C
by Douglas Reed
p. 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390
Lenin, in his Collected Works, wrote: “The World War” (1914-1918) “will see the establishment of Communism in Russia; a second world war will extend its control over Europe; and a third world war will be necessary to make it worldwide.” The central phrase of this forecast was almost literally fulfilled by the outcome of the Second War. The revolution extended its frontiers to the middle of Europe and thus was put in a position to extend its military control over all
By 1956 the Western people, for ten years, had been made accustomed by almost daily intimations from their leaders to the thought that war with “Russia” was inevitable, This was the consequence of the outcome of the Second War; this outcome, again, was the result of the diversion of acts of state policy and of military operations to the purposes of destroying nation-states and of general enslavement; and this diversion, in turn, was the consequence of the process described in the previous chapter as “the invasion of America.” The strength and wealth of
Thus the story of America's embroilment in the Second War demonstrated the power of the “foreign group” which had come to dictate in Washington, and gave living reality to the farewell address of George Washington himself: “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
The published records of the Second War show that the conspiracy had obtained power to dictate major acts of American state policy, the course of
military operations and the movement of arms, munitions, supplies and treasure. Its conscious agents were numerous and highly-placed. Among the leading men who supported or submitted to them many may have been unaware of the consequences to which their actions were bound to lead.
This chapter in the republic's story occupied three and a half years, from
In the First War President Wilson, re-elected on the promise to keep his country out of war, immediately after his re-inauguration declared that “a state of war exists.” In the Second War President Roosevelt was re-elected in 1940 on the repeated promise that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” His electoral programme, however, included a five-word proviso: “We will not send our armies, navies or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside the
The importance of the proviso was shown on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked
The pre-history of this notation, again, is that on January 27, 1941 the United States Ambassador in Tokyo had advised his government that “in the event of trouble breaking out between the United States and Japan, the Japanese intended to make a surprise attack against Pearl Harbour”; that the Soviet spy in
Tokyo, Dr. Richard Sorge, informed the Soviet Government in October 1941 that “the Japs intended to attack Pearl Harbour within sixty days” and was advised by the Soviet Government that his information had been transmitted to President Roosevelt (according to Sorge's confession, New York Daily News, May 17, 1951); that the Roosevelt government delivered a virtual ultimatum to Japan on November 26, 1941; that secret Japanese messages, from September 1941 up to the very moment of the attack, which were intercepted and decoded by United States intelligence units, gave unmistakable evidence of a coming attack on Pearl Harbour but were not transmitted to the American commanders there; that on December 1 the Head of Naval Intelligence, Far Eastern Section, drafted a despatch to the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet saying “war between Japan and the United States is imminent,” which was cancelled by superior authority; that on December 5 Colonel Sadtler of the U.S. Signal Corps, on information received, drafted a despatch to commanders, “War with Japan imminent; eliminate all possibility of another Port Arthur” (an allusion to the similar “surprise attack” that began the Russo-Japanese war), which was similarly suppressed; that a Japanese reply, obviously tantamount to a declaration of war, to the Roosevelt ultimatum was received in Washington on December 6, 1941 but no word was sent to the Pearl Harbour defenders. A message stating that “the Japanese are presenting at one p.m., eastern time today what amounts to an ultimatum … be on the alert” was at last despatched about noon on December 7, 1941, and reached the commanders at
The record now available suggests that the Americans on
Political leaders who are ready to obtain their country's entry into war by facilitating an enemy attack on it cannot be depended on to wage it in the national interest. The American people as a whole still is unaware of the truth of
Eight investigations were held, seven naval or military ones during wartime and one Congressional one at the war's end. Thus wartime secrecy enshrouded them all and none of them was truly public or exhaustive; moreover, all were conducted under the aegis of the political party whose man was president at the time of
Secretary of War's diary (with the significant entry above quoted) was not admitted in evidence and Mr. Stimson himself was not called, being in ill health. Control of the press enabled the long proceedings (six months) to be presented to the public in bewildering and confusing form.
