO 66296/10449. 63 Dixon’s diary for 1947, 27 July, Dixon papers; Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy (Oxford, 1956), pp! 306—25. 64 Hankey, 30 September 1947, FO 66434/11113. 65 Brimelow, 12 April 1947, and Balfour to Warner, 28 March 1947, FO 66295/4045. 66 Roberts, 6 October 1947, FO 66475/11554; Roberts to Warner, 10 October 1947, FO 66476/12302. 67 Hankey, Roberts and Warner, 7-20 October 1947, ibid., 11554,11723 and 11927; Werth, op. cit., pp. 294-326,’for an account of the conference by a fellow-traveller. 68 Bevin-Bidault meeting, 25 November 1947, FO 67683/ 510

Sources and References

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71 72

10262; on Bidault’s experiences at the Moscow Conference see Bidault, op. cit., pp. 145-6, and Bedell Smith, op. cit., pp. 208-9. F Bevin, comment on minute by Crosthwaite, 30 October 1947, FO 67674/10270. Record in FO 67683/10262; see also Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters 1945-62 (Fontana, 1971), entry for 3 December 1947. All quotations are from his special diary of the conference, 25 November-12 December 1947, Dixon papers. General diary for 1947, 15 December, Dixon papers. The next meeting of the Foreign Ministers was to be in Paris in May 1949.

6 Germany: The Main Battleground 1 Troutbeck, 19 July 1945, FO 50912/5471. 2 Michael Balfour and John Mair, Four-Power Control in Germany and Austria 1945-1946 (1956), p. 85; Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam (1977), p. 133. 3 News Chronicle report and Foreign Office minutes, 22 August-11 September 1945, FO 46984/5145. 4 Montgomery to Grigg, 5 June 1945, Grigg papers (Churchill College, Cambridge), no. 35. 5 Grigg to Montgomery, 11 July 1945, Grigg papers 43. 6 Lord Strang, At Home and Abroad (1956), pp. 230-41. On the lack of many obvious signs of national repentance in Germany under the occupation regime see Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 226-8. The Protestant Churches were a partial exception, whereas in the rapidly-reopened German univer¬ sities the situation was particularly dismal. Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 231-7, 249-53, and (on the universities) Sir Robert Birley, The Real Meaning of Academic Freedom (Edinburgh, 1972), pp. 5-6. 7 Exchange of telegrams between Grigg and Montgomery, 27 June 1945, Grigg papers 37-9; The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery (1960), p. 380. 8 Minutes and correspondence, August-September 1945, FO 46735/5132-5961. 9 Harrison, 10 August 1945, ibid., 5132. 10 Minutes, 7 November 1945 and 5 January 1946, and a letter from the Secretary of the Football Association, 15 December 1945, FO 46736/7581 and 10121. 11 Franklin, 30 December 1945, ibid., 9411; Turner to Waley, 1 October 1945, CAB 78/34.

511

/

Sources and References 12 Troutbeck and Harvey, 23-4 November 1945, FO 46736/8332. 13 Waley (Treasury), 2 August 1945, FO 45786/3514; Troutbeck (recording O'Neill), 19 July 1945, FO 50912/5471. 14 Franklin and O’Neill, 12 and 14 December 1945, FO 46736/9413. 15 John Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan (Stanford, 1976), pp. 34-7, 62, 127-31, 156-9. 16 Foreign Office to COGA, 2 May 1946, FO 55588/6796; Harvey, 28 August 1946, FO 55591/10670; Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 100-2; Dean, 22 July 1946, and Bevin to Attlee, 14 August 1946, FO 55572/8607 and 10674. 17 Sargent, 26 December 1946, and correspondence between Bevin and Attlee, August 1946, FO 55591/10676 and 10314. 18 Troutbeck, 6 May 1946, FO 55587/5223; Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 156-9. 19 Harvey, 13 September 1946, and Cavendish-Bentinck to Hankey, 4 October 1946, FO 56414/11441 and 13078. 20 Hankey, 25 October 1946, FO 55592/11995. 21 Troutbeck, 25 June 1946, FO 55843/7188; report of speech in The Times, 23 October 1946. 22 Jellicoe to Miss M.L. Dhonau (Economic Intelligence Department), 2 November 1946, FO 55934/13440. 23 Report, 6 November 1946, and meeting, 22 November 1946, ibid., 15985 and 14465. 24 Hugh Rees (Treasury) to Ronald, 26 November 1946, and inter-departmental meetings on frontier claims of Western allies, ibid., 14465, 14681 and 15757; Jellicoe, 12 December 1946, FO 55928/15333. 25 Unsigned memorandum, 3 January 1947, FO 64502/1581; James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (1947) pp. 177-8. 26 Jellicoe, 17 February 1947, FO 64502/2487; FO memo¬ randum, 3 January 1947, FO 64504/13596. 27 Steel to Strang, 31 January 1947, and Turner to Dean, 4 February 1947, FO 64421/2173 and 1930. 28 Burrows, 4 March 1947, FO 64244/3685; memorandum for Foreign Ministers’ Conferences, February 1947, FO 64505/15039. 29 Diary entry for 9 April 1947 in miscellaneous folder of documents, 1947, Dixon papers. 30 O’Neill, 30 January 1946, FO 55579/1004; Strang, 6 April 1946, FO 55580/4145. 31 Franklin, 21 and 30 January 1946, FO 55579/706 and 1004. 32 Steel, 7 February 1946, FO 55586/1480.

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33 Franklin, O’Neill and Troutbeck, 9-16 February 1946, ibid., 1193,1480 and 1499; Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 126-31. 34 Draft memorandum for Cabinet, February 1946, and Troutbeck, 12 February 1946, ibid., 3216; Georges Bidault, Resistance (1967), p. 148. 35 Minute on Strang dispatch and minute by Roberts, 24-5 April 1946, FO 55580/4544; Roberts and Burrows, 29 March and 2 April 1946, FO 55579/3468; Gimbel, op. cit., pp. 101-2, 106-7. 36 Hugh Dalton, High Tide and After: Memoirs 1945-1960 (1962), pp. 100, 166, 220-2, 225. 37 Meeting, 3 April 1946, FO 55586/3997. 38 Roberts, 2 May 1946, FO 55587/5123. 39 Memorandum signed by Bevin, 3 May 1946; specially con¬ fidential Cabinet minutes, 7 May 1946; Attlee to Bevin, 7 May 1946; minutes of Dominion Prime Ministers’ meeting, 7 May 1946, all in ibid., 5181, 5223, 5822; Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (1961), pp. 138,148; Balfour and Mair, op. cit., p. 132. 40 Minutes of committee, 14 May 1946, FO 55587/5224. 41 Speech by Bevin to Dominion Prime Ministers, 21 May 1946, and extract from Council of Foreign Ministers’ discussion of Germany at Paris, ibid., 5822 and 6671; Burrows, 4 December 1946, FO 59911/10754; Byrnes, op. cit., pp. 179-81, 187-91; Gimbel, op. cit., pp. 109-11, 122-6; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (1978), pp. 225-6, 229-32. 42 Harvey, 24 May and 10 July 1946, FO 55843/6079 and 7188. 43 Burrows, 5 May 1946, FO 55842/5380; draft papers in FO 55588/7267. 44 Franklin and Wilson, 11-12 July 1946, FO 55842/7729; Cabinet minutes, 15 July 1946, copy in FO 55844/9932. 45 Record by Dean of meeting, 23 July 1946, FO 55589/8643; minute by Dean, 24 July 1946, FO 55844/8990. 46 Bevin to Attlee, 25 July 1946, FO 55589/8855; Cabinet minutes, 25 July 1946, copy in FO 55844/8990; record of Strang’s remarks in Dean to Sargent, 30 July 1946, FO 55582/9928; Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 65-9. 47 Control Commission, Berlin, to COGA, 17 August 1946, FO 55590/9966; Harvey, 13 August 1946, FO 55591/10014; D. Wilson, 1 October 1946, FO 55592/11703; Franklin, 3 September 1946, FO 55844/10434. 48 Minutes of meeting, 2 September 1946, FO 55591/10682; on Bevin and the Daily Herald see A.L. Rowse in The Times, 7 March 1981. 513

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49 Meeting, 11 October 1946, FO 55844/12582; meeting of officials, 8 October 1946, FO 55593/12315; Balfour and Mair, op. tit., pp. 165-9; Gimbel, op. cit., pp. 162-6; Barbara Marshall, ‘German Attitudes to British Military Government 1945-47’, Journal of Contemporary History, xv (1980), 655-84. 50 Reddaway, 28 November 1946, FO 55585/14673. 51 Dalton, op. cit., pp. 269-70; Byrnes, op. cit., p. 196. 52 Dean, 22 October 1946, and Roberts, short dispatch specially written for Bevin, November 1946, FO 55592/11995; Red¬ daway, 22 October 1946, FO 55593/12604. 53 Hankey and Flayter, 25 and 30 October 1946, FO 55592/11995. 54 Text of speech in The Times, 23 October 1946; report on press reactions, FO 55593/13144. In contrast to Bevin’s sceptical remarks about the Germans, the Foreign Office drafted a speech the next month for the Prime Minister (FO 55594/14226) in which the Germans, on the basis of recent electoral results, were praised as model democrats who had rejected ‘the quack remedies of Communism. There is a moral here which has useful lessons for us as well as for the Germans.’ 55 Burrows, Warner and Reddaway, 12-17 November 1946, FO 55584/13748; Roger Allen (Moscow) to Dean, 12 December 1946, FO 55585/15664; Peterson to the Foreign Office, 6 December 1946, FO 55594/15441. 56 Sargent, 22 February 1947, FO 67671/2051; extract from Cabinet conclusions, 27 February, and Sargent, 26 February, FO 67672/2291 and 2317; Harvey, 19 February 1947 FO 64243/3184. 57 Circular to embassies, 10 April 1947, FO 67579/2041; text of Bevin’s speech at Margate, 29 May 1947, in FO 66452/6417; conversation between Bidault and Bevin 17 December 1947 FO 67674/11010. 58 Brief for Foreign Secretary for talk with Prime Minister, 17 January 1947, FO 64178/822; minute by Bevin on discussion with Attlee, 27 December 1946, FO 64243/53. 59 Dean, 11 January 1947, ibid., 804; Dean, 6 February 1947 FO 64520/1836. 60 Stevens, 10 December 1946; Wilson, 24 December 1946 and 28 January 1947; Dean and Harvey, 30 January 1947 FO 64244/4064-5, 4752; W.G. Galiman (United slates embassy, London) to Dean, 16 June 1947, FO 64246/8323 61 Wilson, 29 January 1947, FO 66294/1011; Harvey, 24

514

Sources and References

62 63 64

65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72

73 74 75

76 77 78

January 1947, FO 64305/836 (Soviet claims to be reducing reparations from the East Zone were ‘window-dressing’); Peterson to the Foreign Office, 29 January 1947, and D. Wilson, 30 January 1947, FO 64243/1580; Wilson, 22 Feb¬ ruary 1947, FO 64497/2443; minute by Bevin, 28 December 1946, FO 64243/53 (for his belief in maximum decentralisa¬ tion). Dean, 1 February 1947, FO 64521/1900. Dean to Burrows, 17 March 1947, FO 64244/4519; on this see Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 260-1. Dixon diary for 1947, 10 March, Dixon papers. The extensive quotations which follow from Dixon’s papers are from this diary and from a miscellaneous folder of 1947 documents. Dixon diary, 20 March 1947. Walter Bedell Smith, Moscow Mission 1946-1949 (1950), pp. 203, 218-19. Dixon papers, 26 March and 2 April 1947. Dixon papers, 7 April 1947; see also C.R. Rose, ‘The Relation of Socialist Principles to British Labour’s Foreign Policy 1945-1951’ (unpublished thesis, Oxford, 1959), pp. 299-307. Dixon papers, 14 April 1947. Dixon papers, 18 April 1947; Bedell Smith, op. cit., p. 217. Williams, op. cit., pp. 154-9; Dixon papers, 23-4 April 1947. Dixon’s record of a conversation between Bevin and Mar¬ shall, 8 April 1947, FO 64246/6526; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (1973), pp. 262-3; Yergin, op. cit., pp. 299-301; Gimbel, op. cit., pp. 188-92. Memorandum for Cabinet signed by Bevin, 30 April 1947, FO 65052/1797. B.A.B. Burrows, 13 August 1947, FO 64737/10666. Dixon diary for 1947, 28 April; unsigned FO memoranda, December 1946-January 1947, FO 64246/6491 and 6552 (on the necessity of subordinating COGA to the Foreign Office). Wilson, 19 April 1947, FO 66294/3917; Brownjohn to R.A. Chaput de Saintonge, 26 August 1947, FO 64874/11703. Malcolm, 12 May 1947, FO 64993/1987; Dean, 11 January 1947, FO 64243/804. Robert W. Carden, ‘Before Bizonia: Britain’s Economic Dilemma in Germany, 1945-46’, Journal of Contemporary History, xiv (1979), 535-55; Gimbel, op. cit., pp. 194-218, 225-9, 234-46, 252-4, 269, 277-8; F.S. Northedge, British Foreign Policy 1945-1961 (1962), pp. 57-8. 515

