The Pacific

13 �

TENSIONS IN BOTH ALLIANCES

ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS

The alliance between the United States and Great Britain, developed in tentative stages even before Japan, Germany, and Italy drew the United States into the war, had from its beginning both built-in tensions and elements making for cooperation. The tensions came in part from their divergent histories and perspectives, in part from their differing situations and strategies. The United States had gained its independence in a long and bitter war with England, a war which had affected the country more deeply than any conflict except for the civil war. The country’s national anthem recalls to its citizens an incident from their next war with England, and at later times in the nineteenth century there had been further serious friction about boundaries in the northwest and northeast, about fishery rights and British support of the Confederacy in the civil war, about rivalries in Central and South America, and about projects of some Irish�Americans to seize all or parts of Canada to hold hostage for the freedom of Ireland from British rule.

This last source of friction relates to the role of the Americans of Irish descent, who had become very numerous partly because of develop- ments in Ireland during the middle and second half of the nineteenth century, and who were becoming increasingly influential in American politics in the first half of the twentieth century, especially because of their concentration in a number of large eastern and mid-western cities, where their role was crucial to the Democratic Party coalition which dominated American politics in the 1930s. Although their overt hostility to Britain was diminishing somewhat, it remained a factor in the picture.

Furthermore, Americans generally extended their antipathy for their own former colonial masters to the whole colonial concept. If they had generally very little idea of the extent to which Canada, Australia, New Zealand and what was then called the Union of South Africa were in fact fully in charge of their own internal affairs, they had no doubt that

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Anglo-American relations 723

India and the other colonial possessions of Great Britain were not. Having themselves through Congressional action in 1936 decided to withdraw from the one great deviation from their own anti-colonial tradi- tion, the Philippines, they could see no reason why the British should not do likewise. Whatever the size and nature of other colonial empires held by other powers, any glance at a map�to say nothing of population statistics�showed that in the competition for the greatest empire and hence the worst place in American eyes, Britain indeed had taken the lion’s share.

For those concerned about the world trade causes and effects of the Great Depression, and that especially included Secretary of State Cordell Hull and much of the personnel of his State Department, the system of imperial preference instituted by the Ottawa Agreements of 193 2 was an abominable restraint on trade and hence an obstacle to both prosperity and future peace. In addition, there was in both government circles and the American public a sense that the British were sharp and unscrupulous dealers, a quality they had most recently demonstrated by defaulting on their debt to the United States from World War I.

The British, on the other hand, resented the American refusal to share in the support of the peace settlement of 1919 as well as the American tariff system which, they believed, had caused many of their difficulties (including their debt default) in the first place. Many of them, especially in the Conservative establishment, objected to American criti- cism of the British empire in general and of British rule in India in particular. The arrival of large numbers of American troops in England led to many individual cases of friendship and eventually to thousands of marriages, but also produced considerable friction; the Americans, as a popular comment put it, were "over-paid, oversexed, overfed and over here."

There were, in addition to the differences in popular attitudes, diver- gencies in strategic perception. The Americans constantly argued that the "Germany First" strategy demanded that something really be done against Germany in the European theater, and such favorite projects of Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff as mounting big operations to seize the Italian islands in the eastern Aegean did not look to them in the least likely to further that aim. On the contrary, the American leaders saw in such projects diversions designed for British imperial purposes more likely, by diverting resources, to delay than to speed up victory. The refusal of the British to provide a reasonable level of support for their own forces in the Indian theater, on the other hand, looked to Washington and its representatives on the spot as a means of holding

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724 Tensions in both alliances

back on strengthening an anti-colonialist China until Britain could reclaim her colonies after the Americans had defeated Japan.

The British leaders, on the contrary, constantly objected to what they considered excessive American deployment to the Pacific (conveniently forgetting that they had requested it in the first place in order to assure the safety of Australia and New Zealand while much of the force of those Dominions was engaged in the British campaign in North Africa). The British also resented the insistence of the Americans on the priority of the cross-Channel invasion, the willingness of the Americans to sacri- fice to that priority opportunities which they believed existed elsewhere, especially in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, and the failure of the Americans, as they saw it, to see that needs elsewhere precluded for the time being the manpower and resource allocations to the Burma theater, which the British in any case believed unlikely to produce the revived Chinese war effort Americans hoped for.’

The other side of this litany of troubles was an array of substantially more significant factors drawing and keeping the two powers together. The American President and the British Prime Minister had established a truly extraordinary personal and working relationship, and if in this the balance whenever they differed shifted increasingly to the more powerful American side, there was obviously on each side an exceedingly high regard for the other and a determination to make the alliance work. This sentiment was very much shared by the higher staffs of both men, so that, whatever differences over policy and strategy developed, the attempts to bridge these were always made in the shared assumption that cooperation was essential for victory. And until his death in November 1944, Field Marshal Dill invariably worked hard, and usually with suc- cess, to resolve whatever difficulties arose.’

The cooperative attitude at the top had pillars at home and derived strength from implementing organs. At home, Americans admired the steadfastness of the British in their great trial while the British appreci- ated the help they had received and were continuing to get from the Americans. In practice the cooperation generally worked and in the process generated further cooperation. The various joint boards and committees working under the auspices of the Combined Chiefs of Staff carried out their activities with enormous success. In spite of the inherent difficulties of making combined plans and allocating scarce resources from ammunition to shipping space, it all somehow worked; and in the process large numbers of officers from both countries and all services learned to work together and became accustomed to doing so.’ Further- more, there were at least some theater operational commands which were effectively Allied in composition, nature, and functioning.

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Anglo-American relations 725

While MacArthur deliberately kept his headquarters in the Southwest Pacific from being the Allied construction it could (and probably should) have been and Mountbatten, in spite of really trying, simply did not have enough Americans assigned to his Southeast Asia Command to make that a truly Allied one,’ in the Mediterranean and in Northwest Europe there really did develop a truly integrated form of command structure. As much a tribute to the personal efforts of Eisenhower in this direction, the Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers and later his Supreme Head- quarters Allied Expeditionary Force in London and thereafter on the continent were a new type of organization (which Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson continued when he succeeded Eisenhower in the Mediterranean). Quite unlike earlier attempts at liaison or allied command as with Marshal Foch in World War I, these headquarters were of a fundamentally different kind. They developed their own cohe- sion and atmosphere, friendships and procedures, and they not only contributed immensely to smoothing the otherwise troublesome prob- lems of managing the British�American alliance at the time but prepared the way for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) success in the decades after 1949.

Such structures were especially badly needed in the summer of 1944 and thereafter. The tension which developed over the stalemate, or what looked like stalemate, in Normandy tested the cohesion of Allied com- mand. The troubles between Eisenhower’s headquarters, and especially its British members, and Montgomery came close to leading to the lat- ter’s relief. Montgomery in turn had the most extraordinary difficulties with his Canadian commanders. As if this were not enough, the disap- pointing inability of the British, Canadians and Poles under Montgo- mery’s command to close the Falaise gap and completely trap the rem- nants of the two German armies which had been fighting in Normandy produced more friction.