However, the three naval commanders chiefly concerned have published their accounts. Rear Admiral Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet at the time, says of another admiral's belief that “President Roosevelt's plans required that no word be sent to alert the fleet in
Fleet Admiral Halsey, who at that time was one of Admiral Kimmel's three senior commanders, says, “All our intelligence pointed to an attack by
Rear Admiral Theobald, commanding destroyers of the Battle Force at Pearl Harbour, writing in 1954 says, “Dictates of patriotism requiring secrecy regarding a line of national conduct in order to preserve it for possible future repetition do not apply in this case because, in this atomic age, facilitating an enemy's surprise attack, as a method of initiating a war, is unthinkable.” (The admiral presumably means that he hopes a repetition is “unthinkable”). He adds. “The recurrent fact of the true Pearl Harbour story has been the repeated withholding of information from Admiral Kimmel and General Short” (the naval and military commanders at Pearl Harbour, who were made scapegoats) “… never before in recorded history had a field commander been denied information that his country would be at war in a matter of hours, and that everything pointed to a surprise attack upon his forces shortly after sunrise.” Admiral Theobald quotes the later statement of Admiral Stark (who in December 1941 was Chief of Naval Operations in Washington and who refused to inform Admiral Kimmel of the Japanese declaration of war message) that all he did was done on the order of higher authority, “which can only mean President Roosevelt. The most arresting thing he did, during that time, was to
withhold information from Admiral Kimmel.”
Fleet Admiral Halsey, writing in 1953, described Admiral Kimmel and General Short as “our outstanding military martyrs.” They were retired to conceal from the public, amid the confusion and secrecy of war, the true source of responsibility for the disaster at
What, then, was this superior plan, to which all American military effort from
In the First World War, American entry coincided with the revolution in
By June of 1942 President Roosevelt's intimate, a Mr. Harry Hopkins, publicly told the Communist state (at a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden), “We are determined that nothing shall stop us from sharing with you all that we have and are.” These words reflected a presidential order earlier issued (March 7, 1942) to American war agencies (and much later made public) that preference in the supply of munitions should be given to the Soviet Union over all other Allies and over the armed forces of the United States. The Chief of the American Military Mission in
The word “appeasement” was incorrectly used by General Deane, for the policy went far beyond simple “appeasement,” and was obviously aimed at
increasing the military and industrial strength of the revolutionary state after the war.
It is explicit in the above passages that Mr. Roosevelt intended to give the revolutionary state greater support than any other ally, free or captive, and implicit that he was resolved to support
In 1941 this policy of supporting the revolutionary state was clearly bound to produce much greater effects than in 1917. In 1917 American support could only effect “the establishment” of Communism in
In 1941 the situation was entirely different. Communism was long since “established.” Support, if given in the boundless measure promised by Mr. Hopkins, was bound to enable it to “extend,” in accordance with Lenin's dictum. The support given was so prodigious that it enabled Communism to “extend” over a vast area and to prepare for another war as well; the prospect of this third war, arising immediately the second one ended, was then depicted to the Western masses as the consequences of Soviet perfidy.
The values transferred to the revolutionary state from
together, and in sovereign irresponsibility. Public expenditure in
This stream of wealth was directed by one man, described by his official biographer (Mr. Robert E. Sherwood) as “the second most important man in the
This pre-history of Mr. Hopkins's appointment is significant, because it shows the continuing power and method of the group around the American presidents of both world wars. A Congressional Investigating Committee of 1919, headed by Mr. William J. Graham, said of the “Advisory Commission” which produced the 1918 War Industries Board, that it “served as the secret government of the United States … A commission of seven men chosen by the president seems to have devised the entire system of purchasing war supplies, planned a press censorship, designed a system of food control … and in a word designed practically every war measure which the Congress subsequently enacted, and did all this behind closed doors weeks and even months before the Congress of the United States declared war against Germany … There was not an act of the so-called war legislation afterwards enacted that had not before the actual declaration of war been discussed and settled upon by this Advisory Commission.”
Mr. Baruch himself, testifying before a Select Committee of Congress on the wartime activities of the “one-man” authority which he himself had caused to be set up, said, “The final determination rested with me … whether the Army or Navy would have it … the railroad administration … or the Allies, or whether General Allenby should have locomotives, or whether they should be used in Russia or in France … I probably had more power than perhaps any other man did …” (This was the First War background to Mr. Churchill's words to Mr. Baruch in 1939, “War is coming … you will be running the show over there.” The extent of Mr. Baruch's power in the First War is further illustrated by an incident in 1919, when President Wilson was brought back to
came to be known as “the Regency Council,” and when the ailing president's senior Cabinet officer, Mr. Robert Lansing, Secretary of State, called Cabinet meetings on his own authority the president, from his sickbed, dismissed him; though he broke also with other associates, including Mr. House, “
In the Second War President Roosevelt revived President Wilson's power to establish a “Defence Council” with an “Advisory Commission” (1940), and in 1942 this was enlarged into a “War Production Board,” the counterpart of the 1918 “War Industries Board.” Mr. Baruch again advised that “one man” be put in charge of this all-powerful body, but in the event he was not the one man appointed. His biographer says that he was disappointed, but the reader may keep an open mind about that.