Sources and References 79 Dean, Inverchapel and Wilson, 30 September-21 October 1947, FO 64207/12949 and 13494; The Times leader col¬ umn, 21 October 1947; see also Dean, 21 November 1947, FO 64249/15576.* 80 Harvey, 22 October 1947, FO 64207/13513; Sargent and A.J. Gilchrist, 22 and 29 October 1947, FO 64633/14024; Fraser, 10 November 1947, FO 64499/14364. 81 Sargent, 8 December 1947, and Bevin, undated, FO 64250/16198. 82 Meeting with officials, 16 December 1947, and conversation between Bevin and Marshall, 17 December 1947 ibid 16171 and 16394. 83 Meeting between Bevin and Bidault, 17 December 1947 FO 67674/11010. 84 Meeting, 18 December 1947, FO 64250/16395; see also Yergin, op. cit., pp. 317-20. 85 Cullis and Harrison, 11-17 April 1945, FO 46614/1392 and 1460. 86 S.M. Shtemenko, The Last Six Months (1978), pp. 324-6; Sargent to Churchill, 30 April 1945, FO 46614/1861. 87 Harvey, 29 December 1945, and Cullis, 5 January 1946, FO 46624/9990 and 10174; Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 306-19; Strang, op. cit., pp. 223-4. 88 Brief on Austria for Foreign Secretary, 9 September 1945, FO 46619/5733; Harvey and Sargent, 27 February and 20 March 1946, FO 55256/2150 and 2981; Balfour and Mair op. cit., pp. 319-24. 89 Cullis, 24 October 1946, FO 55259/12792; Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 326-31, 350-4. 90 Report, 17 June 1946, FO 55258/7116. 91 Dean, 30 July 1946, FO 55582/9928; Balfour and Mair op cit., pp. 339-43. F' 92 Report of speech in The Times, 23 October 1946; see also Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 310-11. 93 Cullis, 30 January 1947, FO 66294/1011; Brimelow, March 1947, FO 66439/3014. 94 Mack to Bevin, 14 January 1947, FO 64008/402 95 J. Marjoribanks, 24 July 1947, ibid., 9883. 7 Eastern Europe After the War 1 Minutes on report from Resident Minister’s office, Caserta 25 March 1946, FO 58477/4749; G. Clutton to Hankey 23 October 1947, FO 66476/12455. 2 John W. Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Sem-

516

Sources and References blance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War (1972), p. 560.

3 Memorandum by Dixon, 7 August 1945, file on London conference of Foreign Ministers 1945, and 1946 diary, 1 February, Dixon papers. 4 C.M. Woodhouse, The Struggle for Greece 1941-1949 (1976); Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East (Princeton, New Jersey, 1980). 5 Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 148-9, 175-6; Kuniholm, op. cit., pp. 247-9, 353-5. 6 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (Penguin, 1963), p. 141; Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 155-6, 162-5, 181-2, 288; Alexander Werth, Russia: the Post-War Years (1971), pp. 285-7; ‘Summary of Soviet Tactics’, report for June 1947, FO 66295/7365; see also comment by Brimelow on Greece, p. 276-7 above. 7 M.A. Fitzsimmons, The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Government 1945-1951 (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1953), p. 85. 8 Bevin’s speech as recorded in The Times, 23 October 1946; Piers Dixon, Double Diploma: the Life of Sir Pierson Dixon (1968), p. 245; Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 234, 287; Roberts, 18 December 1947, FO 64250/16395 (conversation with Marshall). 9 Minutes, 21 February-9 March 1945, FO 50835/1421; Dixon’s diary for 1945, 3 March, Dixon papers; on the background in American policy to this debate see Lynn Etheridge Davis, The Cold War Begins: Soviet-American Conflict over Eastern Europe (Princeton, New Jersey, 1974), chapters 6-8. 10 Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution (1979 reprint), pp. 212-13; Harold Macmillan, The Blast of War 1939-1945 (1967), pp. 677-8, 684-8, 704; Sir Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (1962), pp. 233, 237, 402-3, for Foreign Office fears that a Communist Italy at the end of the war was a real possi¬ bility. 11 On the systematic nature of this process see Hugh SetonWatson, The East European Revolution (third edition, 1956), pp. 169-71; Walter Bedell Smith, Moscow Mission 1946-1949 (1950), p. 101; the sardonic analysis of the Soviet theory of ‘people’s democracy’ by R.C. Hope-Jones, 9 June 1947, FO 66433/6296. 12 Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Freedom Betrayed (1949), pp. 98, 108, 177-8, 181—2; Elisabeth Barker, Britain in a Divided

517

Sources and References Europe 1945-1970 (1971), p. 51. 13 Meeting, 11 June 1945, FO 50869/4606; James Marjoribanks, 29 November 1945, FO 50870/5097; minutes, JulyNovember 1945, FO 50858/5097, 7588, 8731, 9539; minute, 29 March 1946, FO 59098/4671. 14 Davis, op. cit., pp. 359-68; see also Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (Reprint Society edition, 1950-56), vi, 407-9. 15 Minute on Anglo-Czech trade, 9 March 1946, FO 56014/3128; Nichols to Harvey, 27 March 1946, FO 56007/4609; Allen, 13 May 1946, FO 56008/5777. 16 Nichols, 28 December 1945, FO 56006/203; report by G.M. Warr, November 1946, FO 56013/15241; Josef Korbel, The Communist

17 18

19

20 21

22

23

24

25

Subversion

of

Czechoslovakia,

1938-1948

(Princeton, New Jersey, 1959), pp. 109-18. Nichols, 27 March 1946, FO 56007/4287; Nichols, 29 April 1946, FO 56008/5777. Warner, 5 April 1946, FO 56007/4287; Allen, 13 May 1946, and draft letter to Nichols, 27 May 1946, FO 56008/5777. Hankey, 28 May 1946, ibid., 6865; Nichols, 28 and 31 May 1946; Hankey, 5 June 1946; N.H. Fry, 21 June 1946; G.M. Warr, 24 June 1946, FO 56009/7027, 7236, 7299, 8016. Nichols and Warr, 3-4 July 1946, FO 56010/8615; Korbel, op. cit., pp. 150-6. Bevin to Nichols, 13 June 1946, and Sargent, 15 June 1946, FO 56015/7731 and 7876; Nichols to Hankey, 29 July 1946, FO 56016/10148. Hankey to Nichols, 15 November 1946, FO 56011/13639; Nichols to Hankey, 27 November 1946, FO 56013/15481; Shuckburgh (Prague) to the Foreign Office, 4 October 1946, and Nichols, 17-18 October 1946, FO 56011/12937, 13473, 13639; Nichols to Hankey, 1 and 7 November 1946 (sent on to the Cabinet Office), FO 56012/14286 and 14498. Nichols dispatch and Foreign Office minute, 11 January 1947, FO 65784/12; Nichols to Warner, 14 April 1947, FO 66295/4492. Nichols, 25 July 1947, and C.T. Gandy, 11 August 1947, FO 65785/8873 and 9207; Brimelow and F.B.A. Rundall, 1 and 18 September 1947, FO 66296/9941; Korbel, op. cit., pp. 181-3. ^ Hankey, 7 October 1947, FO 66475/11554; also Hankey, 5 December 1947, FO 65787/13844; Korbel, op. cit., pp. 183—91; V.V. Kusin in Martin McCauley (ed.), Communist 518

Sources and References Power in Europe 1944-1949 (1977), pp. 81-3; Pavel Tigrid in Thomas B. Hammond (ed.), The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers (New Haven, Connecticut, 1975), pp. 406-9.

26 Meyer, 23 December 1947, FO 65787/14483; minute, 28 January 1948, FO 65786/12834. 27 S.M. Shtemenko, The Last Six Months (1978), pp. 153-4. Stalin lavishly praised King Michael to Churchill at Potsdam. Churchill, op. cit., vi, 507. 28 S. Fischer-Galati in Hammond (ed.), op. cit., pp. 310-20. 29 Bela Vago in McCauley (ed.), op. cit., pp. 119-20; Churchill, op. cit., vi, 344-5, 506-7. 30 Davis, op. cit., pp. 258-66. 31 Clark Kerr (in Bucharest) to the Foreign Office, 7 January 1946, FO 59095/505; Harriman’s account in W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946 (New York, 1975), pp. 527-9. 32 Le Rougetel (British mission, Bucharest) to the Foreign Office, 5 January 1946; M.S. Williams, 10 January 1946; Research Department minute, 18 January 1946; Marjoribanks (Bucharest) to Attlee, 26 December 1945; Wil¬ liams minute on Le Rougetel dispatch, 17 January 1946, FO 59095/293, 320, 789. 33 Steward to the Foreign Office, 20 March 1946, FO 59098/4584. 34 Holman to Warner, 31 August and 22 October 1946, FO 59112/13609 and 15791. 35 Williams, 28 March 1946, and letter from the Foreign Office to J.A.K. Christie of the Privy Council, 3 April 1946, FO 59098/4762. 36 Holman to Bevin, 2 December 1946; FO minute, 20 January 1947; report on Romanian elections, December 1946, FO 59108/18325, 18327, 18398; Vago in McCauley (ed.), op. cit., p. 123. 37 Colville, 22 May 1947, FO 66439/3014; R. Sorell (Buchar¬ est) to Bevin, 23 December 1946, FO 67233/241. 38 Colville and Williams, 19-20 March 1947; Inverchapel (Washington) to FO and FO to Inverchapel, 21 and 24 March 1947, ibid., 355 and 3823. 39 Healey to Mayhew, 23 December 1946, FO 67252B/201; Healey to Mayhew, 6 March 1947, and minutes by Colville, 10 March and 2 April 1947, FO 67233/3158, 3690 and 4148. 40 McNeil, 7 December 1947, FO 66434/11987; on Healey ‘brilliant’ but with a mind ‘tending to extremes’ - and his role 519

Sources and References

in British foreign policy under Bevin, see C.R. Rose, ‘The Relation of Socialist Principles to British Labour’s Foreign Policy 1945-1951' (unpublished thesis, Oxford, 1959), pp. 415-19; also the pfofile of Healey in The Times, 17 March 1975. 41 Holman to the Foreign Office and minutes by Watson, 9-29 October 1947; Foreign Office to the British embassy, Lisbon, 18 October 1947, FO 67242/13719, 14154, 14469. Perhaps the Soviet regime did have a fixation with the idea of making political use of former King Carol. During the visit of Churchill and Eden to Moscow in October 1944, the latter had confronted Molotov with ‘gossip’ that the Soviet Union was supporting the deposed King. Molotov denied it. ‘Anglo-Soviet Political Conversations at Moscow, October 9-October 17 1944’ (record of meeting on 16 October), Ismay papers (King’s College, London), VI/10. 42 Warner to Holman, 29 November 1947, and Holman to Foreign Office, 17 December 1947, FO 67248/16264 and 16587. 43 For the Bulgarian background primary reliance has been placed upon Nissan Oren, Revolution Administered: Agrarianism and Communism in Bulgaria (Baltimore, 1973). 44 Williams, 11 January 1946, FO 58512/538. 45 Boswall’s report with comments by several hands, April 1946, and minute by Williams, 8 April 1946, FO 58516/5012, 5250; Boswall, 21 August 1946, FO 58524/12444. 46 Williams, F.A. Warner and others, August 1946, ibid., 12444, 12682 and 12594; dispatches from Sofia and Foreign Office minutes, November-December 1946, FO 58528/16990 and 18221. 47 Colville, 22 January 1947, FO 66912/62; Watson, 6 August 1947 (on the February decision), FO 66920/12116. 48 Williams, Colville and Bevin, May 1947, FO 66907/7235. 49 Watson, 18 and 23 June 1947, and Bennett to Foreign Office, 10 July 1947, ibid,, 7878, 8171, 9439; Bennett to Foreign Office, with minute by Colville, 10-17 July 1947, FO 66908/9482 and 9524. 50 Colville, 11 July 1947, ibid., 9800. 51 Roberts to Warner and Warner to Roberts, 26-9 August 1947, FO 66920/12114; Seton-Watson, op. cit., p. 218. 52 Watson, 6 August 1947, FO 66920/12116. 53 Cabinet minutes, 15 July 1946, copy in FO 55844/9932. 54 Churchill, op. cit., vi, 442-9, 506; Harold Macmillan, The 520

Sources and References Blast of War 1939-1945 (1967), pp. 691-4; Davis, op. cit., p.