At almost the same time, the British were still trying to get the landing in southern France cancelled in a bitter dispute with the Americans. The acrimonious nature of this particular argument over strategy’ was related to British disappointment over the effect of that operation on the Italian front, which they preferred to see supported more heavily, and made all the more bitter by the memory of defeat in the Aegean the preceding fall. Only these factors can explain the complete disregard of logistics by the British: how did they expect the huge armies of the Allies to be supplied without the French Mediterranean ports?

These troublesome military disputes were all resolved or smoothed over, but their sharpness was in part a reflection of other tensions in the

Field Marshal Wavell’s command in the winter 1941-42 did not exist long enough.

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726 Tensions in both alliances

Anglo-American alliance which had been simmering for some time and which increased in 1944. The most difficult and long-standing of these grew out of the fundamentally divergent views of the two countries on the colonial question.’ The American public maintained its fundamental opposition to colonialism, a view shared by most military leaders, while a substantial portion of the British public and much of its civilian and military leadership expected a continuation of the British empire in some form. The divergent views could not have been represented more sharply than by the two leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt, themselves. Churchill became positively apoplectic at any mention of decolonization; Roosevelt was even more certain that all colonies of Britain and other colonial powers were and should be headed for the earliest possible independ- ence, after a period of some sort of trusteeship.

The fact that already in 1942 Churchill had threatened to resign rather than make substantial concessions to the movement for Indian independence supported by Roosevelt had made it clear to the latter that this was an issue on which the British leader simply would not budge. The President was on the whole careful not to push this matter too openly thereafter, but there could be no secrecy about his views. The fact that these were shared by his representative in India, William Phillips, a long-time friend of the President, only served to underline the gulf separating London and Washington on this issue.’

The fundamental difference over the colonial question was, in a way, closely related to another difference which was much more in the public eye at the time in both Britain and the United States: that over the governments being established or to be re-established in Italy and Greece. In both cases, the sentimental attachment of Churchill to the maintenance of monarchy in Italy and its restoration in Greece ran afoul not only of the antipathy, or at least indifference, of the Americans to the monarchical question but also the general identification in both countries of exceedingly conservative and even collaborationist elements with the monarchy. The reluctance, at least initially, of the Americans to work with such people was matched by Churchill’s aversion to anyone in either country whom he suspected of anti-monarchical sentiments. He objected not merely to Communists and those who were willing to work with them but to such respected liberal statesmen as the Italian leader Ivanoe Bonomi.

The American and British attitudes toward the internal evolution of Italian politics were fundamentally different, with Churchill adamant against what he perceived, largely correctly, as an increase in the role of those opposed to the maintenance of the monarchy, even if under King Victor Emmanuel’s son Prince Umberto. The Americans were far

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Anglo-American relations 727

more ready to accommodate the clear signs in Italian politics pointing in other directions. When the April 1944 agreement of the Allies and Badoglio for the all-party government under Victor Emmanuel to be replaced by one under Umberto after the liberation of Rome was to be implemented in June, the pressure of Italy’s parties brought an end to Badoglio’s role as Prime Minister. Bonomi, of all people, became the new Prime Minister, to Churchill’s outrage and quiet satisfaction in Washington.’ British�American quarrels over Italy continued thereafter, focusing later that year on Churchill’s veto of the appointment of Count Carlo Sforza as Foreign Minister.’ The steady drift of the Italian govern- ment into a moderate liberal direction, which the British government found impossible to halt, made Churchill all the more adamant in his attitude toward developments in Greece.

As the Germans evacuated their troops from Greece, British troops landed there. The major Greek resistance organization, the EAM, was dominated by the Communists, though many of the members and sup- porters were not aware of this fact.’ In an increasingly complicated situ- ation, these elements first agreed to a settlement, referred to as the Caserta Agreement, of September 26, 1944, with other elements in the resistance and the British as well as representatives of the Greek government-in-exile, but then reversed themselves and tried to obtain control of Athens. British troops played a major role in putting down this effort; and while the Soviet Union, for reasons to be reviewed later in this chapter, acquiesced in the British suppression of those who looked to the Soviet Union as a model, the American public reacted very negatively to the developments in Greece. An American public statement of December 5, 1944, originally designed to engage the veto of Sforza, also contained a pointed reference to the events in Athens and caused enormous resentment in England but elicited a favorable response from the American public. For weeks something of a publicistic controversy raged and came to be relaxed only by the end of January. 10

The situation in Greece had exploded into something akin to civil war, with British troops playing a key role in putting down an attempted Communist insurgency in Athens. Whatever the obvious interest in obtaining absolute power on the part of the Communists, those on the British side had in many cases collaborated with rather than fought against the Germans. The voices of dissent in the British Parliament were mild compared to the uproar in the United States; Admiral King had American ships transferred to the Union Jack rather than give the appearance of American support by carrying British troops and supplies to Greece under the Stars and Stripes)’ A major effort was eventually made to smooth over the troubles, but there was legitimate concern that

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728 Tensions in both alliances

the two allies would move apart. This was due partly to the greater interest of the American public in such countries as Italy and Greece than Romania and Bulgaria, partly to the perception that British actions were closely connected to her imperial interests which Americans in general deplored, and partly to the impact of the Battle of the Bulge and Montgomery’s unfortunate press conference, reviewed in the next chapter.

A further source of friction between the Americans and British was their troubled relationship with de Gaulle. Both found him exceedingly difficult to deal with, in part because the leader of the Free French appears to have thought it important for his own and French self-respect to make things as difficult as he could for the allies on whom he depended. In this he was certainly successful." Because they realized earlier than the Americans that de Gaulle was likely to have behind him the support of the liberated French people, the British made, on the whole, a greater effort to accommodate the difficult French leader. Once they had been concerned to keep him from flying out of England," now they tried hard to work with him and to persuade the Americans of the wisdom of doing the same." Roosevelt remained reluctant, partly because of his concern over the imposition of a military commander on a liberated France in which the last general to try to head the country had been General Boulanger, in part because those closest to him in Washington held an even more negative view of de Gaulle than the President himself. The July 1944 meeting of the two in Washington eased the strain considerably, but de Gaulle’s subsequent deliberate flaunting of his newly recognized status hardly helped. Because the Brit- ish government, in spite of its own endless troubles with the French general, considered itself bound to him and was constantly urging Wash- ington to follow a similar policy, the difficulties of both Britain and the United States with the Free French leader produced tensions in their relationship with each other.

The problem of de Gaulle in Anglo-American relations does not exhaust the catalog of frictions. There was a whole series of economic difficulties. The British realized that they were not only dependent upon American Lend-Lease aid during hostilities but would need assistance both for the interval between the defeat of Germany and the defeat of Japan and during the period immediately thereafter. Having poured their energies and resources into the fight against Germany, and at a level and cost far beyond the resources of their country, Britain’s leaders looked to the United States for continued aid until they could once again be self-supporting. It was their hope that the extensive "reverse Lend-Lease" which they were providing to the Americans and the great

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Anglo-American relations 729

role they had played in the war would combine with American self- interest in a prosperous post-war Britain to make some assistance pro- gram palatable to them.