The rare references to Mr. Baruch in this narrative do not denote the extent of his influence. The best observers known to me all believed that he was the most powerful of the men around American presidents over a period of more than forty years, up to now. His biographer states that he continued to act as adviser to every American president (including the three Republican ones of 1920, 1924 and 1928) from President Wilson on, and, writing in 1952, predicted that he would also “advise” President Eisenhower and even gave an outline of what this advice would be. Mr. Baruch's true place in this story, or the present writer's estimate of it, will be shown at a later stage, when he made his most significant open appearance.
Even though Mr. Baruch, with evident accuracy, described himself as the most powerful man in the world in 1917-1918, his power actually to shape the events and map of the world was much less than that of any man who occupied the same place in the Second War, for the obvious reason that “the determination of what anybody could have” now extended to the revolutionary state established as a great military power with obvious and vast territorial aims. Even the War Production Board became of secondary importance when the “Lend-Lease Administration” was set up, and Mr. Harry Hopkins was appointed “Administrator” and also chairman of President Roosevelt's “Soviet Protocol Committee” with power “to determine supply quotas to be dispatched to
Mr. Hopkins could only have occupied so elevated a place in the Twentieth Century; public opinion, if informed by a free and impartial press, would hardly have suffered him, for he had no qualification to handle great affairs, least of all foreign ones. Even his biographer, though well-disposed to a fellow-inmate of the White House (in which respectable precincts Mr. Hopkins, according to his own diary, once acted as pander to a visiting Communist notable, a Mr. Molotov), wonders how this man, “so obscure in origin and so untrained for great responsibility,” could have become “Special Adviser to the President.”
As to that, today's student cannot discover who “chose” Mr. Hopkins for his role. However, he finds that Mr. Hopkins in his youth had absorbed the same kind of ideas (those of “Louis Blanc and the revolutionaries of 1848”) which Mr. House acquired in his Texan boyhood. Mr. Hopkins had studied at the feet of a Fabian Socialist from
When Mr. Hopkins took his place as chairman of President Roosevelt's Soviet Protocol Committee he found among its members some who greatly mistrusted the policy of unconditional supply to the revolutionary state. He issued to them the following imperial fiat:
“The
Thus the revolutionary state, through Mr. Hopkins, was shown to be “the inevitable
Of “aeroplanes and tanks” 15,000 and 7,000, respectively, were donated. A navy of 581 vessels was also given (over many years 127 of these were returned and in 1956 the Soviet offered to pay for 31; the remaining ships, over 300, were
declared to have been lost, sunk or declared unseaworthy). A merchant fleet was also presented.
This was only the smaller part of the total transfer of wealth in many forms. The American Government has never published the details of its deliveries. The fact that these are known, and that the greater part of them consisted of supplies obviously designed to strengthen the industrial and war-making capacity of the revolutionary state after the war's end, is due to one of the accidents which assist the historian, although, in the condition of the press today, they never reach the general public mind and therefore produce no remedial result.
In May 1942 a Captain George Racey Jordan reported for duty at the great
Captain
Captain Jordan then began to keep a very full diary, and by means of it was later able to show (when he and the rest of the world learned about “atomic bombs”) that during 1942 about fifteen million dollars' worth of graphite, aluminium tubes, cadmium metal and thorium (all materials necessary for the creation of an atomic pile) were sent to the Soviet Government from Newark. At this time the “Manhattan Project” (the production of the first atom bomb) was supposed to be of such intense secrecy that its chief, Major General Leslie R. Groves, later testified that his office would have refused, without his personal approval, to supply any document even to President Roosevelt. In 1942, when he made these entries in his diary, Captain
His next experience of the authority wielded by the Soviet officers came when one of them took affront on seeing a red star on an aeroplane belonging to the Texaco Oil Company and threatened to “phone
removed. Captain
At this time Captain Jordan began to realize that the mass of material that was going to the Communist state was not in the least covered by the terms of the master Lend-Lease agreement (“The Government of the United States will continue to supply the U.S.S.R. with such defence articles, defence services and defence information as the President … shall authorize to be transferred or provided”) but included many things that had nothing to do with “defence” and everything to do with the post-war strengthening of the Soviet. He noted, for instance, the supply of “tractors and farm machinery, aluminium manufacturing plant, railway car shops, steel mill equipment” and the like more. These shipments (which, an enthusiastic interpreter told him, “will help to Fordize our country”) are indicated in the round totals which are the only information on the subject provided by the American Government. President Truman's “Twenty First Report to Congress on Lend-Lease Operations” shows under the head of “Non-munitions” the enormous figures of $1,674,586,000 for agricultural products and $3,040,423,000 for industrial materials and products.