55 56

57 58

59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66

67 68

69

347; Dixon’s diary of the San Francisco Conference, 14 May 1945, Dixon papers. Woodhouse, op. cit., pp. 159-60. Colville to Balfour, 9 March 1946; minutes on Nesic visit, 12-21 March 1946; Colville, 13 March 1946; Belgrade embassy to the Foreign Office, 19 March 1946, all in FO 59507/2774, 4047, 4537, 4971. Warner (on conversation with Stevenson), 30 April 1946, and Colville, 6 May 1946, ibid., 6688. Colville, 22 July 1946; Peake dispatch, 1 August 1946; correspondence between the Foreign Office and the Belgrade embassy, 30 August-13 September 1946, FO 59508/10984, 11353, 12864, 14036. Peake to Warner, 15 April 1947, FO 66295/5210. Peake to Foreign Office and minute by Wilson, 21 March and 2 April 1947, FO 67673/3268. Balfour to Jebb, 19 April 1947, FO 67582A/2766; ‘Summary of Soviet Tactics’, for June 1947, FO 66295/7365; Peake to Jebb, 23 June 1947, and several minutes, FO 67459A/4850; Peake to Warner, 28 July 1947, and minutes, FO 67468/10820. Hankey, Warner and Bevin, 13 October 1947, FO 66475/11718. ‘Summary of Soviet Tactics’, report for November 1947, FO 66297/14048; British mission, Bucharest, to the Foreign Office, 30 December 1947, FO 67248/17020. Peterson to Bevin, 12 April 1946, FO 59232/6015; see also Kuniholm, op. cit., p. 357. Memorandum by FORD, ‘The Bosphorus and the Darda¬ nelles’, 6 January 1947, FO 59231/17969. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945 (New York, 1979), p. 435; Kuniholm, op. cit., pp. 42, 219-21; Churchill, op. cit., vi, 206, 505-6, 533; ‘Anglo-Soviet Political Conversations at Moscow, October 9-October 17 1944’ (record of meeting on 17 October), Ismay papers, VI/10. Kuniholm, op. cit., pp. 52-3 and 69-70 for a summary of Soviet wartime moves indicating ill-will towards Turkey. Bevin’s conversations with the Turkish ambassador and Foreign Minister, 31 December 1945-11 January 1946, FO 59239/52 and 745; Nichols (Prague) to Hankey, 29 July 1946, FO 56016/10148. Peterson to Foreign Office, 31 December 1945; Ward, 6 521

Sources and References

January 1946; text of Bevin’s remarks on Turkey in Com¬ mons (written by McDermott); McDermott, 28 February 1946; Peterson to Bevin, 12 April 1946; Bevin’s conversation with the Turkish ambassador, 18 April 1946, all in FO 59232/22, 3007, 3023, 6015, 6068; Hayter, 11 May 1946, FO 59233/7409; Kuniholm, op. cit., pp. 240-1, 257-8, 301-2, 335-7. On America’s growing interest in Iran, a subject of the greatest importance, see Kuniholm, op. cit., pp. 148-208, 214-16, 236-7, 270-350, 376-98, 414, 422. 70 McDermott, 13 March 1946, FO 59246/3770; Kuniholm, op. cit., p. 258. 71 Minutes on Soviet-Turkish treaty of 1921, January 1946, FO 59239/745; Edmonds, Brimelow, W.E.D. Allen, Mc¬ Dermott, February-March 1946, FO 59246/1673, 1946 and 3270; Bevin to Tom Driberg, 23 March 1946, and Edmonds, 4 April 1946, FO 59247/4551 and 5532. 72 See memorandum cited in note 65 above. 73 Wing Cdr Stapleton to R.G. Howe and minute by Pinsent, 22 and 25 July 1946, with minute by Bevin, FO 59225/10898; minutes, including Sargent, 28 September 1946, and Bevin FO 59228/14488. 74 Sir David Kelly (Istanbul) to the Foreign Office, 5 September 1946, and minute by Pinsent, 9 September 1946, FO 59228/13230; Pinsent and Sargent, October 1946, FO 59229/1420, 14750, 14758; Bevin’s speech as in The Times, 23 October 1946. In his memoirs Acheson was to compare the Soviet threat to Turkey in 1946 with that of the ancient barbarians to the Roman Empire. If that was a little far¬ fetched, it provides the only justification for Yergin’s asser¬ tion that the American attitude to Soviet demands on Turkey at that time was almost hysterical. By contrast, Kuniholm’s detailed account justifies its author’s conclusion that the United States’ response to Soviet demands on Turkey was not aggressive towards Russia. Neither Yergin nor Kuniholm seems fully to accept that an extremely resolute Western response to those demands, whether described in that way or as ‘hysterical’, was precisely what was needed to deter Stalin and virtually eliminate the danger of armed conflict. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (1978), pp. 234-5; Kuniholm, op. cit pp. 359-76, 381; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (1970), pp. 195-7. 75 Pinsent, 10 October 1946, and Dixon (in Paris) to Sargent, 7 October 1946; memorandum on the Straits and the Aegean 14 October 1946, FO 59230/14938 and 15251; Pinsent’ 522

Sources and References

30 October and 12 November 1946, FO 59231/15753 and 16279. 76 Pinsent, 29 November 1946, FO 67276/68. 77 Foreign Office to the embassy in Washington, 6 October 1947, FO 67277/13645; Watson and Balfour, 12 and 14 August 1947, FO 66908/10698. It is worth noting that about this time Walter Lippmann, while urging caution and restraint in dealing with the Soviet Union, was struck by the fact that Stalin’s Russia had attained all the war aims of Tsarist Russia between 1914 and 1917 except control of the Straits and north-east Turkey, and appeared to regard the as yet un¬ attained aims of its predecessor as being as valid as those now realised. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War (New York, 1972), pp. 22-6. 8 Britain, the United States and Western Europe 1944-7 1 This passage largely follows Avi Shlaim, Britain and the Origins of European Unity 1940-1951 (Reading, 1978),

2

3

4

5

6

chapter 2. Although Churchill had ideas about international organisation, the Foreign Office accused him with some justice of being frivolous as well as, in their view, misguided; see minute by Cadogan, 28 July 1943, FO 35397/3216. The Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (1965), pp. 444-6; Old Men Forget: The Autobiography of Duff Cooper (Viscount Norwich) (1953), pp. 345-7; John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (1978), entry for 15 July 1944. FO memorandum on the history of the Western group proposal, July 1945 (marked as not for general circulation in view of the Prime Minister’s attitude), FO 50826/5419. Churchill to Eden, 31 December 1944, ibid., 671; Shlaim, op. cit., pp. 66-7, citing de Gaulle’s memoirs; Elisabeth Barker, Churchill and Eden at War (1978), pp. 215-16; Roger Parkinson, A Day’s March Nearer Home (1974), pp. 404—5; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entry for 11 November 1944. Churchill to Eden, 8 February 1945, and Ward, 5 January 1945, FO 50826/1900 and 671; Dixon’s diary for 1944, 7 November, Dixon papers. Harvey (ed.), op. cit., entries for 18 August and 15 December 1944; Armistice and Post-War Committee, 13 July 1944, CAB 87/66; Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (1961), pp. 118-19; T.D. Burridge, British Labour and Hitler’s War (1976), pp. 143-4; Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: the Struggle for Survival (Sphere Books, 1968),

523

Sources and References

entry for 5 February 1945; see also Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (Reprint Society edition, 1950-56), iv, 547, 645. 7 Ward, 18 January 1945, FO 50826/671; Harvey (ed.), op. cit., 28 February, 5, 18 and 19 April 1945. 8 Jebb, 6 February 1945, FO 50826/1264; Sir Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (1962), pp. 463-5; Gunnar Hagglof, Diplomat (1972), pp. 198-9. 9 Eden to Peterson, 4 July 1945; Troutbeck, 6 March 1945; Ward, 11 January 1945; memorandum on visit of Norwegian Foreign Minister, September 1945, all in FO 50826/4283, 1265, 445, 7851; minute about Norway, 2 March 1946, FO 59911/898; Rumbold, 18 March 1946, FO 59953/ 3625. 10 Hood, 2 April 1945; Eden to Peterson, 4 July 1945; Ward, 1 September 1945, all in FO 50826/2270, 4283 and 7851. 11 Churchill, op. cit., vi, 504-5. 12 Memorandum cited in note 3 above; Jebb, 13 August 1945 FO 50826/5786. 13 Record of meeting, 13 August 1945; Ward and Warner, 19-20 September 1945; minutes, November 1945, all in ibid., 7851, 7042, 7443, 8915. 14 Record by Marjoribanks of meeting on 12 October 1945 ibid., 7851. 15 Cooper, op. cit., p. 362. 16 Hoyer Millar and Sargent, 1 and 4 January 1946, FO 59911/259; Hoyer Millar, 21 April 1946, FO 59852/240; Rumbold, 10 July 1946, FO 56785/9380; Hoyer Millar, 7 November 1946, FO 59853/9634; Harvey, 28 August 1946 FO 55591/10670. 17 Sargent, 4 January 1946, FO 59911/259; Edward Mortimer in Martin McCauley (ed.), Communist Power in Europe 1944-1949 (1977), pp. 151-67. 18 Rumbold, 27 April 1946, FO 55587/5532; 4 September 1946, FO 55590/9946; 22 March 1946, FO 59953/3625. On this subject see Alfred J. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party 1941-1947 (New York, 1962). 19 Rumbold and Hoyer Millar, 22 and 25 March 1946 FO 59953/3625. 20 Harvey, 2 April 1946, ibid., 3744. 21 Foreign Office to the embassy in Paris and embassy to FO 13-14 April 1946, ibid., 3612. 22 Dixon, 15 May 1946, FO 59954/4702.

524

Sources and References 23 Harvey, 25 July 1946, and Hebblethwaite, 2 August 1946, ibid., 6814. 24 Record of conversation between Bevin and Bidault, 11 October 1946, and Hoyer Millar, 24 October 1946, FO 59955/28895. 25 McNeil, 26 October 1946, ibid., 9352; see also Bevin to Attlee, 26 September 1946, Attlee papers, box 5, Bodleian Library, Oxford: ‘I’d no idea what was in their [the Con¬ servative leaders’] minds; not consulted on Churchill’s speeches and no wish to be.’ 26 Record of meeting, 5 December 1946, FO 59911/10754; Harvey, 23 December 1946, and Bevin, FO 59955/10679. 27 Ronald to Sargent, 11 November 1945; Harvey, 9 January 1946; Sargent, 4 January 1946, FO 59911/2410 and 259. 28 Ronald to Sargent, 11 November 1945, and minute by Burrows, 6 December 1945, ibid., 2410. 29 Brimelow, 7 December 1945, ibid. 30 Ronald, 4 January 1946, ibid. 31 Rumbold, 18 March 1946, including extract from a minute written earlier by Cadogan, FO 59953/3625. 32 Ronald to Roberts, 9 December 1946, FO 59911/2410. 33 Ronald’s new memorandum, December 1946, ibid., 10754. 34 McNeil to Ronald, 4 December 1946, and Burrows, Troutbeck and Hankey, 4, 5 and 16 December 1946, ibid. 35 Brimelow as in note 29 above. 36 Record of meeting in Ronald’s room, 5 December 1946; Ronald to Clarke, 11 December 1946; record of Cooper’s conversation with Sargent, 19 December 1946, ibid. 37 Memorandum, January 1947, FO 66546/76. 38 Rundall, 17 February 1947, on Washington dispatch, 30 January 1947, FO 60999/521; Sargent, 21 December 1946, FO 67670/25; also Sargent, 26 February 1947, FO 67672/2317; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (1978), pp. 280-6. 39 Jebb to Dixon (in Moscow), 13 March 1947, folder of miscellaneous papers, 1947, Dixon papers; Jebb, 19 March 1947, FO 67582A/2001; see also Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (1972), pp. 199-203. 40 Young, Warner, Dening, Philip Mason and Jebb, 21 March-8 May, and Balfour to Jebb, 19 April 1947, FO 67582A/2001. 41 George Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (1968), pp. 320-3, 357-63; Peterson to the Foreign Office, 20 June 1947, FO 66370/7458. 42 Yergin, op. cit., pp. 305-9, 321; Dean Acheson, Present at the 525