At the Quebec Conference of September 1944 the Americans had promised a generous treatment of British needs in what was coming to be referred to as Phase II Lend-Lease, the period after the defeat of Germany. The British sent John Maynard Keynes to Washington to work out an agreement on this subject. Keynes, whatever his ability as an economist, was perhaps not the wisest choice, given the attitude of Roosevelt toward him, but that may not have been known to the British.a Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau in particular tried to accommodate the British, having himself played a key role at the Quebec meeting; but objections within the United States government and Congress, responsive to doubts among the American public, kept the resulting agreement�if the compromises arrived at can be called that�substantially below what the British had hoped for. And even that would be imperilled by legislative changes in Congress and the early end of the war with Japan."

The difficult discussions of further aid to Britain in the last months of 1944 were complicated by the differences between the American and British delegations at the international civil aviation conference simultaneously taking place in Chicago. At a time when British Airways is the world’s largest air carrier and dominates its most important and profitable route, that between New York and London, it may at first be difficult to follow the agitated debate over post-war civil aviation between Americans who wanted open competition and the British who were afraid that American wartime mass production of transport planes, when they themselves were concentrating on fighters and bombers, would drive them out of peacetime passenger traffic altogether. Massive American pressure brought agreement on terms close to what the British strongly objected to, but the pressure itself angered the authorities in London while Washington seethed over what was seen as British intransigence.’6

Behind the angry dispute over the future of international civil aviation and also in the background of differences about Lend-Lease was always the argument over differing philosophies on international

’ In a letter of July 9, 1941, Bernard Baruch had warned Roosevelt not to trust Keynes, referring to very bad experiences at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In his reply of July

the President, who was generally not inclined to put his thoughts on paper, wrote, "I did not have those Paris Peace conference experiences with the ’gent’ but from much more recent contacts, I am inclined wholly to agree." FDRL, PSF Box 117, Bernard Baruch. For British doubts about the American plan to publish the minutes of the Council of Four at Paris, see wm (43) War Cabinet 93(43), 5 July 1943, PRO CAB 63/35.

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730 Tensions in both alliances

economic policy. The Roosevelt administration, led on this issue by Cordell Hull, argued in favor of lowering barriers and controls. On this issue, there were two fronts: at home, against the advocates of protective tariffs, especially influential in the Republican Party, and abroad, against the imperial preference agreements embodied in Bri- tain’s arrangements with her Dominions and colonies. If in the pre- war years the administration had concentrated its efforts on the passage and implementation of the reciprocal trade agreements act, fighting in the Congress against the domestic opponents of its lower tariff policies, during the war it tried hard to utilize the leverage provided by Lend-Lease to push the British into abandoning their special imperial preferences. The prospect of a terribly difficult recov- ery from the exertions of war made the London government most reluctant to yield to American pressure on this issue; it would affect relations between the two for years to come.17

In the period immediately following the end of the war in Europe, the question of relaxing British restrictions on Jewish immigration into the British mandate of Palestine was to poison Anglo-American relations, but this prospect was not apparent during the period of hostilities. It was the future of Germany and the relationship of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union that gave rise to different opinions in the two capitals and friction between them. On the future of Germany, the differences were worked out in the fall of 1944. After lengthy opposition, Roosevelt was finally converted to the British scheme of occupation zones, which left Berlin deep inside the Soviet sector and allocated the southern rather than the northwestern zone to the United States. The President’s mood was not improved by Churchill’s change of mind on the zonal question in early 1945, and his successor, Harry Truman, was also unwilling to break the zonal agreement once it had been reached. Both Churchill and Roosevelt at Quebec in September, 1944, agreed to the deindustrialization embodied in the Morgenthau plan and both soon after abandoned it, though not necessarily for the same reasons (an issue reviewed in Chapter 15). The policies of the Western Allies toward Germany would be somewhat different in principle but far more similar in practice than might have been anticipated, a reality which later facilit- ated the junction of the two zones.

Rather more difficult was the divergence in views concerning rela- tions with the Soviet Union. Here there were on the one hand common Anglo-American perspectives which would produce major frictions between both and the Soviet Union, frictions to be discussed

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The Western Powers and the Soviet Union 731

later in this chapter, but there were also significant differences in approach between the two Western Powers.

THE WESTERN POWERS AND THE SOVIET UNION

On some points the British and American governments were in full agreement. Both very much preferred to keep their project to develop the atomic bomb secret from the Russians, though both were aware of Soviet espionage efforts to penetrate the work being done, with the Americans apparently being more aware of it and the British far more deeply penetrated. Both had in prior years made substantial efforts to work with the Russians on military matters and intelligence exchanges; both had been equally rebuffed and were by 1944 about equally dis- heartened on this score. Both still very much hoped for post-war cooperation with the Soviet Union, though both were becoming some- what skeptical about the prospects for such cooperation. Where they differed from each other, and hence at times had substantial disagree- ments, was on how to deal with the Soviet Union in the meantime.

The British Prime Minister and most in his government were con- cerned that the waning power of Britain in the face of the growing power of the Soviet Union made early agreements with Moscow a necessity. Even if those agreements, and the concessions required to obtain them, were painful�especially for those East Europeans who would find them- selves under Soviet control�it was better to get the best terms possible early and try to tie the Soviets down by such agreements than to wait until later when Britain’s power had ebbed further and the Russians could do practically what they wanted:8 This approach explains the course Churchill had tried to adopt in 1941-42 in accepting the essen- tials of Russia’s pre-June 1941 borders, a course from which he had been kept by American objections. As the Red Army beat back the German invaders and headed into Central and Southeast Europe, he wanted to return to it.

Roosevelt’s views were based on a different reality and drew quite different conclusions from that reality. The President was opposed to advance commitments about the post-war world not only on general principles, in part because of the believed bad effects of the secret treat- ies made during World War I, but also due to a view of the realities of power which was entirely different from Churchill’s, and for very good reasons. He knew all too well how poorly prepared for war the United States had been in 1939, 1940, and 1941, and how long it was taking to mobilize American military strength. He was equally conscious of the

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732 Tensions in both alliances

difficulties of projecting the slowly but steadily growing power of the United States across the vast oceans separating her from the European and Pacific enemies in the face of the struggle with German submarines and other sources of ship losses. The obvious implication for a man who believed firmly in the long-term ability of the country to surmount these difficulties and attain victory was that a steady unfolding of American power was certain to improve the position of the United States in Allied councils. Generally averse to making choices before they were abso- lutely necessary, in regard to the future of Europe Roosevelt believed that he had every incentive to postpone decisions. This was especially true at a time when American forces were not yet deployed on the continent in force; it would continue to be the case for some time there- after as American strength in France grew.

As it was, American armies were to move far beyond the lines contem- plated by Churchill even though there was some reluctance to move east of them in 1945; had the Germans not launched their last great offensive in the West, the Americans would quite likely have pushed yet further. If there was a case to be made for Churchill’s belief that a waning power had best make its deals early, then an equally good case can be made for Roosevelt’s view that a country growing in strength could benefit from postponing decisions until that power had unfolded to its full potential.