In 1943, when heavy losses to the ocean convoys caused a much greater proportion of Lend-Lease materials to be sent by air, an American air terminus for the movement of these supplies was set up at Great Falls, Montana, and Captain Jordan was transferred there as “Lend-Lease Expediter.” Once more his orders from the United States Army Air Force designated him “United Nations Representative,” though no such body existed, and he found awaiting him a Presidential directive, headed “Movement of Russian Airplanes,” which said that “ … . the modification, equipment and movement of Russian planes have been given first priority, even over planes for
Major Jordan then noticed that an extravagant number of black suitcases, roped and sealed, was passing through his “pipeline to
Among the mass of papers, plans, correspondence and blueprints were two discoveries which, years later, proved to fit neatly into the picture of espionage and conspiracy which was revealed by the various exposures of 1948-1956. One
was a bundle of State Department folders, each with a tab. One of these read, “From Hiss,” and another, “From Sayre.” Major Jordan had never heard either name, but they were the names of the chief State Department official later convicted (Alger Hiss) and of another State Department official involved in the same affair. These folders contained copies of secret despatches from American attaches in
The more important discovery was one which affects all men living in the West as much today as if it were now detected. It was a letter addressed to the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Trade, Mikoyan. Major Jordan noted down an excerpt from it: “ … .had a hell of a time getting these away from
(For some years after the Second War the public masses in
In 1944 Major Jordan, more worried than ever, attempted to see the Lend-Lease liaison officer at the State Department but was intercepted by a junior official who told him “Officers who are too officious are likely to find themselves on an island somewhere in the
(12,766,472 lbs), graphite (7,384,482 lbs), thorium, uranium nitrate, oxide and urano-uranic oxide, aluminium and alloys (366,738,204 lbs), aluminium rods (13,744,709 lbs), aluminium plates (124,052,618 lbs), brass and bronze ingots and bars (76,545,000 lbs), brass or bronze wire (16,139,702 lbs), brass and bronze plates (536,632,390 lbs), insulated copper wire (399,556,720 lbs), and so on.
These lists also include the “purely postwar Russian supplies” (General Groves), such as an oil-refinery plant, forging machinery and parts ($53,856,071), lathes, precision boring-machines, canning machinery, commercial dairy equipment, sawmill machinery, textile machinery, power machines ($60,313,833), foundry equipment, electric station equipment, telephone instruments and equipment ($32,000,000), generators ($222,020,760), motion picture equipment, radio sets and equipment ($52,072,805), 9,594 railway freight cars, 1,168 steam locomotives ($101,075,116), merchant vessels ($123,803,879), motor trucks ($508,367,622), and endlessly on.
Among the major donations obviously intended to strengthen the Soviet Union industrially after the war, Major Jordan's records include one repair plant for precision instruments ($550,000), two factories for food products ($6,924,000), three gas generating units ($21,390,000), one petroleum refinery with machinery and equipment ($29,050,000), 17 stationary steam and three hydro-electric plants ($273,289,000). The Soviet lists reproduced by Major Jordan suggest that a spirit approaching hysteria in giving moved Mr. Hopkins and his associates, for they include items for which no rational explanation can be found, for instance: eyeglasses ($169,806), teeth ($956), 9,126 watches with jewels ($143,922), 6,222 lbs of toilet soap $400 worth of lipsticks, 373 gallons of liquor, $57,444 worth of fishing tackle, $161,046 worth of magic lanterns, $4,352 worth of “fun fair” devices, 13,256 lbs of carbon paper, two “new pianos,” $60,000 worth of musical instruments and (an item which conjures up visions of the “Beloved Leader,” Mr. Roosevelt's and Mr. Churchill's “Uncle Joe”), “one pipe,” valued at ten dollars!