Sources and References Creation (1970), p. 233; Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy (Oxford, 1956), pp. 248-53, 293-305; John Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan (Stanford, 1976),

pp. 194-9, 208-18,* 221-3, 257-8, 267-8, 274-9. 43 Dixon, 11 June 1947, FO 62398/4614; Washington embassy to the Foreign Office, 24 June 1947, FO 62401/5010; Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (1973), pp. 264-5. 44 Rundall, 25 July 1947, FO 61077/2475; memorandum by the Economic Relations Department, 19 November 1947, FO 65988/1333; M.C. Kaser, 23 December 1947, FO 66488A/114204. 45 Minute, 20 November 1947, FO 61077/4008. 46 Record of conversation, 21 October 1947, FO 67674/9376; also recorded in FO 64633/14024. 47 Conversation between Bevin and Marshall, 17 December 1947, FO 64250/16394 (also recorded in FO 67674/11009); see also Yergin, op. cit., pp. 332-5. 48 Sargent, 21 December 1946, FO 67670/25; see also Shlaim, op. cit., pp. 130-42. 49 Memorandum, January 1947, FO 66546/76. 50 Brimelow on letters from the ambassadors in Brussels and Rome, 19 September and 6 October 1947, FO 66296/10854 and 11396; extract from Cabinet minutes, 25 January 1947, FO 62398/592; Cooper, op. cit., pp. 369-73; the anecdote in Yergin, op. cit., p. 312n. 51 Hoyer Millar, 23 January 1947, FO 67670/831; Roberts to Hoyer Millar, 16 May 1947, FO 67673/4878. 52 Harvey, Sargent and Hoyer Millar, 10-19 February 1947, FO 67651/1468; correspondence between the Foreign Office’and the embassy in Brussels, minute by Hoyer Millar, and tele¬ gram to Dominion governments, March 1947 FO 67663/2363, 2527 and 2938. 53 Circular, 10 April 1947, FO 67579/2041. 54 Cooper to Bevin, 16 May 1947, FO 67673/4815; Tomkins and Wilson, 20-1 May 1947, FO 67579/2991; Cooper, op cit., p. 374. ^ ” 55 Bevin-Ramadier talks, 22 September 1947, and inter¬ departmental meeting, 26 September 1947, FO 67673/8652 and 8579. 56 Harvey’s record of conversation with Massigli, 2 October 1947; Wilson, 10 October 1947; meeting, 8 October 1947 67671^161, 9053; W. Blanch, 24 February 1947, FO 57 Crosthwaite and Hogg, 30 October and 11 November 1947, 526

Sources and References

and correspondence between Cooper and Bevin, 26 Nov¬ ember-17 December 1947, FO 67674/10270, 10504 and 10907. Cooper published extracts from his pleas for a cus¬ toms union and staff talks in his Old Men Forget (pp. 379-81) without mentioning that he was promised satisfaction on the latter. Whether this omission was intentional or whether it aptly illustrates the title of the book is not clear. 58 Wilson, 19, 24 and 26 November 1947; Peterson dispatch with minute by Wilson, 27 November 1947; Harvey, 11 December (misdated November) 1947; Clarke to the Foreign Office, 25 December 1947, all in FO 67683/10036, 10139, 10249, 10274, 10555 and 11156. For an earlier contempt¬ uous description of the leaders of the French Communist Party - ‘the rank and file include many good Frenchmen’ - as willing puppets of the Soviet Union, see Hogg, 1 May 1947, FO 66295/3923. 59 Conversation between Bevin and Bidault as recorded by Roberts, 17 December 1947, and minute by Crosthwaite, 30 December 1947, FO 67674/11010 and 11127.

527

Index

Acheson, Dean, 402, 522n Afghanistan, 86,121, 249 Agrarian Party, Bulgarian, 383, 386 Albania, 96,193,196-7, 209, 286, 358-9, 403 Alexander, Field Marshal, 219 Alexander, John, 64 Algeria, 99 Allen, Roger, 260, 334,458n Allen, W.D., 47-8,135,160, 164,171,175, 213,458n Antonescu, Ion, 215, 374 Archangel, 82 Ardennes offensive, 141, 220 Argentina, 248 Armenia and Armenians, 249, 396-8, 400-1,403,405 Armistice and Post-War Committee, 42, 59, 212, 227, 409, 476n Atatiirk, Kemal, 400 Athens: British plans to occupy, 200-1, 212; rising in, 219-20 Atlantic Charter, 27, 69, 71, 83, 87,93,108,184 Atomic bomb, 3,149, 269-70, 509n Attlee, Clement, 3, 37, 97,144, 180,233,260,359,372,394;

and British war aims, 26, 31, 212, 410, 469n; views on policy towards Germany, 34, 41, 47, 321, 470-ln; succeeds to premiership, 148; deep suspicion of Russia, 226, 259; sends message to Stalin, 262; working relationship with Bevin, 228-9, 265, 283, 300, 325, 337-8, 345 Australia, 9-10, 79, 248, 270 Austria, 20, 96,141,192, 254; question of enforced independence for, 24-5, 30, 43, 88, 111, 225; possible cession of Berchtesgaden to, 48-9; British policy towards during war, 68-73, 209, 477n; Soviet intentions towards, 145; developments in after war, 238, 245, 289-90, 325-6, 345, 352-7, 437, 474n, 477n; see also Reparations, Austrian Austria-Hungary, 215, 218 Azerbaijan, Iranian, 249 Bahrein, 250 Bailey, Colonel W.S., 205 Baker, Philip Noel, 394 528

Index

Balfour, John, 6-8, 118, 260-1, 286, 390, 394,437-40, 458n Balkans: possible federation in, 32, 406; possible co-operation with Soviet Union in, 76; Stalin invites British invasion of, 86; Foreign Office and Soviet aims in, 93,109, 112-13,194-5, 198-200, 211-15,240,248,256, 277; and grand strategy of the war, 201, 203; Bevin’s views on, 224; limited extent of British concern with after war, 359, 361 Baltic Republics: seen as ‘not viable’, 37, 84-5, 93; Soviet annexation of, 74, 194, 266; importance of before Russo-German war, 76-7; question of British recognition of annexation, 89, 95, 97-8, 105, 151; and United States, 112; and Poland, 15 8; see also Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania Bande, Baron, 468n Barclay, Roderick, 232 Barrington-Ward, Robin, 93, 240 Bavaria, 30, 71, 88 BBC, 80,127,178,273,391 Beaconsfield, Lord (Benjamin Disraeli), 12 Beaverbrook, Lord, 82, 85, 153-4 Belgium, 24, 35, 63-4, 88, 224, 244, 406, 409; possible frontier changes, 48, 305, 307; post-war British relations with, 296,406-7,410-11,413, 415-17,420, 443,445-6, 449 Belgrade: becomes Tito’s capital, 217

BeneS, Eduard, 106, 110, 128, 181-6,188-90,192,367, . 370-2,374 Bennett, John Sterndale, 147, 386-7, 458n Berchtesgaden, 48-9 Berlin, 48, 66, 141-2,164, 230, 249, 297-9, 308-10, 318, 320, 331, 342; Congress of (1878), 12 Berne, British legation at, 22 Bevan, Aneurin, 321, 503n Beveridge report, 104 Bevin, Ernest, 3-4,14, 18-19, 47, 57,97, 169, 457, 509n; becomes Foreign Secretary, 148; and Polish problem, 180; background experience, beliefs and working practices as Foreign Secretary, 222-35; and Conferences of Foreign Ministers: September 1945, 236-9, 414-15; December 1945, 245-6; Moscow 1947, 342-6; London 1947, 288-90; and Anglo-Soviet relations, 251-3,255,260,262-3,265, 272,275-6,278-9; 421,443, 454—6; and Marshall’s offer of aid, 280-4; concern of for British economic strength, 284-5; and policy in post-war Germany, 294—5, 300, 302-3, 305-7, 309, 313-14, 316-25, 327-31,333-7,341,348, 350-1,420-4, 455-6;and policy in Austria, 356; and policy in south-east Europe, 359,361,369,371,376, 385-6, 394-5; and Turkey, 395-9, 401-2; and policy in western Europe, 414-15, 420-5,429,432-3,442-51, 453-6; attitude of towards

529

Index Bevin, Ernest, contd United States, 224, 227, 231, 320, 325,329,333,346,423, 442-3,448-9,453-6; * opposition to his foreign policy within Labour Party, 228-9, 503-4n Bidault, Georges, 220, 231, 282, 284,288,290,305,314,322, 337,351,410,416, 420-3, 453-5 Bierut, Boleslaw, 172 Birse, Arthur, 133,148,172 Bizonia,290, 315, 325,327, 330-1,334,336-9, 346-8, 350-1,441 Blanch, W., 450 Bloc of Democratic Parties, Romanian, 378 Blum, Leon, 445 Board of Trade, 368, 450 Bohemia and Moravia, Protectorate of, 181 Bohlen, Charles, 148-9, 233, 245, 440 Bonham-Carter, Lady Violet, 69 Bor-Komorowski, General T., 172 Borkum, island of, 304 Brandenburg, 39,164 Bratianu, Constantin, 375, 377-8, 380 Brazil, 244 Bremen, included in American zone of Germany, 63 Bremerhaven, included in Am¬ erican zone of Germany, 63 Breslau, offered to Poland by Stalin, 175 Brest-Litovsk, treaty of (1918), 129 Briand, Aristide, 448 Brimelow, Thomas: and repatriation of Soviet

prisoners, 19-20; and post-war British-Soviet relations, 240, 247-8, 252-5, 265, 273-4, 276-8,286,356,426, 428, 432; sympathetic to Armenians, 400-1; biographical note, 458 British Commonwealth, see Commonwealth British Communist Party, 104 Brooke, Field Marshal Alan, 122, 131 Brownjohn, Major-General N.C.D., 347 Brussels Treaty Organisation (1948), 406 Bulgaria: in Second World War, 68,129-30,195,199, 201, 216, 482n; speculation about Soviet policy in, 144-7; British fear of Russophile tradition in, 193-4,196,198,200; increased British interest in towards end of war, 209-12, 215; post-war developments in, 149,236-8,254, 265,268, 358,361-2,364-5,367,376, 378, 382-8 Burrows, B.A.B., 293, 316, 322, 334, 346, 425-6, 458n Burrows, Lieutenant-General M.B., 115-16,137-8 Butler, Nevile, 6-9,11-13, 65, 121-2,147, 458n Butler, Sir Paul, 476n Butler, R.A., 1,6-7, 77,223, 45 8n Butterfield, Professor Herbert, 1 Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, 137,164 Byrnes, James, 279, 402; and Oder-Neisse frontier, 47; British mistrust of, 239, 241-2, 245; and Soviet-

530

Index American relations, 244, 246,267-8,317,321-2, 376; and Germany, 331; proposed Byrnes treaty, 275, 333,336,345,433,435, 441-3 Cabinet: War Cabinet, 2, 21, 26, 28,31,36, 52-3,55,58,71, 89,93,95,108,128,161,163, 178,186, 202,209,211-12, 214,217,226,228, 407; post-war Labour Government, 229,282-3,317,324-5,335, 389, 445-6 Cadogan, Sir Alexander: and ‘long-term planning’ in foreign policy, 13; and treatment of Germany, 28-9, 37, 44, 52, 87-8; and British policy in western Europe, 65, 448; and relations with the Soviet Union, 77, 84-5, 93,101, 117-18,126, 140,428, 480-ln; and Attlee, 148; and the Polish question, 153, 160, 176,178; and Czechoslovakia, 181,187; and Yugoslavia, 204, 206, 208; on American ‘unhelpfulness’, 214; and Bevin, 223, 232; biographical note, 458 Caine, Sir Sidney, 450 Cairo, 113,132,200, 203,206; Cairo Conference (1943), 111 Camberley, Staff College, 19, 276, 356 Canada, 147,253,344 Carol, King of Romania, 231, 381,520n Carr, E.H., 93-4,239-40, 349 Casablanca Conference (1943), 101,484n Catroux, General, 284

Caucasus, 79,154 Cavendish-Bentinck, Victor, 103,119,364, 383-4, 458n Cazalet, Victor, 97 Cecil, Lord Robert, 69 Central Department of Foreign Office, 1,69,118,158,198, 209,457 Chamberlain, Austen, 335 Chamberlain, Neville, 186, 241 Chaplin, John, 50 Chauvel, Jean, 441 Chequers, 97 Chetniks, Yugoslav, 203, 205-6 Chiang Kai-shek, 111, 437 Chicago, 13 Chichester, Bishop of, 28-9 Chiefs of Staff, American, 52, 54,437,455 Chiefs of Staff, British, 2, 65, 72, 206, 209,211,306,332,355, 407; and treatment of post-war Germany, 33, 52, 54, 61; and contingency planning for war with Russia, 118—23, 412 China, 4, 9, 33, 111, 114,147, 236,246,343,398, 437; Chinese Communists, 286 Christian Democrats, German, 319,326,337 Churchill, Winston S., 3, 6, 8, 34, 110, 144, 227-8, 266-7, 270, 277,385,389,421,429,450, 470n; and Anglo-Soviet relations, 15, 66-7, 75, 77-8, 80, 82, 84-8, 94-5, 97, 99, 103-4, 111, 113,123,139, 148-9,213-14,240,263,353, 361, 367, 396-7, 474n, 488n; opposes compromise peace with Germany, 21-3; and British war aims, 26, 32-3; and Foreign Office, 31-2; and