This differentiation in perspective hampered Anglo-American delib- erations as they dealt with the Soviet Union and made it very difficult for the two powers to adopt a common line toward Moscow. There was certainly no lack of issues between the London and Washington governments on the one hand and Moscow on the other. These had been there from the beginning of the alliance forced on them by Ger- many; many came to a head in the summer and fall of 1944.

Undoubtedly the most important of the issues was that of the future of Poland. Neither the British nor the American government was an admirer of the pre-war government in Warsaw, and neither government was especially devoted to the pre-war eastern border of Poland. The point on which there was, however, basic agreement in both govern- ments�as well as the public in the two countries�was a hope and a very strong desire for the future liberated Poland to have its independ- ence. Here was the central and determining problem: given the geo- graphic realities, Poland was most likely to be liberated by the Red Army; could it still be independent?

In the First World War, Serbia had been overrun by the armies of the Central Powers, but at the end of that conflict had emerged larger and independent because of the defeat of those Central Powers at the

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The Western Powers and the Soviet Union 733

hand of the Western Allies, Russia having previously been defeated by Germany. Now the situation was going to be different. The Soviet Union was obviously not only not being defeated by Germany, it was making a major contribution to Germany’s defeat and the Western Allies had every interest in urging and helping it to do so. How then enable Poland, wedged as it was between Germany and Russia, to retain an independ- ence which Germany had hoped to extinguish along with much of its population and which Stalin appeared unwilling to allow?

The British government, which was closest to the Polish government- in-exile, located in London since the summer of 1940, took the view that the best hope for an independent Poland lay in that government-in-exile making almost any concession to Moscow that the latter might want as a means of assuring its return to a Poland that would in any case be liberated by the Red Army. If they could only get back into the country, the people there would surely rally to them rather than to whatever puppets the Soviet Union might prefer to install. Both before and after the Soviet Union broke off relations with the Polish government-in-exile, the British government, with Churchill playing an active personal role, tried hard to pressure the London Poles into making first territorial concessions and subsequently also some changes in personnel to accom- modate Soviet demands."

The Polish leaders in the West were on the whole unwilling to make the extensive territorial concessions asked for, though a few of them were willing to make some changes, especially in view of anticipated gains at Germany’s expense. They were, however, not inclined to accept the view that the Soviet Union could be a multi-national unit while Poland could not and were especially reluctant to agree to yield portions of pre-war Poland while the war was on and they were in exile.

It cannot, of course, be known what would have happened had they agreed to Soviet demands. It seems likely, however, that it made no difference and that the British were deluding themselves. There were already the germs of a Polish government and army under strict Soviet control being organized within the Soviet Union. Stalin’s policy clearly looked forward to an entirely new regime in Poland; and while he would and did make what he considered concessions to London and Wash- ington to hold down the level of acrimony in the alliance, he appears to have made up his mind very early that none but his own hand-picked Poles would have any real say in Warsaw."

American policy on the Polish question lagged behind that of England but engaged the same basic problem.2’ In part because of domestic political concerns, President Roosevelt was most reluctant to push con- cessions on the Polish government-in-exile. There was, furthermore,

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734 Tensions in both alliances

his hope that he could do more for the Poles as American power grew; as late as the Yalta Conference, at a time when the Red Army was in occupation of all of Poland, he still hoped to get a better deal for Poland." This hope would not be realized; geography and the Red Army ruled. But the issue of Polish independence came to the fore dramatically in the summer of 1944, and while it did not sunder the alliance between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union during the war, it turned the possibility of their continued cooperation in the post-war years from a hope to a highly unlikely prospect.

As described in the preceding chapter, the uprising of the Polish underground army in Warsaw which began on August 1, 1944, produced a major crisis in the alliance against Hitler. The Red Army halted its advance and withdrew its spearheads in the outskirts of Warsaw, shifting its emphasis to the creation of bridgeheads across the Narev river north and the Vistula river south of the Polish capital. The Russians, who had called upon the Poles to rise against the Germans, not only stood aside as the Germans crushed the uprising, they refused to allow British and American planes to land on Soviet airfields as they attempted to drop supplies to the insurgents. As a matter of policy, the Soviet Union even refused to allow British planes from Italy to fly over Soviet-occupied Hungary on their long and dangerous journey to the Polish capital." The result of this general policy, as could be expected, was the crushing of the uprising by the Germans, which was followed by the systematic destruction of what was left of the city.

These events, it should be noted, took place very much in the public view. Unlike the relevant exchanges of diplomats and heads of states, most of which did not appear in print until long after the war, the dramatic events of the two months of fighting in the streets of Warsaw reverberated in Britain and the United States. Nothing could have done so much to undercut the admiration for the Red Army and with it sympathy for the Soviet Union as the spectacle of Soviet acquiescence in the defeat of the Poles. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could budge Stalin by their messages about the situation; neither believed that the alliance could or should be broken over it; but nothing about that alliance would ever be the same again.

It was not only that friction over the future of Poland, thrust into the limelight by the Warsaw uprising, highlighted the differences between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Even with the signs of approaching victory�perhaps because of them�the suspicion and hes- itations of the Soviets in their treatment of the British and American military missions continued, and all attempts at more effective coordina- tions of military activities were frustrated." These difficulties shed an

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The Western Powers and the Soviet Union 735

interesting light backwards on the military talks conducted by the British and French with the Soviets in Moscow in the summer of 1939; cooperation on military affairs was most definitely not high on the list of Stalin’s priorities. Ironically it was precisely this unwillingness to work out practical arrangements that led to the worst incident in Allied affairs when American planes bombed and strafed a Soviet column believed to be German on November 7, 1944. This tragic event, in which a number of Red Army officers and men were killed, led to the effort to develop a strategic bomb line; but even that attempt never met with Soviet cooperation." These sorts of practical difficulties continued until the end of the war; the problem of what to do about liberated prisoners of war, discussed in the next chapter, being added in the final months.

The future of Poland was, furthermore, not the only liberated area at issue between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union. There were differences over the policy to be followed toward Italy not only between Britain and the United States but also with Russia. While the Western Powers took the lead there�when they could reach agreement�the Soviet Union also insisted on a voice and was eventually accorded one."

The predominance of the Western Powers in Italy has sometimes been cited as a precedent for Soviet control of events in the countries of East and Southeast Europe, but this facile analogy ignores a critical difference. In all the liberated and occupied countries there were Com- munist Parties. In every area that came under Western control, these parties continued to operate and frequently participated in the govern- ment; in Italy, for example, it not only did both of these but remained a major force for decades. The converse was not true in the areas over- run by the Red Army. Precisely because in those states the Communist Parties were minute, the new masters not only put them in charge of the government, army, and police, but quickly pushed out and repressed those movements which represented the bulk of the population (a point which became dramatically obvious in 1989 when the people discovered that their local masters were no longer backed by the Red Army).a

As the Red Army in the fall of 1944 occupied first Romania and then Bulgaria and began to push into Hungary and Yugoslavia, the question of whether or not the people there would be able to influence the com- position of the new governments came to the fore. The British and Americans discussed this problem at their meeting in September 1944 at Quebec, a conference Roosevelt and Churchill held in part because

’ Yugoslavia was the one exception to this pattern. It had a large Communist Party by 1944 and much of the country was liberated not by the Red Army but by the efforts of the Yugoslays themselves. These differences had a great influence on Yugoslavia’s subsequent history.