Mr. Hopkins's past as a professional fund-raiser and welfare-worker seems to show in the donation of $88,701,103, over four years, for “relief or charity”; those who have visited Soviet Russia may try to imagine this money being doled out by the Commissars to the poor! This was not the end of cash-giving under “Lend-Lease.” In 1944 Mr. Henry Morgenthau junior, Mr. Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, and his Assistant Secretary, Mr. Harry Dexter White (later shown to have been a Soviet agent) ordered the shipment to the Soviet Government of duplicates of the United States Treasury plates to be used for printing money for the use of the forces occupying Germany after the war. This meant that the money printed by the Soviet Government for the use of its troops was redeemable by the American Government as there was no distinction whatever between the paper printed. By the end of 1946, when public protests caused the American Government to stop paying its own troops with these notes,
so that the Soviet Government could make no further use of them, the United States Military Government in
Thus for four or five years there was an unlimited transfer of the wherewithal of war, of supplies for post-war industrial use, and of wealth in manifold forms to the revolutionary state, and “re-discussion” of this policy lay under ban at the highest level. Moreover, “preference” and “priority” for this policy, in relation to American needs or those of other allies, was explicitly ordered at that level.
There were two other ways in which the revolutionary state could be “supported” and helped to “extend”: (1) the conduct of military operations; (2) the direction of State policy at high-level conferences issuing from these military operations. As the policy of delivering arms and wealth was so firmly, even fanatically pursued in favour of the revolutionary state, it was logical to expect that the same policy would be pursued through military operations and the conferences resulting from them. In fact, this happened, as good observers foresaw at the time and as the receding picture of the war now plainly shows. It also was the inevitable result of the capture of a great measure of power behind the scenes, in the
The effort to turn all military operations to the advantage of the revolutionary state, which in complicity with Hitler had started the war by the joint attack on
In view of the vast consequences which General Marshall's interventions produced the circumstances of his original elevation are of interest. President Roosevelt appointed him Chief of Staff in 1939 over the heads of twenty major generals and fourteen senior brigadiers (six years earlier his nomination to general, being adversely reported on by the Inspector General, had been barred by the then Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur). One of General Marshall's earliest acts was, in 1940, to ask Senator James F. Byrnes (an intimate of Mr. Bernard Baruch) to propose an amendment to an army estimates bill
authorizing the Chief of Staff to override seniority rules in favour of younger officers held by him to be “of unusual ability.” Senator Byrnes's amendment, then adopted, provided that “in time of war or national emergency … any officer of the Regular Army may be appointed to higher temporary grade …,” and under this empowerment General Marshall during 1940 made 4,088 promotions, among them that of the fifty-year old Colonel Dwight Eisenhower, who then had no battle or command experience but within three years was to become Supreme Allied Commander. The combination of General Marshall and General Eisenhower was decisive in shaping the outcome of the war in 1945.
Immediately after
General Marshall, in view of his appointment, was presumably entitled to be regarded as the best military brain in the
In spite of all this General Marshall, on return to
all that followed later in the war must be considered in the light of this action of the highest military officer in the
In the spring of 1942 the Germans still had 1,300,000 troops in
Mr. Churchill's own account, and the narratives of all other authorities, agree that he was from first to last consistent, at all events in this major issue. He was the only man among the Western leaders with great military and political experience, and he clearly saw that the war would bring neither true victory nor peace if the revolutionary state, the aggressor at the war's start, were enabled to spread deep into
In this controversy his great antagonist proved to be General Marshall more than President Roosevelt, whose state of health in the last year of the war may have incapacitated him from clear thought, unless he was simply the helpless captive of the pressures around him. Mr. Churchill desired to strike from the south as well as from the north and to bring the Balkan and Central European countries under Allied occupation before they could pass merely from Hitlerist enslavement into that of the Red armies; this policy would have led to true victory, have given the world a prospect of peace for the rest of the 20th Century and have largely fulfilled the original “aims” of the war, among which “liberation” was the greatest. General Marshall was resolved to concentrate on the invasion of
The struggle continued for eighteen months, but the die was cast, as events proved, at the first Quebec Conference of August 1943, when the Anglo-American armies, having completed the conquest of North Africa, had returned to Europe and were driving the German armies out of
there, and, above all, abandoning all idea of a thrust from
The secondary, southern invasion offered no military advantage to justify this decision which was obviously political; the document on which General Marshall based his arguments in favour of it at the Quebec Conference reveals this. It was called “
Here the overriding “policy” laid down in respect of Lend-Lease deliveries reappears in respect of military operations; it is that of unconditional surrender to the paramountcy of Soviet aims and interests. Stalin had opposed the thrust through the Balkans and averred that “the only direct way of striking at the heart of
This was General Marshall's most momentous intervention. Mr. Churchill, though he never criticized General Marshall, refers cryptically to him in his war memoirs, and in Triumph and Tragedy mourned the lost opportunity. General Mark Clark, in 1943 the American Commander in
of Rome we ‘ran for the wrong goal,' both from a political and a strategical standpoint … Save for a high level blunder that turned us away from the Balkan States and permitted them to fall under Red Army control, the Mediterranean campaign might have been the most decisive of all in post-war history … A campaign that might have changed the whole history of the relationships between the Western World and Soviet Russia was permitted to fade away … The weakening of the campaign in Italy … was one of the outstanding political mistakes of the war.”