531

Index Churchill, Winston S., contd propaganda to and future of Germany, 35, 37-8, 41, 43-4, 47, 51-4, 62, 471n; visit of to Moscow in 1944, 2, 42-3, 128-36, 216; and restoration of Austrian independence, 70-1; relationship with Eden, 125, 131, 230; and question of withdrawal to zonal boundaries at end of war, 140-3; and British intervention in Greece, 200-1, 218, 220-1; and British policy in Yugoslavia, 203, 206, 216-17; and Fulton speech, 258-60, 264, 423; and ‘United States of Europe’, 279, 336, 446-8; and post-war British security, 406-10, 412, 433; and the Polish question, 112, 154,156,160-1,163,167-9, 171-4,179-80, 375; and Anglo-American relations, 58, 89,94-5,101,126 Clarke, Henry Ashley, 433, 452-3,459n Clay, General Lucius, 298, 322, 346,351 Collier, Laurence, 76, 459n Colonial Office, 229, 450 Colville, John, 379-80, 385, 387, 390-2, 459n Cominform, 286-7, 359, 373, 394,453 Comintern, 185, 252, 287;. dissolution of, 104-5, 286, 363 Committee of National Liberation: French, 407; Polish, see Lublin Committee Commonwealth, 9, 224, 239, 246,445-6; Prime Ministers’ Conference (1946), 317; see also Dominions

Communism: seen as global monolith by Foreign Office, 199, 205, 256-7, 269, 276, 286,361,367,370,372,393, 418, 452, 527n; Bevirt’s views on, 226, 228 Conferences of Foreign Ministers: Moscow (October 1943), 36, 71,102,108-11, 116, 163-4, 241, 467n, 471n; London (September 1945), 236-9, 414-15; Moscow (December 1945), 245-6, 376, 397; Moscow (March-April 1947), 288, 306-7, 339, 342-6; London (November-December 1947), 20,281-2,288-90,307,346, 348-50, 442, 448, 452-3 Conferences of heads of state, see individual names Congress, American, 279, 402, 435,439,445,454 Conservative Party, 124 Control Council, for Germany, ^ 297-9, 310, 312, 351, 430 Control Office, for Germany and Austria, 297, 299-300, 306, 328, 347 Cooper, Duff (Viscount Norwich), 232, 283, 288, 407, 420, 433, 447, 451, 457, 527n Corfu incident (1923), 398; Corfu Channel incident (1946), 359 Cossacks, repatriation of, 17, 468n Coulson, J.E., 459n Cranborne, Lord, 44, 57, 69, 224 Crankshaw, Edward, 167 Crete,'196, 210 Crimean War, 12,121,126 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 29, 75-8, 82,103,254,457

532

Index Croatia, 203 Crosthwaite, P.M., 288, 451, 456,459n Cullis, M.F., 352-3, 356, 459n Cunningham, Admiral Andrew,

122 Curzon Line, 48, 112, 155-6, 158,163,166-8,173-4, 178 Cyprus, 197 Cyrenaica, 196, 237, 241, 401 Czechoslovakia, 24, 35, 69-70, 195,199, 264; possible federation with Poland, 32, 96-7, 106-7,109-10,159, 182-4, 188-90, 198; frontiers of, 48; Soviet intentions towards, 98, 128, 145; Czech-Soviet treaty (1943), 110,165,188, 190-1; British policy towards during war, 180-93; Czech Communists, 182, 286; post-war developments in, 266, 303, 305,355,358,360,364-5, 366-74, 414 Dahrendorf (German politician), 310 Daily Express, 124 Daily Herald, 329, 455 Dalmatian islands, 217-18 Dalton, Hugh, 59, 91, 279, 293, 316,319,331 Danube and Danubian basin, 32, 70-1,196,212,262,264, 356-7, 406, 470n Danzig, 36, 39, 46, 302 Davies, Joseph, 112 Deakin, F.W.D., 205-6 Dean, Patrick, and British policy in Germany, 300, 327-8, 331, 338, 340-2, 347-8, 459n Deane, General John R., 116

Declaration on Liberated Europe, 140, 361-2 Democratic Party, American, 10 Democratic Party, Turkish, 403 Dening, M.E., 437 Denmark, 88, 142, 402, 411, 424 Dew, Armine, 84, 98-9, 102, 104,109,158, 203,209,459n Dimitrov, George, 388 Dixon, Pierson: on need for fight to finish with Germany, 50-1; on Churchill as acting Foreign Secretary, 126; observations of at Moscow Conference (October 1944), 131-4; and Anglo-Soviet relations at end of war, 141; relationship with Bevin, 148, 232, 280, 282-5, 360, 421; reflections of on Anglo-Polish relations, 165-8, 171-4; and British policy in south-east Europe, 194—5, 197, 217, 219-20; and post-war British foreign policy, 238-9,252,255,268,275, 289-90, 307, 343-5, 347, 361-3, 436, 439; dislike of for Byrnes, 245; and British policy in western Europe, 409; biographical note, 459 Djilas, Milovan, 360, 391, 394 Dodecanese islands, 88, 196-7, 210-12,218,250,268,403, 482n Dominions, 23, 42, 45, 89, 145, 147, 178,343,413,442,446 Donnelly, J.C., 13, 459n Douglas, Lewis W., 134, 285 Douglas (Marshal of the Royal Air Force), Sholto, 328 Drogheda, Lord, 8 Duclos, Jacques, 452 Dudley, Alan, 11-12

533

Index Dulles, Foster, 454 Dunkirk, treaty of (1947), 335-6,393,406, 441,445 EAM-ELAS, in Greece, 139, 200-2,218-21,227 East Prussia, 24-5, 29-30, 36, 39,44-6, 83,88,96, 135,158, 175,186,302 Economic Intelligence Department of Foreign Office, 303 Economic and Reconstruction Department of Foreign Office, 457-8 Economic Warfare, Ministry of, 31,79 Eden, Anthony, 3, 22, 30, 35, 58, 423, 457, 467n; ignorant of economic factors, 11; and repatriation of Soviet prisoners, 18; and treatment of Germany, 26-8, 37, 41, 43-4, 52-3,55, 62, 470-ln;and the Polish question, 47, 151, 154—5,158—9,161,163, 167-70,172-3,176-8,183; and restoration of Austrian independence, 70-1; and Anglo-Soviet relations, 77, 79, 82,85-90,93-4,97-8,102, 104,106-11,113-17,122-7, 130,135,138-40,142,144, 149,480-ln, 482n, 488n;and Anglo-American relations, 94, 363; and Czechoslovakia, 182, 184-7; and British policy in south-east Europe, 193-5, 197, 202,204,206,212-14, 216-20; and post-war organisation in western Europe, 407-9, 411-12; relationship with Churchill, 125,131, 470n; relationship

with Bevin, 225-6, 229-30, 239,260 EDES, in Greece, 201 Edmonds, W.S., 401 Egypt, 149, 220, 241, 450 Eire, 113 Eisenhower, General Dwight D., 140-2,298 El Alamein, battle of, 101 Elbe, River, 40, 323 Elizabeth, Princess, 381, 459n Ellis-Rees, Hugh, 450 Estonia, 75, 95, 158 European Advisory Commission, 43, 52, 63, 72, 108-11,118,136-7,352 Evans, F.E., 6 Far Eastern Advisory Committee, 246 Far Eastern Commission, 246 Far Eastern Department of Foreign Office, 437 Fatherland Front, Bulgarian, 382-3,386 Fichte, J.G., 27 Finland: British renounce reparations from, 68; Russo-Finnish War (1939-40), 74-5, 89,226; British declaration of war on, 82-3; wartime situation and evidence of Soviet aims in, 84, 95-8,106,110,126,194,227; peace feelers from, 212-13; expectation of total Soviet take-over of, 128,147; post-war developments and peace treaty, 144-5, 238, 245, 268 Firebrace, Brigadier, 118 First World War, 33, 218, 225, 401 Fitzmaurice, Gerald, 69, 459n

534

Index Fiume, port of, 218 Food, Ministry of, 51 Football Association, 296 Foreign Office: role of officials, 1-2; attitudes in towards United States, 6-14,105, 120-1,125, 144-7; responsibility of for repatriation of Soviet prisoners, 17-19, 482n; unwillingness in to make compromise peace with Germany, 21-2; and British war aims, 23-6; and wartime propaganda towards Germany, 28; and possible dismemberment of Germany, 30, 33-7, 41-4, 67; desire of to control British policy in post-war Germany, 31, 299-301, 347; views in on nature of German problem, 4, 34, 38, 56-61; and ‘transfers’ of German population, 40, 44-8; wish of for federations on continent of Europe, 32, 96-9,105-10,113,159, 182-3; denies having extreme right-wing sympathies, 55, 197; and British leadership of western Europe, 61-2, 65; and wartime policy towards Austria, 68-73; and founding of the Anglo-Soviet alliance, 80-1, 83-4, 88, 94-9; bereft of information on conditions in wartime Russia, 90-2; question of personal contacts with Soviet people, 92-3, 118; hopes and fears in concerning Soviet intentions (1943-5), 101-7,113-14,118-23, 126-8, 135-6, 141, 143-8, 188; dilemma posed for by

Soviet-Polish relations, 152-3, 157-62,164,170-1,174-8; and Soviet policies towards Czechoslovakia, 181-3, 190-3; acquiescence in Soviet veto over peace moves from minor enemies, 199; wish of for pro-British regime in Greece, 200-2; policy of in wartime Yugoslavia, 204-8, 217-18; aims of in south-east Europe towards end of war, 209-15; Bevin’s relationship with officials, 223, 225-6, 230-3; assessments of post-war Soviet foreign policy in, 238-45, 251-62, 265-70, 280-2, 286-8,426, 428, 432; debate in over policy in post-war Germany, 292-9, 301-16,322-4,332,340-1, 349; support of officials for socialist measures in British zone of Germany, 300-1, 326, 328, 347-8; opposes ‘United States of Europe’, 336, 446-8; exaggerates popularity of Communism in post-war Europe, 360; post-war attitudes in towards eastern Europe, 364—5, 369-70; structure of, 457-8; and ‘secret diplomacy’, 488n;see also individual departments', Communism; United States, fear of isolationism in; Western Group idea France, 74-5, 77,180, 188, 191, 203; past mistakes in relations with, 122, 146; wartime hopes for future relations with, 30, 35,63-5, 108, 128, 145,224, 409-13; Stalin on, 86, 88-9, 112; British fears of a

535

Index France, contd Communist France, 3,14,118, 417-24; role of in post-war Germany, 48, 65-6, 296-*-9, 305, 307, 309-17, 322-3, 338, 348-51,410,417,419-23; British policy towards under Bevin, 227, 236-8, 240, 246, 268,270,279-81,414-24, 433, 435, 442-56; relations of with Soviet Union, 92,136, 285-8,338,343,355; Communist strikes in (1947), 452-3; French Communist Party, 280, 286-7, 317 Franco, Francisco, 428 Frank, Hans, 166 Frankfurt-on-Oder, offered to Poland by Stalin, 175 Franklin, A.A.E., 296-9, 309-12,323-4, 327, 459n Fraser, P.R., 349 Free Austrian Movement, 69 Frisian islands, 304 Fry, N.H., 459n Fulton speech, by Churchill, 258-60, 264, 423 Galsworthy, John, 384 Gatehouse, Miss A.F.C., 176, 460n Gaulle, Charles de, 66,136, 227, 407-8, 410, 415-17, 452-3 General Staffs, American and British, see Chiefs of Staff George II, King of Greece, 201-2,214,221 George VI, King, 231, 378 Georgia, ‘claim’ of to Turkish territory, 396-8, 400, 405 German Political Department of Foreign Office, 458 German Section (later Department) of Foreign