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736 Tensions in both alliances

Stalin had refused to meet with them. It was at this second Quebec Conference that the Americans originally agreed to the dispatch of Brit- ish troops to Greece and, in the hope of maintaining Great Britain’s power into the post-war years, promised an effort to continue aid beyond the defeat of Germany."

Even before the great offensives of June 1944 in West and East, there had been discussions about the possible switch of Germany’s East European satellites to the Allied side. When these had involved the Western Powers, as in the case of Bulgaria which was at war only with them, the Soviets had been kept informed." The converse, however, was not observed: when the Soviet Union began to deal with Romanian diplomats, the Western Powers were not told." Concern over the future of the East European countries had led the British to raise the possibility of a sort of "spheres of influence" agreement with the Russians already early in 1944. In May British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky had tentatively agreed that Romania would be in the Soviet and Greece in the British sphere, though it was pretended that the arrangement would hold only for wartime.’

In the face of American doubts, forcefully expressed by President Roosevelt, Churchill went forward with the concept of an agreement with the Soviet Union which, designed in the Prime Minister’s view as a means of restraining the Russians, allocated percentages to the West and the Soviet Union. Proposed by him to Stalin in Moscow in October, the notorious percentage agreement was to have little significance except in two ways." It confirmed Soviet willingness to refrain from interfering in Greece, a policy that it took Greek Communists some time to recog- nize and accept.’ The other effect was to show the Soviet leadership that little serious opposition from the West to the imposition of Soviet control was likely; certainly not the message Churchill had intended to give.

The reality was that the Western Powers could do little to interfere in any case. The real question was whether Stalin would pay attention to their protests in order to retain their good will; the events surrounding the Polish uprising of August 1944 showed that he would not. Roosevelt believed that there was little point to constant protests if there were no chance of these being heeded; perhaps in the future the situation would improve, but in the meantime there was in fact little that the Western Powers could do."

This was at the time as true for plans about Germany as its satellites. The British plan for the partition of Germany into occupation zones and the projects for German territory to be turned over to Poland and the Soviet Union are reviewed elsewhere. The major concern of the Western

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The Western Powers and the Soviet Union 737

Powers, that the Soviet Union might sign a separate peace with Ger- many, was finally fading in 1944. There remained doubts about Soviet plans attached to the National Committee for a Free Germany and the League of German Officers, both organized under Moscow’s auspices in 1943; but there came to be no attempt at a counter-organization in the West.’ If there were to be agreements on the issues concerning the future of Germany, these would have to be worked out in conferences between the three Allied leaders in person, and with Stalin refusing to meet Churchill and Roosevelt, that meant the questions would have to wait until their second (and last) meeting in February 1945.

The relations between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union were further troubled by the friction caused by Soviet espionage in the West, although the extent of this, (referred to in Chapter to), especially in Britain, was not suspected at the time. There were also arguments about the repatriation demanded by the Russians of any Soviet citizens or agents who attempted to defect to the West." The Soviet government added repeated complaints about Rudolf Hess who was imprisoned in England and should, according to their arguments, have been put on trial immediately. There are signs that Stalin worried alternately about the Western Powers using Hess the way he had tried to use German prisoners in the U.S.S.R. for an alternative government to replace Hit- ler’s and then make peace with it, or their allowing Hess to escape to a neutral country the way Emperor William II had fled to Holland at the end of World War I.36

The signs of friction between the Allies were at times very much in the public eye, and the Germans did everything in their power to call attention to them, provide disinformation about them to the Soviets and the Western Powers, and in other ways emphasize the inter-Allied difficulties in the hope of rupturing the alliance they had forged against themselves." They had an obvious interest in splitting the alliance, since, unlike Japan, they were at war with all three. These, of course, realized very clearly that this was precisely what the Germans wanted and for that very reason recognized that, if the Allies expected to win the war, remaining together and overcoming their differences would be essential. By 1944 it was obvious to both sides that the only hope of victory the Axis still had was a split among the Allies, and the very efforts of the Germans to create such a split made the Allied governments more sens- itive to the need to work things out. The fact that victory was finally in sight in 1944 thus had a double and contradictory effect on the alliance. On the one hand, the removal of mortal danger made them less inclined to subordinate individual aims to the need for hanging together and hence a greater willingness to disregard the susceptibilities of allies. On

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738 Tensions in both alliances

the other hand, the imminence of victory and the obvious desperation of the Germans suggested that this was a poor time to allow divergent views of policy and strategy to break up a winning coalition and thereby risk all that had already been attained at huge cost in lives and treasure.

The need to work out differences if at all possible was, it should be noted, perceived even if somewhat differently by the leadership in all three Allied capitals. This is to be seen very clearly in the difficult negotiations which led to the creation of the United Nations Organiza- tion, in spite of major differences of opinion which surfaced at the Dum- barton Oaks Conference held in the Washington area from August 21, to October 9, 1944." Already at the Moscow Conference of October 1943 the Allies had agreed that a new international organization should replace the moribund League of Nations, but it was much easier to call for the establishment than to work out the practical details of such a structure. Furthermore, the three major powers approached this ques- tion from very different sets of experiences and perspectives.

Only the British had belonged to the League from the beginning and were still formally members in 1944. They looked upon any new struc- ture as an important method for continued American involvement in world affairs, a useful mechanism for resolving at least some disputes, and, hopefully, as a way of smoothing continued cooperation with the Soviet Union, a subject expected to be difficult indeed. There were, however, serious concerns about any new international organizations. On the one hand, the British not only wanted France restored eventually, if not immediately, to a major role and all the Dominions and also India to be represented in such an organization. On the other hand, they were determined, and Churchill was especially insistent on this point, that there be no interference into the affairs of the British colonial structure from the outside. This concern extended both to possible claims on portions of the empire by others, such as China’s claim to Hong Kong, and to any prescriptions for the internal development of territories included within the empire.

The Soviet Union had joined the League in 1934 but had been ousted as a result of its attack on Finland in the winter of 1939-40. The denun- ciations of the League which had preceded its entrance into that organ- ization seemed justified in Moscow’s eyes by the subsequent expulsion. While it was clear to Stalin that participation in any new international organization was in theory preferable to staying out, with the obvious risk that such abstention would only facilitate that "ganging-up" on the Soviet Union by others which he always feared, there had to be some protection for the U.S.S.R. in any new structure.

He evidently believed that it was important for the Soviet Union to

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The Western Powers and the Soviet Union 739

play a part in the new organization, and he appears to have been espe- cially interested in the role it could play in preventing any renewed aggression by a revived Germany. Furthermore, he appears to have had two major concerns about the whole question. In the first place, he no more wanted interference of any sort into the internal affairs of his empire than Churchill wanted in the British one. The result of this was a general tendency to restrict competence to political matters and to downplay all others to the extent of having the Soviet Union stay out of the whole set of new international banking and monetary structures created at the Bretton Woods Conference reviewed later in this chapter.