General Mark Clark (a brilliant American soldier who was subsequently relegated to secondary commands and resigned from the Army) says “blunder” and “mistake,” but the document above quoted and many other sources now available show that the decision was neither blunder nor mistake in the ordinary sense of those words: that is, an error made in miscalculation of the consequences. The consequences were foreseen and were intended; that is now beyond doubt. The decision was political, not military, and it was made by the men who formed the group around the president. It was, in the field of military operations, the exact parallel of the decision taken in respect of Lend-Lease operations: to subordinate all other considerations to the interest of the revolutionary state.
Thus the war, which could have been ended (probably in 1944) by the Allied liberation of the countries overrun by Hitler, leaving the Soviet state within the natural Russian boundaries or a little more, and Europe in balance, dragged on through 1944 into 1945; while the German armies in Italy were given respite and the wasteful invasion of Southern France lent no impetus to the main invasion of Normandy.
The shape which the war took in its last ten months then was that dictated by the Soviet Government and superimposed on Western military strategy through its agent in the American Government, the man known as Harry Dexter White. Being dead, he cannot testify, but he is commonly held by the best authorities known to me to have been the author of the plan, for the destruction of
Under the shadow of this plan (as will be seen) the Western armies gradually broke their way through to the edge of
General Eisenhower describes his refusal of Field Marshal Montgomery's proposal, late in 1944, to strike hard with all available forces for
criticizes
This was all in vain. General Marshall, in
Thus “the hideous bisection” of
This statement was made in reply to a question at a dinner of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on March 3, 1949; The questioner said “the general feeling is that if our Army had marched into Berlin and … Prague the picture in the post-war period might have been different … Had our political leaders … refrained from interfering with you in going through your regular military procedure of taking as much as our armies might take … don't you think the postwar picture might have been different?”
General Eisenhower's statement cannot have been true, even if he thought it was. The order to hold back the Allied advance until the Red armies had taken
possession of Germany and Central Europe, with its three chief capitals, obviously followed the “policy” which, demonstrably, governed Lend-Lease: that of giving preference to the demands of the Soviet state over all other allies, and even over the needs of America itself. For that matter, General Eisenhower's own naval aide and biographer, Captain Harry C. Butcher, specifically states that when General Eisenhower (against Mr. Churchill's protest) opened direct communication with Moscow about the halting-line for the Allied advance, the question of “boundaries and areas to be occupied had gone beyond the sphere of military headquarters.” General Eisenhower's actions clearly followed a predetermined political plan agreed at the highest level; by the time he became president its consequences were plain to see and he might have felt “haunted” by President Roosevelt's example (as Mr. Roosevelt was always “haunted” by that of President Wilson).
Mr. Churchill supplied (on May 11, 1953) the conclusive comment on this military outcome of the Second War, which was the second great “disenchantment” for troops who thought themselves victorious: “If our advice had been taken by the United States after the armistice in Germany, the Western Allies would not have withdrawn from the front line which their armies had reached to the agreed occupation lines, unless and until agreement had been reached with Soviet Russia on the many points of difference about the occupation of enemy territories, of which the German zone is only, of course, a part. Our view was not accepted and a wide area of
Thus the policy followed in the transfer of arms, wealth and goods and in the conduct of military operations during the Second War served to “extend” the revolution. One other way remained in which this process of extension could be advanced through the war: by the capitulation of Western state policy, at the highest political level, in the pourparlers and conferences of leaders which were held as the military picture unfolded.