536

Office, 31,38,49,176,232, 291,458 Germany: British fear of permanent hostility from, 3-4, 14, 26-7, 34-5, 49-51,102-3, 120-1,186-7,291,335-6, 340, 346-7, 408-9, 412-13, 425-6,456; unwillingness to make compromise peace with, 21-3, 28-9; wartime debate on peace terms for, 24-6, 29-31,39,46, 52,54-5,157, 164, 174-7; British wish for reduction in German birth-rate, 38-9; wartime debate on nature of occupation regime, 56-61, 114-15; fear of Germany turning Communist, 60-1; British wish to separate Austria from, 69-72; German dealings with Soviet Union before invasion (June 1941), 74-5, 78-9; German-Soviet peace contacts after the invasion, 102-3, 111; British wartime dilemma concerning propaganda towards, 26-30, 51-4; zonal division and possible dismemberment of, 30, 33, 35-7, 39-44, 61-6, 87-8,108, 111, 127-8, 139-43, 209, 476n; British public opinion and, 36-7, 45-6, 49,175-6,305; ‘transfers’ of German population, 38-40, 44-8, 185-7,192; possible use as an ally against Russia, 118-20, 123; post-war British speculation on likely tendencies in, 146, 250, 253, 291-2,301,311-13,316-17, 326, 331, 335; Bevin and

Index policy towards, 224-7, 232; question of peace conference for, 244-5; British policy in after the war, 265, 269, 292-9, 307-52, 514n; four-power negotiations over after the war, 288-90, 342-6; post-war consideration of frontiers of, 301-7; see also Bevin; Foreign Office; Poland; Reparations; France, Soviet Union and United States, policies of in post-war Germany Gladwyn, Lord,see Jebb, Gladwyn Goebbels, Joseph, 28 Goering, Hermann, 21-2, 468n Gottwald, Klement, 371 Greece: and possible Balkan federation, 32, 96-7, 194-6, 198; British policy towards during war, 107,128,130, 139, 144,196,199-202, 210-16, 218-21; Greek exile Government during war, 196-8; Bevin and, 227-8; post-war developments in, 146,237,250,268-9,277, 344,359-63,365,375, 389-90,400,435-7,439 Gregory VII, Pope, 242 Grey, P.F., 21,27 Grigg, Sir James, 115,293-4 Grochalski, Count, 364 Grotewohl, Otto, 310 Groza, Petru, 144, 375-6, 378 Gusev, Fedor, 44, 52,135 Habsburg Monarchy, 70 Haigh, Austin, 127, 460n Halifax, Lord, 74, 94, 124, 131, 241,457,468n Hall-Patch, Sir Edmund, 329, 449

Hankey, R.M.A.: and policy towards the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, 255, 261, 265-6, 272-4, 276, 279, 282, 287,364,370-2,374,384, 395, 431-2, 468n; and policy in Germany, 302, 309, 332-3; biographical note, 460 Harriman, Averell, 8,16, 23, 62, 110,164,171,234,238,245, 247, 266, 298, 376, 480n; accompanies Beaverbrook to Moscow (1941), 82-3; accompanies Churchill to Moscow (1942), 100; and Churchill’s second Moscow visit (1944), 131, 134—5; urges active American role in Poland, 179; visits Stalin in the Crimea (1945), 242-4 Harrison, G.W.: on the nature of the German problem, 27, 29, 34, 60, 71-2; on German ‘peace feelers’, 28; on peace terms for Germany, 40; on relations with Russia, 113, 209; on the German-Polish frontier issue, 164; on the Soviet-Czech treaty (1943), 190; and policy in post-war Germany, 295-6; biographical note, 460 Harvey, Oliver: on German territorial losses, 45-6; on German reactions to defeat, 50; on British relations with western Europe, 65, 409, 416-17, 419-20, 422, 424-5, 450, 453; and Anglo-Soviet relations, 84, 97, 107-8, 121; on Britain’s prospects of remaining a Great Power, 147-8; and the Polish question, 154,161, 170,

537

Index Harvey, Oliver, contd 175-6; and Czechoslovakia, 192; and Yugoslavia, 206; and policy in post-war Germany, 300-1, 322-3, 327-8; and policy in post-war Austria, 353-4; biographical note 460 Hayter, W.G., 332, 460n Healey, Denis, 380 Hebblethwaite, S.H., 422, 460n Heligoland, 306 Helphand (Soviet defector), 102 Henderson, Loy, 399 Henry IV, 242 Herder, J.G., 27 Hess, Rudolf, 81, 140 Heydrich, Reinhard, 181, 186, 192 Himmler, Heinrich, 28, 103 Hitler, Adolf, 21-3, 26-30, 48, 50,57,68, 70, 74-5,78,81, 100,109,140,151,180,187, 193,198, 201,213,225,238, 241,247,257,267,275,299, 334, 366, 374-5, 484n Hoare, Sir Samuel, 28 Hogg, Norman, 451,460n Hohenlohe, Prince, 28 Hokkaido, island of, 243, 481n Holman, Adrian, 377-8, 381, 460n Home Army, Polish, 163,171, 177 Hood, Viscount Samuel, 209, 211, 244, 365, 412,460n, 477n Hope-Jones, R.C., 279, 460n Hopkins, Harry, 131, 172, 179-80 Horrocks, Lieutenant-General Brian, 292-3, 296 House of Commons, 125,143, 208,230,233,239,280,303, 333,356,361

House of Lords, 95, 143-4 Houstoun-Boswall, W.E., 383-4, 460n Howard, Douglas, 30,194,199, 202, 206, 208, 460n Hudson, Derek, 37 Hudson, G.F., 58 Hull, Cordell, 94,105, 111, 124-5,164, 214, 471n Hungary: evidence of Soviet intentions towards during war, 43,97-8,110, 189,193; Soviet terms for separate peace with, 198-9; British policy towards during war, 70, 82,96,129,187,195,201, 209-10, 216; and post-war Soviet policy, 145-7, 149, 356, 358, 373, 376; and post-war British policy, 238, 265, 364; frontiers of, 213, 365-6, 375; American interest in (1947), 437 Hynd, J.B., 299-300, 316-17, 321,325,347 India, 79,137,155,244, 246, 248-50,254,422 Indo-China, 139 Indonesia, 248 Inonii, Ismet, 113 International Labour Organisation, 222, 226 Inverchapel, Lord, see Kerr, Sir Archibald Clark Iran: Churchill’s offer to replace Soviet troops in, 86; Soviet policy in and question of evacuation of Soviet troops from, 149, 246, 249-50, 253, 256, 399; importance of to Britain, 211,220, 397, 437 Iraq, 32, 211 Ireland, 449

538

Index Ismay, General, 85,115-16, 134,137-8, 467n Istria, 135 Italian colonies, 12, 237 Italy: British wartime views on future of, 32, 64,128; and grand strategy of war, 101, 122,142, 201, 203; frontiers of, 48, 211-12, 218, 389; surrender of German forces in north of, 140-1; British wariness about Soviet intentions towards, 109, 125, 127,130,135,146,194, 213-14,281,355,361,363, 409,412,437; AngloAmerican disagreement over at Potsdam, 149; peace treaty with, 244-5, 268, 317, 366; need for inclusion of in Western defence arrangements, 442-3, 449; Italian Communist Party, 127, 130,286-7, 420,445 Izvestia, 215 Jaksch, Wenzel, 192 Japan, 114, 117, 476n; Soviet entry into war against, 86-7, 129, 139, 149, 480-ln; Soviet demand for share in occupation regime in, 241-4, 246, 506n; activities of Soviet mission in, 508n Jebb, Gladwyn (Lord Gladwyn): on Britain’s Great Power role, 2; on future of colonial empires, 10—11; on Anglo-American relations, 12-13; on treatment of Germany, 31, 36, 471-2n; criticises Churchill, 32-3, 407; and Chiefs of Staff, 114, 119-21,123; on Anglo-Soviet

relations, 147, 275; on the Poles and the Czechs, 189; and policy in eastern Europe, 210-11, 362; and policy in western Europe, 413; criticises Truman Doctrine, 436-7; biographical note, 460 Jellicoe, Lord, 303, 305, 461n Jenkins, Roy, 229, 232 Jews, 51, 156-7,212,249 Jones, Jack, 352 Kaser, M.C., 441 Kastellorizon islands, 211 Katyn (massacre of Polish officers), 18, 154, 156, 160-2, 167-9, 189, 491n, 506-7n Kazakhstan, 248 Kennan, George, 42, 62, 245, 247,259,261,317,439-40 Kerr, Sir Archibald Clark (Lord Inverchapel), 111, 461n; early admiration for Stalin, 103; work as Ambassador in Moscow, 107,116, 124,135, 157, 219, 238, 407; chafes at restrictions in Moscow, 118, 263; and the Polish question, 166,169,171; Ambassador in Washington, 349, 402; thinks British unfair to Soviet Union (1943), 484n; becomes disillusioned with Soviet Union (1946), 376 Keynes, J.M., 8,13, 25-6, 59, 71-2,292 Khrushchev, N.S., 234 Kiel Canal, 30, 36,114, 306 King, C.E., 6, 9-10, 461n Kirkenes, proposed Anglo-Soviet expedition to capture, 87 Kirkuk oilfields, 250 Koch, Erich, 91,481-2n

539

Index Konigsberg, 135-6, 175 Korea, 256, 437, 508n Kot, Stanislaw, 90,152-3, 234 Kurdistan, 249 Kuwait, 250 Labour Governments (1945-51), 3, 263, 300, 444-5 Labour Party, 25, 55, 57, 74, 104,134, 222,227, 229,264, 329,371,380, 503-4n Labour Party Conference (1947), 278, 336 Lambert, A.E., 267-8, 461n Lange, Oskar, 170 Laskey, D.S., 199-200, 211, 461n Laski, Harold, 264 Latvia, 75, 95,158 Law, Richard: and AngloAmerican relations, 8-9, 11; and the disarming of Germany, 30; and need for British role in occupation of Austria, 72; and Anglo-Soviet relations, 84, 102,136; and policy in south-east Europe, 209, 212; biographical note, 461 League of Nations, 7, 32, 133, 191,222,227 Lebanon, 410, 415 Leeper, Sir Reginald, 200, 202, 218, 461n Lend-Lease aid, 58, 81,100 Lenin, V.I., 130,237,273-4, 310,352,400 Leonhard, Wolfgang, 185, 363 Levant, 149 Level of Industry Committee, for Germany, 313 Liberal Party, 137 Libya, 5,101,149, 237 Lidice massacre, 181,192

Lintott (British official), 450 Lippmann, Walter, 147, 523n Lithuania, 29, 75, 88, 95, 151, 157-8 Litvinov, M.M., 95 Lorraine, 30 Loxley, P.N., 6 Liibeck, occupied by British, 142 Lublin Committee (later Government), 170, 177-8 Lunebiirg Heath, proposed monument at, 293 Luxembourg, 48, 305 L’vov (Lwow), dispute over possession between Russia and Poland, 159,162-3,165,167, 169-70,173 MacArthur, General Douglas, 242, 244 McDermott, Geoffrey, 255, 398-9, 461n Macedonia, 196, 365, 389 Mack, Sir H., 49, 357, 461n Maclean, Fitzroy, 76, 206-8, 216-17,461n Macmillan, Harold, 219, 255, 363 McNeil, Hector, 380, 423, 430, 461n Madrid, British embassy at, 22 Maisky, Ivan, 78, 82, 85,103-4, 106,108,153-4 Makins, Roger, 25, 30, 69, 98, 151-2,181,183-4,186,279, 461n Malaya, 10 Malcolm, Angus, 10, 461n, 466-7n Malcolm, Dugald, 253, 347 Malenkov, G.M., 286 Malkin, Sir William, 168, 462n Manchukuo, 398

540

Index Manchuria, 256-7, 438, 476n, 506n Maniu, Iuliu, 375, 377-8, 380, 382 Marjoribanks, James, 462n Marshall, George, 279, 284, 288-90, 307, 336, 343-6, 348, 350-1,437,439-43,446-8, 453,455 Marshall Aid Plan, 257, 276, 279-85,287,373,394, 439-41,449 Martel, General Giffard, 115 Masaryk, Jan, 266, 371-2, 398 Masaryk, T.G., 191,370 Massigli, Rene, 420, 423-4, 449-50 Matsuoka, Yosuke, 22-3 Matthews, H. Freeman, 212, 306 Mayhew, Christopher, 380, 462n Memelland, 29, 88 Mexico City, alleged Soviet-American contact at,

112 Meyer, Sir Anthony, 374 Michael, King of Romania, 215-16,231,374-5,377-82, 395, 519n Middle East, 79,121,155,212, 246,248,250,404,450; Anglo-American rivalry in, 12-13; British request to Russia for exclusive sphere of influence in, 262-3, 271 Mihailovich, General Draza, 203-8,216, 500n Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw, 159-60, 170-5,177,179,388 Millar, F.R. Hoyer, 416-17, 419, 423, 462n Missouri, USS, mission of to Turkey, 399 Molotov, Vyacheslaw, 19, 44, 92,100,103,116,132,138,