His second, and perhaps even more significant interest related to the organization’s internal structure and procedure. He was evidently concerned that in any voting the U.S.S.R. and the sympathetic regimes it hoped to establish in Eastern Europe might be hopelessly out- numbered. For this reason, he at first adopted a restrictive attitude toward membership, only agreeing at Yalta in February 1945 that those who joined the Allies in war by March t, 1945, could be invited to the founding conference. The same worry about what might be called the optics of voting by all countries appears to have been behind the Soviet proposal, first made to the horror of the British and American delega- tions at Dumbarton Oaks on August 28, 1944, that all sixteen Soviet republics be initial members.39 This issue, like the preceding one and the dispute over the veto which is discussed below, was also resolved at Yalta as described in Chapter 14, but should be seen in the author’s view as a part of Stalin’s worries about the way future voting in the new organization might well look, even if those votes did not mean that much.’

An issue of supreme importance to the Soviet Union, and one on which Stalin was evidently not prepared to compromise until the last moment, involved that of unanimity, an issue generally referred to as that of the veto. While President Roosevelt always favored some form of the veto, from the beginning of serious discussion of the new organiza- tion, the Soviet government was insistent on unanimity on all issues among the great powers on the executive organ. Their suggestion that it be called the "Security Council" was accepted by the others at Dum- barton Oaks, and they were willing to accede to proposals that France and China have permanent seats on the Council; they were also agree- able to a system where majority votes rather than complete unanimity would be acceptable�provided always that the majority include all the

� It might be noted that had Stalin had his way, the Baltic Republics and the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as Moldavia would all have been separately represented in the UN�as in fact they are becoming on the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

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740 Tensions in both alliances

permanent members. What the Soviet Union said, in effect, was that the other nations, which would be elected on a rotating basis by the body including all members, called the Assembly, could be out-voted by a majority on the Security Council, but no great power, especially the Soviet Union, could be dealt with in this fashion. And that requirement of unanimity was to extend to issues in which it was itself involved.

This insistence, to which the Soviet delegation at Dumbarton Oaks adhered in the face of every objection, was based, it would appear, on two major considerations. One was an element of prestige and one of practical substance. The prestige issue, which at this time may well have been more significant than believed by some, was the definitive recognition of the status of the Soviet Union as a world power. Isolated in pre-war years, clearly making a major contribution and the largest sacrifices in the war to defeat Germany, the U.S.S.R. was to be recog- nized by all as a state which would properly play a major role on the world stage. This meant that no action should be taken on any subject by the world organization unless the Soviet Union was in accord with it.

The practical issue was, simply put, that the Soviet Union was not going to allow itself to be out-voted on any issue, especially including those in which it was itself involved. No urging by either the British or the Americans was going to make Moscow budge on this question, and the Soviet representative in the negotiations, Andrei Gromyko, made it clear that no concessions on it were to be expected. The efforts to show that the public in the United States and Great Britain would not support and might not be willing to join an organization in which a country was to be a judge in a matter in which it was itself involved made no impact on the Soviet delegates, and they were willing to let the conference adjourn without an agreement on the voting question." The final report on the Dumbarton Oaks Conference simply stated that the procedure to be followed on voting in the Security Council was "still under consideration."

The United States had refused to join the League altogether, and those who were in leadership positions in the country in World War II all looked back to that decision as one of the great errors made by America. Their view of that error was redoubled by the fact that it had been a domestic political disaster for them as well; their party, the Democrats, had been crushed in the 1920 election and kept out of power for over a decade. Roosevelt was himself particularly conscious of that turn of the American public. He had been the second man in the Wilson administration’s Department of the Navy and he had been the second

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The Western Powers and the Soviet Union 741

man on the losing Democratic Party’s national ticket in the 1920 elec- tion. Furthermore, the one time during the 1930s when Roosevelt had tried as President to obtain the Senate’s agreement to have the United States join the World Court, he had suffered a humiliating defeat. With this as background, the careful work of the administration in Washington to get an agreement on a new international organization both with the Allies and at home should be easy to understand.

Cordell Hull was as convinced as Roosevelt that a new international organization would be needed to maintain the peace by settling disputes and bringing collective pressure to bear on any power inclined to take an aggressive path. He worked hard to build up support at home and, with the President’s full agreement, tried to avoid what was seen as a grave mistake of the Wilson administration by involving key Republicans in the process of developing and defending the American position. It has become fashionable to denigrate the role of the wartime Secretary of State; this was certainly one field in which he was extremely active and successful. He had obtained Soviet agreement in principle at the Moscow Conference, he had developed a working relationship with key Republican congressional leaders, and he closely monitored the State Department’s work on the project.’

The stalemate over voting procedure which hampered the Dumbarton Oaks Conference left Roosevelt and Hull, like the British, searching for a solution. In the British government, the belief in the absolute need for what was now being referred to as the United Nations Organization was so strong that the Cabinet, under Churchill’s prodding, came to realize that a compromise was desirable but that the Soviet position should be accepted if that proved the only way to get agreement. Though not formulated in quite so explicit a fashion, the American attitude developed along identical lines. It is an interesting indication of the extent to which both governments hoped that, in spite of current and prospective fric- tions, cooperation with the Soviet Union in the future would be possible, that they were both prepared to jettison their preferred procedure if there were no other way to obtain Soviet participation in the United Nations.

These internal discussions took place between the Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta conferences as both the British and American governments tried to develop compromise proposals which were designed to meet the major Soviet concern, but without crippling the procedures of the United Nations. In one way or another, these new formulae kept a major power which was party to a dispute from stopping discussion of an issue and other procedural matters but retained the unanimity requirement for

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742 Tensions in both alliances

major actions. It was the hope of President Roosevelt that this would satisfy the Russians and get them to drop the sixteen Soviet republics proposal. The British were agreeable to what they saw as a proposal similar to their own ideas, but Churchill let it be known that, if Stalin insisted, he would be willing to accede to the Soviet position. As the Prime Minister explained to the British Cabinet on November 27, 1944, when a Western bloc was suggested by the Foreign Office: "He was very doubtful himself as to the soundness or practicability of a Western bloc. In his judgement the only real safeguard was agreement between the three Great Powers within the framework of the World Organization. He felt himself that Russia was ready and anxious to work in with us."42

When the compromise proposal was discussed at Yalta, Stalin pre- tended not to have heard of it although it had been submitted to Moscow two months before. In the context of the discussions at Yalta, however, he came to agree to it and also dropped the membership demand for fourteen of the sixteen republics as well. He too clearly thought post-war cooperation within a United Nations Organization was sufficiently in Soviet interests to make at least some concessions to his allies.43

On another subject relating to the United Nations the major objec- tions had come from the British. This was the concept of trusteeship, pushed by the Americans and agreeable to the Soviet Union. This pro- posal was seen at first by the British�and entirely correctly�as yet another American scheme for subverting colonial structures, including their own. The agreement of the Americans to apply this new version of the League’s mandate system only to territories taken from the Axis powers removed British objections, if not London’s worries. If on this subject it was easier for the Americans and Russians to reach agreement, there was a further one on which, in spite of difficulties, it was the British and Americans who eventually accepted a new set of institutions while the Soviet Union decided to remain outside.