The feelings of readers might be needlessly harrowed if the story of all these meetings (Atlantic,
The “Atlantic Charter” was preceded by President Roosevelt's third post-election oration, on January 6, 1941, when he told an
“respective policies” of
The retreat from these lofty purposes followed in the
At the time of this conference the Anglo-American armies were being held back in Europe so that the Red armies might embed themselves deep in the heart of
The Western leaders, on the refusal of the Soviet dictator to leave his domains, foregathered with him in the
“The first course at breakfast was a medium-sized tumbler containing …Crimean brandy. Following the opening toasts and the brandy there were repeated servings of caviar and vodka … Then assorted cold cuts were served … and with them, a white wine … Finally, small hard Crimean apples and with them bountiful glasses of a quite sweet Crimean champagne … The final course of this breakfast consisted of tall thin tumblers of boiling hot tea with which brandy was served in snifters. That was just breakfast! How could any man with his stomach full of the above described stuffings make one rational or logical decision in relationship to the welfare of the United States of America … Elliott
Roosevelt, who went with his father to the conference, said that practically everyone was drunk.” As to dinner in the evening, Mr. Charles E. Bohlen, who was present as Assistant Secretary of State and interpreter to President Roosevelt, says of one such meal that “Marshal Stalin acted as host. The atmosphere of the dinner was most cordial, and forty-five toasts in all were drunk.”
On top of all this, the dying President Roosevelt arrived at Yalta as the signatory of the “Morgenthau Plan,” drafted by a Soviet agent in his own Treasury Department (Mr. Harry Dexter White); and was accompanied by another Soviet agent, later exposed and convicted, Mr. Alger Hiss of his State Department, who at this vital moment was the president's special adviser about “political affairs.” In effect, therefore, the Soviet government was represented on two sides of the three-sided table, and the outcome of the conference was the logical result. Up to the very eve of the meeting Mr. Churchill continued his effort to save something of Central Europe and the Balkans from the fate to which they were abandoned at
A month before the meeting at Yalta Mr. Churchill cabled to President Roosevelt, “At the present time I think the end of this war may well prove to be more disappointing than was the last.” He had come a long way from the “finest hour” of 1940, during which year, on acceding to the prime ministership, he wrote, “Power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.” He now knew how little true power the “premier-dictators” have and could only hope, at the utmost, to salvage a little from the ruins of victory, which at that moment was being thrown away just before it was won.
What he knew, and told President Roosevelt, was all unknown to the embroiled masses. That complete control of the press, of which the Protocols arrogantly boast, prevented the truth from reaching them, and they were being swept along from day to day on a high tide of inflamed enthusiasm for the great “victory” which they were about to gain. Mr. Churchill's ‘‘power” was quite impotent to alter that. A few months earlier (August 23, 1944) he had asked his Minister of Information, “Is there any stop on the publicity for the facts about the agony of
The “agony” to which Mr. Churchill refers is the heroic rising of General
Bors's underground army of Poles against the Germans as the Red armies approached
The power which the revolution had gained in the infested West was enough to prevent the publication of facts like these during the Second War, and Mr. Churchill's enquiry of his Minister of Information vanished into air. The “agony of
Such was the background to the Yalta Conference where, at his first meeting with Stalin, President Roosevelt, a man on the grave's edge, told the Soviet dictator that he “was more bloodthirsty in regard to the Germans than he had been a year ago, and he hoped that Marshal Stalin would again propose a toast to the execution of 50,000 officers of the German Army.” The word “again” alludes to the Teheran Conference of December 1943, where Stalin had proposed such a toast and Mr. Churchill had angrily protested and left the room. Thereon President Roosevelt had suggested that only 49,500 be shot, and his son, Elliott, in convivial mood, had expressed the hope that “hundreds of thousands” would be mown down in battle; “Uncle Joe,” beaming with pleasure, then had risen from his seat to embrace Mr. Elliott Roosevelt.
Mr. Roosevelt wished by this prompting of Stalin to annoy Mr. Churchill (whom by 1945 he apparently regarded as an adversary); he had told his son Elliott at Teheran, “Trouble is, the P.M. is thinking too much of the postwar, and where England will be; he's scared of letting the Russians get too strong”), and made this plain to Stalin by saying he would “now tell him something indiscreet, since he would not wish to say it in front of Prime Minister Churchill.” Among the things which were not told in front of Mr. Churchill was this: “The President said he felt that the armies were getting close enough to have contact between, and he hoped General Eisenhower could communicate directly with the Soviet staff rather than through the Chiefs of Staff in London and Washington as in the past”
(February 4, 1945).