148, 213, 407; and the Austrian problem, 71; congratulates Ribbentrop, 75; conversation with Cripps, 76; visits Britain and the United States (1942), 95-8; and federations in post-war Europe, 107; at Moscow and Teheran Conferences, 110-12, 471n; negotiations with Eden (Moscow, 1944), 130,216, 520n; and the Polish question, 159,165,172, 178-9; and Czechoslovakia, 183; post-war conduct of Soviet foreign policy by, 236-8, 242-3, 255, 262,268,282,288-90,301, 305,307,322-3,325,343-6, 397, 414, 439-40; personality of, 233-5; working relationship of with Stalin, 263-4, 266-7, 272 Mongolian People’s Republic, 255 Monroe Doctrine, 438; Bevin’s comment on the ‘three Monroes’, 425 Montgomery, Field Marshal Bernard, 91, 142, 273, 509n; as Military Governor in British zone of Germany, 292-6, 300, 328; visits Russia (1947), 270-2 Montreux Convention (1936), question of revision of, 396-7, 401-2 Morgenthau, Henry, 35, 43; his ‘plan’ for the future of Germany, 58-60 Morocco, 99 Morrison, Herbert, 378, 462n Morton, Major, 41 Moscow: British Military Mission in, 115-17, 481n;

541

Index Moscow, contd visits to by Eden and Churchill: Eden (1941), 85-90, 155, 480n, 482n;" Churchill (1942), 100; Churchill and Eden (1944), 2, 42-3,59,123,128-36,171-3, 396, 474n, 488n, 520n-,see also Conferences of Foreign Ministers (1943-7) Moss, H. St L.B., 55 Munich: possible Nazi shrine at, 49; Munich Agreement (1938), 69, 97, 180-1, 183-9, 192,371,374 Murmansk, 82, 85-6 Murphy, Robert, 298 Mussolini, Benito, 145, 274, 398 Myers, Brigadier E.C.W., 202, 208 Namier, Lewis, 37 Naples, Churchill-Tito meeting at, 217 Narvik, supposed Soviet interest in, 74, 227 National Council for the Homeland, Polish, 169-70 National Liberal Party, Romanian, 375 Nazis and Nazism, 4, 15, 23, 27, 33-4, 51, 53, 55, 60, 67-8, 72, 92, 225, 296, 342, 388; fear of resurgence of after war, 48-9, 475n; Bevin’s gaffe to Molotov regarding, 238; . Soviet equation of Britain and America with, 265, 274-5, 309, 325-6; British accuse Russians of using in Germany, 313; Bevin’s feeling that Nazism not dead, 333, 337 Nekrashevitch, Colonel, 377 Nesic (Yugoslav official), 390

Netherlands, The, 141, 293; British expectation of ‘leadership’ of, 24, 63-5, 88, 152,224,270, 406-7,409, 413; frontiers of, 48, 304-5, 307; role in occupation of Germany, 35, 296, 417, 443; possible inclusion of in ‘Western group’, 415-16, 445-6,449 Netherlands East Indies, 10, 224,304 New Mexico, atomic bomb test in, 149 New Statesman, 37 New Zealand, 9-10, 142, 147 Nichols, Sir Philip, 189, 266, 367-73, 462n Nicolson, Harold, 69 Normandy invasion (1944), 50, 53-4,123, 126, 129, 484n North American Department of Foreign Office, 6, 65, 436 Northern Department of Foreign Office, 16, 76-7, 80, 118,158, 198, 332, 364, 373, 457, 468n Northern Epirus, 197 Norway, 63-5, 74-5, 87-8, 227, 244 Nuremburg: possible Nazi shrine at, 49; executions at (1946), 333 O’Butler, Rohan, 27 Oder, River, 30, 39-40, 44, 46, 164,169,174-7,449,452 Oder-Neisse frontier, 46-9 177-80,301-7,375 Odessa, Russians bar British from defences at, 117 O’Malley, Sir Owen, 161-2,166, 168,462n O’Neill, Con: and British policy in Germany, 31, 38, 40-2, 48,

542

Index 50, 298-9, 308, 312-13; biographical note, 462 Operation Mincemeat, 201 Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, 283 Osobka-Morawski, Edward, 172 Oxley, General, 385 Pakenham, Frank, 347 Palestine, 156, 212, 249, 271, 450 Paris Conferences: Peace Conference (1919), 144, 245; Peace Conference (1946-7), 234,246,263-5,268,317, 321-3,366,372,416,421; conference on Marshall Aid (1947), 281-4, 439-40 Parker, Ralph, 177 Partisans: Yugoslav, 129, 202-8, 217-18, 358, 500n; Italian, 363 Pauker, Anna, 380-1 ‘Peace Aims’ group, 25 Peake, Charles, 392-5, 462n Pearl Harbor, 6, 81 Peasant Party, Romanian, 375 Peenemiinde, German rocket base at, 303 Perowne, Victor, 7, 462n Peter II, King of Yugoslavia, 203,207-8,217-18 Peterson, Sir Maurice, 19, 262-4, 266-7, 271, 273, 280, 334,340-1,395,398-9,411, 439,452-3, 462n Petkov, Nikola, 382, 385, 387-8 Petsamo: question of annexation of by Soviet Union, 87-8, 108; Bevin’s suggestion regarding, 226-7,232 Pinsent, R.P., 401-4, 462n Poland, 2, 35, 39, 56, 70, 74, 85, 89,124-5,136,149,194-5,

244, 257, 286, 506-7n; Govemment-in-exile in London: recommendations of for future of Germany, 23-4; its relations with Britain, 151-78, 488n; its relations with the Soviet Union, 152-5, 161-2,170-4; question during war of cession of German territory to Poland, 24-5, 29-30,36,44-8,60, 83,88, 135,157,164, 173-80; Polish territorial losses to Soviet Union, 29, 81,84,151-2, 158-9,161-2,164,173; possible Polish-Czech federation, 32, 96-7,106,159, 182-4,188-90,198; Soviet intentions towards, 98, 126-7, 141, 144-5, 170-4; Churchill and the Polish question, 112, 129,160-1,163,167-9, 171-4,179-80; Roosevelt and the Polish question, 112,139, 161, 164-5,174,179, 495n; Polish Communism, 162, 169, 172; Poland in the post-war period, 265, 298, 301-7, 358, 362,364,371,375,414 Pomerania, 24, 39, 47,164, 178 Portal (Marshal of the Royal Air Force), Sir Charles, 114, 122-3 Porter, Paul, 439-40 Portugal, 22,64, 112, 128,381, 412,428 Post-Hostilities Planning Committee, 39,115,119-20, 123, 210, 481n Potsdam Conference (1945), 2, 47-8, 67-8, 144, 148-50,174, 178-80, 236-7, 270, 375, 396, 412; ramifications of decisions of in post-war Germany, 291-2,297-8,303,311,313,

543

Index Potsdam Conference, contd 320,323-4 Prague American refusal to occupy (1945), 142 Pravda, 40, 121,124, 215, 272 Prussia, 33-4, 41, 57, 225, 342 Qatar, 250 Quebec Conferences: 1943, Alin-1944,63 Queen Mother, Romanian, 377-8 Radescu, General, 144 Ramadier, Paul, 448 Rankovic, Alexander, 394 Reay, Lord, 45 Red Cross, 292 Reddaway, Norman, 327, 330-1, 334,462n Rendel, Sir George, 462n Renner, Karl, 353 Reparations: Austrian, 67-8, 71-2, 345, 356, 477n; German, 32, 38, 43, 66-7, 88, 108,139,150,323-5,327, 330,334,340,343,346; Hungarian, 199; Italian, 149 Republican Party, American, 10, 454 Research Department of Foreign Office, 213, 306 Rhineland and Rhenish separatism, 30, 44, 88,136, 142-3,311-12,316-17,322, 335,337 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 75, 103,159 Riddleberger, James W., 323 Riga, treaty of (1921), 157 Ripka, Hubert, 182-3,189 Roberts, Frank: on British refusal to negotiate with Nazi Germany, 22; on Polish war

aims, 24; on British propaganda to Germany, 26; on the nature of the German problem, 31, 40-2, 51, 57, 60, 64; on British public opinion, 37; on German-Polish relations, 39; on Anglo-Soviet relations, 46,120, 240, 242-3, 246-52,255,260, 265,284, 286-7, 418, 445; and the restoration of Austrian independence, 70; and federations in eastern Europe, 106-7; and the Polish question, 30, 83,153, 156-9, 162-8,170-1,175; and British relations with Czechoslovakia, 181-2, 184-6,188-92; and British policy in south-east Europe, 198, 387-8; and policy in post-war Germany, 232, 315-17, 331; and the proposed Western group, 425, 429; biographical note, 463 Robertson, General Sir Brian, 300, 325, 327-30, 342, 350-1 Roman Catholic Church, 12, 60, 224 Romania: in Second World War 68, 82, 84,95-8,106,110, 126,129,140,143-4,187, 193-5,198-201,212-16; speculation on Soviet intentions towards at end of war, 145-7; discussion of at Potsdam, 149; developments in after the war, 231,236-8, 243,246,254,265,268,356, 358, 362-7, 374-83, 385, 397 Romer, Tadeusz, 173 Rommel, General Erwin, 86 101,271

544

Index Ronald, Nigel, 13, 463n; on future of Germany, 25, 35; on Anglo-Soviet relations, 84, 366; on the frontiers of Germany, 305; initiates debate on aims of British foreign policy (1945-6), 424-33 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 8, 23, 62,65,72,111,133-4,136, 236, 407, 421, 481n, 484n; and Unconditional Surrender, 28, 52-4; and dismemberment of Germany, 35, 41; and Morgenthau Plan, 58; and Soviet-American relations, 66, 81-3, 94-5, 98,122; dealings of with Churchill, 89, 95, 99, 101,130-1,139; indifference of to eastern Europe, 112, 122,139,161,164-5,174, 179, 201, 214, 495n Rose, E.M., 194-5, 203-4, 207-8, 463n Rosenberg, Alfred, 91 Royal Air Force, 16, 24, 64, 82, 86,190,204,213,217,328, 467n Ruhr, The, question of partial or total separation of from Germany, 43, 60, 68, 288, 299,311-13,316-17,321-2, 328,330,337,341-2,347-8, 417,419-21,423 Rumbold, Sir Anthony, 416-19, 429, 463n Rundall, F.B.A., 434, 440, 463n Russia, see Soviet Union Russia Committee, 321 Saar, 30,288,305,307,322, 338, 423, 471n Saka, Hasan, 397 Salazar, Antonio de, 381,428

Salonika, 211, 365, 394 San Francisco Conference (1945), 148 Sargent, Orme, 13, 30, 463n; and deportation of Germans to Siberia, 37-8, 40; opposes dismemberment of Germany, 42, 87; speculates on Soviet intentions in Germany, 61; and British policy in western Europe, 65, 416-17, 435, 441-2, 444; and relations with Soviet Union, 77, 84, 92-6, 98, 107,113-14,120, 122, 236,265,268,270,335-6, 350, 353-4,402; convinced that Germany would seek revenge, 102-3;and Anglo-American relations, 125; memorandum on ‘Stock-Taking after VE-Day’, 144-8; and the Polish question, 158, 176; and policy in south-east Europe, 195-6, 207-8,214,217,362,366; and policy in post-war Germany, 316-17, 325, 335-6; and post-war Czechoslovakia, 371 Saudi Arabia, 12, 250 Savery, Frank, 157, 159, 463n Scandinavia, 24, 33, 106,128, 224,280,406,411,414 Schapiro, Professor Leonard, 18 Schulenburg, Count Werner von der, 392 Scott, Sir David, 11, 463n Second Front issue, 54, 81, 86-7, 95,98-100,109-12, 117,125, 127, 139 Security Council of the United Nations, 252, 256, 265, 360, 398, 430-ln Selborne, Lord, 143

545

Index Selby, Sir Walford, 69 Serbia, 196, 204 Siberia, 38, 40, 45-6, 124 . Sikorski, General Wladyslaw, 85,153-60,170,183,491n Silesia, 24, 37, 39, 47-8, 60,175, 178, 302,342 Simferopol, 132 Sinclair, Sir Archibald, 137 Skaife, Brigadier E.O., 117 Slovak rising (1944), 192 Smith, Walter Bedell, 247, 439 Smithers, Sir Waldron, 482n Smolensk, 154 Smuts, Jan Christian, 71-2 Social Democratic Party: Bulgarian, 383; Czechoslovak, 370-1, 374; German, 310-11, 319,326-7,337,341; Romanian, 380 Socialist Party, French, 418, 423, 452 Socialist Unity Party (Soviet zone of Germany), 331 Somaliland, British and French, 422 Sosnkowski, General K., 159, 171 South Africa, 224 South Tyrol, 48-9, 474n Southern Department of Foreign Office, 194-5,197,199, 207, ^ 209,387,457 Soviet Union: nature of Anglo-Soviet relations, 2-4; views of ‘revisionist’ historians on, 5; American perceptions of, 12; British perceptions of Soviet intentions during war, 13-16, 38, 40, 44, 46-8, 66-7, 91; and repatriation of Soviet prisoners, 17-20,137, 139-40, 254, 482n; and division of Germany into