In the first three weeks of July 1944 representatives of most of the United Nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to try to develop an international banking and monetary system for the post-war world. It was devoutly hoped that this would preclude the kind of inter- national economic and monetary warfare which had characterized the years before World War II and had in the eyes of many contributed to world economic malaise and the pressure toward war which some had seen in that situation. There is certainly some truth in the view of one scholar that a major objective was "locking the door, or trying to lock it, upon the international trade and fiscal practices of Dr. Schacht."44 The reference is to the German economic leader of the 1930s who

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The Western Powers and the Soviet Union 743

had devised innumerable schemes to defraud foreign investors to assist German trade and rearmament."

For the immediate post-war problems of relief of suffering and dev- astation, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) had been established at American initiative in 1943 and was already beginning to operate." For the long-term redevelopment of the world economy, however, something far more permanent than such an obviously temporary institution, however important and even vital in the short run, was believed needed. At the Bretton Woods Conference it was decided to establish two permanent institutions, an International Monetary Fund and an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the latter usually called the World Bank. While the Mon- etary Fund was designed to assist international currency transfers and stability, in the process obviating the sorts of competitive devaluations and special currency manipulations which had hampered world trade before the war, the World Bank was expected to provide capital for development and the continued growth of economies UNRRA had helped recover.

If these new institutions, the instruments for which were ratified by numerous nations over the following years, did not always function as effectively as the founders had hoped, this was in large part the result of the war’s disruption of the world economy being even greater than anyone had anticipated. They nevertheless contributed enormously to the period of great economic growth which followed the war. Drastically modified in the 1970s because of the greatly altered position of the United States and the dollar in world trade, both the Monetary Fund and even more the World Bank remain major factors in the world eco- nomy half a century after their conception. A striking feature of their role is the fact that the very countries of Eastern Europe which were prevented from joining by the Soviet Union after World War II are all or almost all expected to become members by the end of the twentieth century.

Whatever concessions the Western Powers were willing to make to Soviet preferences, and whatever adjustments Stalin was prepared to make to accommodate them in turn, on this question there would be no agreement. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who had chaired the Bretton Woods Conference, hoped for a while that the Rus- sians could be persuaded to join the new financial institutions; after all, they expected to benefit and did benefit from UNRRA. But there was simply no way in which the Soviet leadership could see its economy linked to that of the rest of the world, and neither the Soviet Union nor

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744 Tensions in both alliances

the governments it established in Eastern Europe joined the Fund or the Bank. In this field, the gap between the Allies could not be bridged.47 That divergence was not, however, seen as so serious as to be disruptive of the alliance in a major way as long as agreement could be reached on the establishment of the United Nations Organization (UNO).

The formal meeting to found the UNO was to be held, as agreed at Yalta, in San Francisco in April of 1945. By the time that conference was held, Franklin Roosevelt, its most important sponsor, had died. But he had played a key role in attuning the American public to participating in world affairs, including the UNO. The very fact that this organizing conference was being conducted even as the war in Europe was obviously in its closing stages showed that the alliance of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union, however strained, had held fast to the end.

THE TRIPARTITE PACT POWERS

If the Allies had numerous difficulties in working together, these were minimal when compared to those of the Tripartite Pact powers. There were no institutions comparable to the British�American Combined Chiefs of Staff and the other joint boards and committees. The Tripart- ite military commissions established between Germany, Italy and Japan in the winter of 1941-42 were good for publicity pictures but practically nothing else." The argument that this was due to geographic factors cannot be sustained in the face of the absence of any real coordination between Germany and Italy in the early years of the war when those two were contiguous�unlike Britain and the United States�and coor- dination would have been simple to arrange had there been any desire for it. There is no evidence to suggest that either Axis partner had any interest in such coordination; on the contrary, both Hitler and Mussolini far preferred to direct the respective war efforts of their countries entirely independently of each other.’

The rapid deterioration of Italy’s position in the Axis as her armies were defeated first in Greece, then in East Africa, and finally in North Africa has been recorded. On the one hand, Italy could no longer con- duct war independently, as Mussolini had at one time imagined, on the other the Germans were justifiably worried that a total Italian collapse would open up Europe to Allied invasion from the south. Such a situ- ation would require the dispatch of substantial German forces both to whatever new fronts might be created by Allied landings and also as replacement for Italian occupation forces in France and Southeast Europe. Under these circumstances the Germans tried unsuccessfully

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The Tripartite Pact powers 745

to prop up the Italian war effort while watching with great suspicion for any signs of defection from the Axis.5�

The relationship between Germans and Italians was almost always strained. They had fought on opposite sides in World War I; the Italians looked on the Germans as barbarians, and overbearing ones at that, while the Germans considered the Italians inefficient and incompetent. Germany’s inability to provide the coal Italy needed in spite of very considerable efforts was matched by the unwillingness of the Germans to treat the vast numbers of Italian workers in Germany decently. This latter problem, a steady irritant in German�Italian relations, would be greatly exacerbated by the deliberately ruthless treatment accorded to the soldiers disarmed by the Germans after the Italian surrender and then deported to slave labor in Germany."

As if these problems were not sufficient, there were, in addition, personal and ideological ones. The personal problem was that some of the highest German officers who dealt with the Italians, notably Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, simply could not abide them, an attitude which was quickly and widely known. The ideological question on which there was a wide difference concerned the proper handling of the Jewish question. Mussolini had introduced a series of anti-Semitic laws in 1938 as a sign of his ideological affinity with the German dictator. These rules, though often enforced on Italy’s tiny Jewish community, appear to have been no more popular than the German goosestep, introduced into Italy at the same time and for the same reason under the pompous title of "passo Romano," the Roman step."

The divergence between the Axis partners became ever more pro- nounced during the war. German initiation of the systematic killing of Jews was no more discussed with the Italian government than any other of their major political, military, or other initiatives, but the Italians were expected to participate fully. On the whole, in spite of Mussolini’s willingness to go along, they mostly simply would not do so. In the Italian-occupied portions of France, Yugoslavia and Greece the local commanders, who knew perfectly well what the Germans were doing, refused to turn over the Jews to the Germans to be murdered, and endless arguments over this issue led to no agreement. The Italians were confirmed in their prior belief that the Germans were still barbarians, and the Germans were reinforced in their view of the Italians as indiffer- ent and incompetent allies.

The most significant divergence between Germany and Italy, however, was the one over strategy. As the Allied threat to Italy grew in 1942� 43, obvious to all with the British breakthrough at El Alamein in early

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746 Tensions in both alliances

November 1942 and the American landing in Northwest Africa a few days later, the Italians began to urge Germany to concentrate its forces on the war against Britain and the United States while working out a compromise peace with the Soviet Union. First put forward to Hitler and other German leaders in December 1942, these proposals always fell on deaf ears, as did the similar Japanese proposals which the Ger- mans had by that time been hearing for over a year. The Germans saw the threat in the Mediterranean, but their response was not what Musso- lini wanted.