Here is the explanation for the fate of
Stalin did not again propose the shooting of 50,000 Germans. The Yalta records suggest that he showed some reserve towards Mr. Roosevelt's private proposals to him (which included one that the British should give up Hongkong), and the picture of him which emerges from these papers is, that of a more dignified, and in spoken words at least more scrupulous man, than the president! The reasons may be, on the one hand, that Mr. Roosevelt's talk was so callous and cynical that it produces a feeling of repugnance in the reader; on the other, even Stalin may have hesitated to believe that the American president would go as far as he said in supporting Soviet aggrandizement and have suspected some trap, so that he showed more than his usual reserve. In any case, the murderer of millions appears, in these particular pages, rather less repellent than his visitor.
The supreme test of Western honour at
Though Mr. Churchill had not given up the last hope of averting it, the imminence of this annexation was apparent at
Thus when Mr. Roosevelt asked leave to “bring up
proposed the amputation of Poland along the Curzon line, adding the strange remark that “Most Poles, like the Chinese, want to save face” (many observers of this period noted that he was sometimes incoherent, and he did not explain how the loss of Polish territory would save the Polish face). Mr. Roosevelt had been well briefed for this proposal. Mr. Edward Stettinius, who was nominally his Secretary of State at that time but seems to have had no part in forming policy, records that “the President asked me to get a lawyer to consult with him over the wording of the Polish boundary statement; I called Alger Hiss.”
Mr. Churchill was left alone to make the last protest on behalf of the original “principles” and objects of the Second World War: “This is what we went to war against Germany for: that Poland should be free and sovereign. Everyone here knows the result to us, unprepared as we were, and that it nearly cost us our life as a nation.
But in the end he signed (and later Polish troops, the first to fight Hitler, remained mourning in their quarters while the great “Victory Parade” was held in
Thus the deed was done, and instead of freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear, the peoples of
Under some subsidiary agreement the Western Allies agreed to regard all Russian prisoners as “deserters,” to be driven back to the Soviet state. All these matters read soberly on paper; the picture of their results for human beings appears in such words as those of the Rev. James B. Chuter, a British Army chaplain and one of 4,000 prisoners from a disintegrated German prisoner-of-war camp who made their way towards the advancing Allies in 1945: “Along the eastern bank of the river Mulde was encamped a great multitude … This was the end of the journey for the tens of thousands of refugees who had passed us. The Mulde was the agreed line at which the Americans halted and to which the Russians would advance. The Americans would let none save German military
personnel and Allied prisoners of war cross the river. From time to time some desperate soul would fling himself into the flood in a vain attempt to escape from the unknown fury of the Russian arrival. It was to avoid such incidents and to discourage them that the occasional splutter of American machine guns on the Western banks was heard … sounding, in that most frightening manner, a plain warning to all who thought to cross the river line.”
Such was the outcome of the Second World War, and the agreement which sanctified it all, (in which Stalin's signature was added to those of the two signatories of the Atlantic Charter of 1941) said, “By this declaration we reaffirm our faith in the principles of the Atlantic Charter.”
This was the end of the Yalta Conference, but for a significant footnote. At a last “man-to-man” meeting between President Roosevelt and Stalin, on the eve of the president's departure to visit King Ibn Saoud, Stalin said “the Jewish problem was a very difficult one, that they had tried to establish a national home for the Jews in Birobidzhan but that they had only stayed there two or three years and then scattered to the cities.” Then President Roosevelt, in the manner of a man who is a member of an exclusive club and is sure his host must also belong, “said he was a Zionist and asked if Marshal Stalin was one.”
This exchange produces on the reader the effect of two men getting down to the real business at last. Stalin replied that “he was one in principle but he recognized the difficulty.” In this passage, again, the Georgian bank-robber sounds more like a statesman and speaks more prudently than any Western leader of the last forty years, none of whom have admitted any “difficulty” (Mr. Churchill was wont to denounce any talk of “difficulty” as anti-Jewish and anti-semitic). This was not the whole conversation on the subject, although it is all that the official record discloses. On the same, last day of the full conference Stalin asked Mr. Roosevelt if he meant to make any concessions to King Ibn Saoud, and the President replied “that there was only one concession he thought he might offer “and that was to give him” (Ibn Saoud) “the six million Jews in the
All the statements cited above, with the one exception, are taken from the official publication, “The Conferences at
Historically regarded, the revelations of these
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