546

occupation zones, 61-3; and the Austrian problem, 71-2, 352-7; peace contacts of with Nazi Germany, 102-3, 111, 484n, 488-9n; impact of German atrocities in on Soviet foreign policy, 91-2, 481-2n; relations with Britain before the German invasion, 74-9; relations with Britain, June-December 1941, 79-85; visit of British Foreign Secretary (December 1941), 85-90; British ignorance of conditions in during war, 90-2; origins of Anglo-Soviet treaty of alliance (May 1942), 92-9; Churchill’s first visit to (August 1942), 99-100; British aid to, 82, 99-101, 486n; relations with Britain, January-October 1943, 101-7; policy of at Moscow and Teheran Conferences (1943), 108-14; attitude of British military leaders towards, 115-18,122-3; relations with Britain, January-October 1944, 123—36; Churchill’s second visit to (October 1944), 128-36; relations with Britain towards end of war, 136-50; and the Polish question during the war, 151-80; intentions of towards Czechoslovakia during the war, 181-2, 188-93,192-4; and south-eastern Europe during the war, 193-9, 202, 204-5, 208—13, 215; Bevin and policy towards, 224, 226-8, 233-5 {see also Bevin); and Foreign Ministers’ Conferences

Index (September and December 1945), 236-46; British relations with in 1946, 247-68; British relations with in 1947, 268-90, 336; policies of in post-war Germany, 256-8, 267, 296-8, 301-3, 307-15,317-20,324-9, 332-5, 338-46, 349-50; Soviet policy in post-war eastern Europe, 358-405; attitude of towards security organisation of western Europe, 412, 414-16, 425-33, 446-7 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 406, 410, 416-17,445 Spain, 22, 64, 112,385,412, 420, 428; Spanish Communist Party, 128 Special Operations Executive, 33, 202-6 Stalin, Joseph, 5, 16, 51-2, 68, 74,81,118,121,124,233-4, 393-4, 408-9, 421,430, 471n, 484n; on functions of diplomacy, 15; and wartime Soviet foreign policy, 29-30, 35,41,44-7, 63,71,83, 85-90, 92,97,102, 106-12, 129,142,145,151, 480-ln, 482n, 488n, 500n; wartime correspondence and meetings with Churchill, 42-3, 59, 66-7, 82,104, 111, 126,128-41, 148-9, 216, 474n; and Soviet ‘public opinion’, 87, 118, 480-ln; and appeasement of Hitler, 75, 78,103; British belief in untrustworthiness of, 53, 99, 266-8; and the Polish question, 151,154-5,157, 160-2,165,168-73,174-5, 177-8; and wartime dealings

with the Czechs, 182, 184-5, 188-9, 192-4; and wartime Soviet policy towards south-east Europe, 193-5, 205,207,213-14,217, 219-21; and post-war Soviet foreign policy, 238, 241-6, 253,257-60,265,269,303, 338,346,353,358-61,363, 367, 371-2, 374-5, 380, 389, 396-8,400-1,415, 506n, 522n; interviews with British Ambassadors (1943 and 1946), 103, 262-4; plays host to Montgomery, 270-2; Foreign Office study of mentality of, 273-5 Stalingrad, Sword of, 112 State Department: Foreign Office attitude towards, 8; joint study of Italian colonies, 12; and dismemberment of Germany, 42; and British wartime relations with Soviet Union, 94,185, 212, 217; and post-war Anglo-Soviet relations, 242; increasingly aware of need for AngloAmerican co-operation, 259-60, 349; policy of in post-war Germany, 298-9, 306, 316, 323, 351; and post-war eastern Europe, 377, 379, 390, 392; and Turkey, 399; and follow-up to Truman Doctrine, 437; and Marshall Aid Plan, 440 Steel, Christopher, 306, 463n Stevens, Roger, 339 Stevenson, Air Vice-Marshal Donald, 377 Stevenson, Sir Ralph, 391, 463n Stettin, cession of to Poland, 46, 175-6,301,303,307

547

Index Steward (British official), 377 Stimson Doctrine (1931), 438 Stockholm, German-Soviet contacts at, 102 Straits, 196, 209; Soviet ambitions at, 149, 215, 220, ^ 396-7, 401-4, 523n Strang, William: compares Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, 15-16; on compromise peace with Germany, 22, 29, 52; on dismemberment of Germany, 30, 44; on the Austrian problem, 72; and Anglo-Soviet relations, 84, 92-3, 109, 136-7; and Czechoslovakia, 181; and Yugoslavia, 206; observation of on Bevin, 228; and post-war British policy in Germany, 293,295,306,308-9,326-7, 331, 348, 417; biographical note, 463 Stuttgart, speech by Byrnes at (1946), 322 Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, 189, ^ 192-3,368-9,372-3 Sudeten Germans, 48, 184—7, 192,365 Suez Canal, 241, 262 Sweden, 74-5, 79, 227, 402, 411 Switzerland, 140 Syria, 262, 410, 415,417 Szczecin, see Stettin Taft, Senator, 434-5 Tangier, Soviet claim to a voice at, 240 Tatarescu, Gheorghe, 376 Taylor, A.J.P., 5, 15 Teheran Conference (1943), 2, 41,43,45,51,62,111-14, 128,133,164-5,175,353, 396, 423

Teschen, dispute over between Poland and Czechoslovakia, 183-4,189,371-2 Thorez, Maurice, 452 Tibet, 232 Times, The, 37, 93, 177, 239-40, 264, 349 Tito, Josip Broz, 130, 143, 202-8,216-18,355,358, 389-95 Togliatti, Palmiro, 214 Tokyo, British embassy at, 23 Tolstoy, Count Nikolai, 17-18, 468n Tomkins, E.E., 447 Trades Union Congress, 284, 329, 443 Transport and General Workers Union, 222 Transylvania, 97, 213, 365-6, 375 Treasury, British, 11, 59, 229, 297,329,391,449-50 Treaties, see individual names Trianon, treaty of (1920), 365-6 Trieste, 72, 142, 218, 245, 301, 389,454 Tripolitania, 262; Soviet claim to,5,237,239-41 Trott, Adam von, 29 Troutbeck, J.M.: and British policy in Germany, 31, 38, 41, 44-5, 55, 57, 67-8, 232, 279, 291-2,294,301,313-14,329, 411,430-1,463n Truman, Harry S., 13; initially conciliatory towards Soviet Union, 142; at Potsdam Conference, 148-9, 412; and post-war American foreign policy, 179-80, 236, 241-2, 246,260,336,359-60,389, 394,399,402,404, 433, 445

548

Index Truman Doctrine (1947), 256, 286, 360-1, 394,404; British response to, 435-9, 441 Tunisia, 70, 101 Turkey, 32, 77,128, 146,196-7, 199, 220; question of entry into war of, 93,109,113,195, 201, 210-11, 482n; need to defend against Soviet encroachments, 215; British policy and post-war developments in, 246, 249-51, 255,359,361,367,395-405, 435,437,445, 522n,523n Turner, Mark, 297, 306, 464n Ukraine, 91, 95,122,137, 159, 163-4,170,189 Ulam, Adam B., 81, 244 Ulbricht, Walter, 310 Unconditional Surrender policy, 28, 52, 54,484n Union of Polish Patriots, 162, 169, 170 United Nations, 108, 111, 127, 137,139,240,265,269,275, 285,387,406,425,428, 430-1,436, 438; see also Security Council United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, 246 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (proposed), 279-80, 440, 446 United States of America: Anglo-American relations and ‘revisionist’ historiography, 4-14; wartime relations of with Britain, 58, 63-8, 94—6, 105, 109,120-1,125-6, 136-7, 139-47; and question of future of Germany during war, 30, 40, 59, 62-3; and Austria, 71-2; policy of in

south-east Europe, 199, 208-9,212,214,218,220, 360-3,373,376-80,382, 384-7,389-94;and loan agreement with Britain (1946), 13-14,285; British-American-Soviet relations and the Cold War, 104, 149,240-6,250-1, 253-5,260-3, 265, 268-70, 273-8, 286-90, 335-6, 339, 342-6, 354, 435-9, 486n; post-war policy of in Germany, 297-301, 306-7, 315-17, 320, 322-3,328-31,333,346-8, 350-2; post-war policy of in western Europe, 415-16, 441-3; growing interest of in security of Turkey, 396-7, 399-404; and offer of aid to Europe (1947), 279-84, 439-41; lingering British belief in strength of isolationism in and sense of rivalry with, 261-2, 264-5, 339, 404, 409-13, 432-5, 441, 444, 448-9, 454-5 Upper Silesia, see Silesia Usedom, island of, 303 Uzbekistan, 248 Vansittart, Lord, 24, 28, 37, 43, 293 Vassilevsky, Marshal, 271 Venezia Giulia, 218, 389-90 Versailles, treaty of (1919), 24-5,31,34,59, 144, 186-7, 292 Vienna: ‘race’ to capture, 141; Vienna Award, by Hitler (1940), 97 Vilna, Polish-Lithuanian dispute over, 151 Vis, island of, 217

549

Index Vyshinsky, Andrei, 152, 252-5, 284,375,403 Waley,S.D., 8, 59, 68,297 War Office, 118,180 Ward, J.G.: and British planning for the future of Germany, 33; and British policy in western Europe, 64, 409-12, 414; and post-war security needs, 115; on Soviet intentions, 141, 240; and policy regarding the Straits, 209-10; and Anglo-American relations, 240-1; biographical note, 464 Warner, Christopher: attitude of towards Soviet Union during war, 16, 80, 83,92,118-20, 123, 135,198, 215; and wartime policy towards Germany, 30; and the Polish question, 158, 160, 170, 177; and post-war policy towards the Soviet Union, 242, 247, 251-60,267-9,272,275, 280-1,288,335,369,372, 381, 393-5, 414; and the Truman Doctrine, 437; biographical note, 464 Warr, G.M., 371-2, 464n Warsaw Rising (1944), 171, 174 192 Wasilewska, Wanda, 162,169 Waterhouse, E.K., 200 Watson, J.H., 380, 386, 388, 464n Webster, Sir Charles, 55-6 Weizmann, Chaim, 51 Welles, Sumner, 35,105 West European Department of Foreign Office, 288, 393, 416, 422,451,458 Western Group idea: wartime

antecedents of, 3, 61-6, 407-13, 476n; question of American assistance in forming, 12-13; Bevin’s early views on, 224; post-war developments towards, 253, 265,279,314,424-33,435, 442-9; Soviet opposition to, 238, 240, 258; Bevin’s unwillingness to ignore Soviet objections, 414-16, 429 Wheeler-Bennett, Sir John, 182, 186 Whitehead, Professor T. North, 6-7, 464n Williams, M.S., 384, 386, 464n Wilson, Sir Charles, see Moran, Lord Wilson, Duncan, 323, 327, 339-41, 347, 349, 464n Wilson, Geoffrey, 91-2, 95,103, 113,117-19,121-2,124,132, 157,170, 464n Wilson, Sir Horace, 119 Wilson, John, 279, 393-4, 448, 450,452-3,464n Wilson, Woodrow, 8, 28, 54, 247 Winant, John, 8 Winterbotham, F.W., 481-2n Woodward, Professor E.L., 1 25, 37, 49, 55-6, 464n World Federation of Trade Unions, 258 Yalta Conference (1945), 2, 42-3, 62, 66-7, 75,128, 136-40,149,174,178-9,236, 242,343,361-2,396,410, 423, 481n; British-Soviet agreement on repatriation of prisoners at, 17-18, 20, 139-40 Young, Wilson, 436 Yugoslavia, 77, 98,129, 135,

550

Index 143,145,187,193,197,244, 500n; inclusion of in possible Balkan federation, 32, 96-7, 194-6, 198; British policy in during war, 196, 199, 202-9, 212-18, 499n; post-war

developments in, 345, 358-9, 361,365,367,388-95,414 Zhdanov, Andrei, 286-7 Zhukov, Marshal, 295 Zog, King of Albania, 209

551

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DA 47.65 .R58 1982

Rothwell: Britain and the Cold War

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47.65 .R58/1S82 UTHOR

Rothwell, Victor Britain and the Cold War DATE DUE

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