In early 1941, when there appeared to be all sorts of opportunities for Axis advances in the Mediterranean area, the Germans had committed small forces there, primarily because Hitler saw the area as Italy’s living space and hence not worth a major investment of German resources. Now that disaster appeared to threaten Italy, his worry was that the Allies could use Italy as an airbase for attacks on Germany from the south, and might seize the portions of Southeast Europe under Italian control, thereby threatening Germany’s access to the mineral resources of that area. Under these circumstances he was prepared to allot a far larger share of his military resources to the Mediterranean theater, a commitment most obvious in the building up of an Axis army in Tunisia. This effort was, however, designed as a protection for Germany’s southern flank, not as a support for Italy’s ambitions; under no circumstances was he willing to accept the basic reorientation in strategy urged on Germany by both the Italian and the Japanese governments.

Many of the transport aircraft which might have been utilized to fly supplies into the beleaguered German garrison in Stalingrad were instead deployed to Sicily for ferry duties to Tunisia, but Hitler was not about to consider a compromise on the Eastern Front. There was, instead, to be a new German summer offensive on that front. The same difference, if on a smaller scale, affected German�Italian relations in the turmoil that was World War II Yugoslavia. The Italians wanted to arm Mihailovic against the partisans and then crush him later; the Ger- mans preferred to fight both simultaneously."

The collapse of Italian resistance on Sicily in July 1943 followed by that of the whole Fascist system later that month marked a final parting of the ways between Germany and Italy. The extraordinarily clumsy way in which the Italian government left the war merely facilitated Ger- many’s use of considerable Italian territory and resources for a continued war which devastated the country. The puppet state Mussolini organized under German auspices in northern Italy after his rescue from imprison- ment could have no influence on German strategy or policy. The most

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The Tripartite Pact powers 747

dramatic illustration of this was to be the surrender negotiations which the Germans there carried out behind his back in 1945. They had shot innumerable Italians in various so-called reprisals; they left Mussolini to be shot by his own people.

The relationship between the European Axis powers and Japan was not marked by any closer cooperation than that between Germany and Italy. In the political field, there was very little willingness to work together. Japanese advice to the Germans to allow greater freedom to the subject peoples of Europe, as Japan claimed she was granting in her sphere, fell on deaf ears. Nothing remotely resembling the extensive discussion of post-war plans among the Allies ever took place among the powers of the Tripartite Pact. In November 1942, after a conference of the heads of Japanese diplomatic delegations in Europe, Ambassador Oshima forwarded their recommendations that the Japanese, Germans and Italians must work together as effectively as the Allies were doing." It regularly proved most difficult to iron out minor differences;’ certainly on the major issues between Germany and Japan nothing changed.

The basic strategy issue remained unsolved in 1943 and 1944. The Germans wanted the Japanese to become offensive again, by which they meant that Japan should move against the British, Americans, or Russi- ans. Certainly Japan was not about to attack the Soviet Union. The Japanese had been badly beaten by the Russians in the 1939 fighting, had no desire whatever for a repetition, feared that the Soviet Union might allow the Americans use of air bases for attacks on the home islands of Japan and, therefore, went to great lengths to keep peace with the Soviet Union. They were most assuredly not going to interfere with the steady stream of American supplies passing by Japan to help the Soviet Union in its fight against Germany. In these years, as earlier, the Japanese were certain that the Germans should make peace with Russia so that Germany could concentrate on fighting Britain and the United States."

As for fighting the British, the Japanese waited until 1944 to launch a major offensive into India from the positions which they had occupied in Burma in early 1942. From the perspective of Berlin, this was too little and too late. Mounted in the summer of 1942 to follow on the earlier Japanese conquest of Malaya and Burma, such an operation might have had a significant impact on the war. In 1944 the Japanese offensive was a strategic irrelevance.

The only other major Japanese offensive was that in China in 1944, and that operation was designed more to prevent American air attacks from Chinese bases and to substitute Japanese land lines of communica- tions for the sea lanes vulnerable to American submarines than part of

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748 Tensions in both alliances

any broader strategic concept. As for direct engagement of the Amer- icans, the Japanese in 1943 and 1944 were already permanently on the defensive.

The only other possible area of military cooperation was in the war at sea. Time and again the Germans tried to have the Japanese devote greater attention to the war against Allied shipping. Japanese submar- ines, however, continued to be utilized primarily in fleet support opera- tions and, increasingly, in supplying Japanese garrisons cut off by the advancing American and Australian forces. The Japanese naval leader- ship never understood the German navy’s strategy of trying to do to the Allies what the latter were ever more successful in doing to Japan: cutting the vital oceanic supply routes. The whole field of submarine warfare against shipping as well as the problems of defending against this type of operation was one in which Japanese naval leadership displayed a consistently high level of incompetence unique in the annals of war at sea.

In a long conversation between von Ribbentrop and Oshima on May 19, 1943, the whole situation of the war was reviewed at a time when the balance in the conflict was clearly shifting. The European Axis powers had just lost their last foothold in Africa and the Germans had barely stabilized the situation on the Eastern Front. The Japanese had evacuated their last forces from Guadalcanal and Kiska. They had sent a special mission under General Okamoto Kiyotomi to Germany across the Soviet Union and Turkey in the vain hope of improving cooperation between the two countries; he was present at this meeting."

Their exchange illuminates the divergence in the strategies of Berlin and Tokyo as well as the lack of understanding in each capital of the situation of its partner in the war. Oshima explained why Japan could not attack the Soviet Union and would prefer to mediate a German� Soviet peace. Von Ribbentrop urged a Japanese offensive somewhere, insisted on the necessity for a new attack on the Eastern Front, and denounced the Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union for his interest in peace between Germany and Russia. Oshima frankly told von Ribben- trop that he doubted Germany could defeat the Soviets and urged the Germans to proclaim the independence of the Baltic States and the Ukraine the way Japan had done in Burma and the Philippines, a pro- posal the German Foreign Minister rejected out of hand.

It is obvious from this open exchange between two men who had known each other for years, had inaugurated closer relations between their two countries by negotiating the Anti-Comintern Pact behind the backs of their respective foreign offices in 1935-36, and appear to have had a very high personal regard for each other, that there was no real

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understanding of the other country’s true position." The Germans had no comprehension of the weakness of Japan after six years of war and major defeats at the hands of the Americans; the war in East Asia had never drawn their careful attention, and whatever the insights of a few in the German hierarchy, those at the top had no real sense of what was going on in the Pacific. The Japanese, on the other hand, had not recog- nized the priority of racial dogma and expansionism for their German ally, and as a result never understood German policies. That in the face of such mutual ignorance and incomprehension there would be even less cooperation than between the Allies should not be surprising.

The signs of approaching defeat brought little effective change in the situation. Although the Germans tried to provide some technical assist- ance to their ally by giving Japan details of at least some of their new weapons, Japan’s industrial system was in no condition to take advantage of such knowledge in the little time which remained available. The only real effect of such exchanges was in their unknowingly providing information to the British and Americans who were decyphering them." In economic as in military affairs, in strategy as in politics, the countries of the Tripartite Pact went each its own way to destruction and defeat.

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