The Pacific

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The Pacific

For the first year of the Second World War the Pacific Theater seemed like an afterthought. Even prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR and Churchill, in March 1941, had agreed on a Europe First strategy that saw the lions’ share of men and materiel headed across the Atlantic. After the surprise attack, planners saw no need to shift gears. They continued to see Germany as the greater global threat. Were Germany to defeat Britain and the Soviet Union, the US would be alone, facing two enemies. Despite opposition from General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Ernest King, Europe First remained the Allied strategy.

 

General Jimmy Doolittle

The only operation of any significance in the early days of the Pacific campaign was the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Though scarcely a pinprick it was an important morale boost for the US and proved that the Japanese home islands were vulnerable to attack from carrier-based aircraft. And interestingly the audacious raid was not carried out by naval aircraft but by 16 B-25 bombers, modified to carry twice their normal fuel load and flown by members of the US Army Air Force from the USS Hornet. (You might want to do a little investigating as to why they didn’t use Navy aircraft and naval aviators.) It was the first incident which caused the Japanese leadership any concern. 

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Doolittle Raid over Tokyo at the start of World War II

As we have discussed, the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway caused a shift in the momentum of the Pacific War, but the question remained–how to deal with the small but important Japanese garrisons spread across the wide Pacific in the course of their campaign to build the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The solution was called Island Hopping. Taking every island would have simply been prohibitive in men, material, time and treasure, so planners targeted key islands, and the rest were blockaded and left to wither, cut off from the home islands. Both General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area, and Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief United States Pacific Fleet, supported the approach.

Names like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Peliliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa became part of every American’s vocabulary. We’ll discuss them in some detail in class. However, we should take a little time here to examine the development of the amphibious doctrine which the United States Marine Corps focused on during the inter-war years. The first major amphibious landing by US Marines took place at Vera Cruz on March 9-10, 1847 during the Mexican American War. The Marines used whaleboats to get as close to shore as possible, relying on covering fire from US naval vessels just off shore. The operation was a success, with no casualties, but meant that the men had to jump off into the surf and wade ashore.

A long “dry” spell followed the Vera Cruz landing. Not until the Great War did troops participate in a major amphibious operation, the disastrous Gallipoli landing. On April 25, 1915, troops from Australia and New Zealand landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the northern bank of the Dardanelles, in an attempt to secure transit to the Black Sea to support Russia. After an extensive bombardment by a joint Anglo-French naval force, ANZAC troops with smaller French, British, Gurkha and Indian contingents landed at Anzac Cove, and Helles. Again using whaleboats to approach the beach, the assaulting troops met a stiff resistance by the Turks under Kemal Ataturk. Though the Allied troops established a beachhead and moved inland they never came close to their objective. In the end close to 100,000 men died in the Gallipoli campaign, roughly 50,000 on each side. It became clear by late fall that further operations were futile and the Allies began withdrawing their troops on December 7, 1915. This video will give you a good idea what the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign was like. 

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Even before World War I, Japan’s aggressive approach to both China and Russia caused concern in certain circles in Washington which worried that she might be a threat to US possessions (the Philippines, Wake, Guam and Hawaii). In 1897 the US Navy began to develop plans against eventual hostilities with Japan, the first version of what became known as the famous War Plan Orange. At the close of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles awarded a number of former German possessions to Japan as so-called mandates, including the Marianas, Marshall and Caroline Islands, giving Japan a much larger footprint in the Pacific. Later iterations of the plan perfected by the Joint Army and Navy Board included the concept of Island Hopping. With the new perceived threat from Japan, Marine Corps Commandant John A. Lejeune sent Major Earl (Pete) Ellis on a reconnaissance tour of the Pacific islands. Unfortunately Ellis died during his trip (conspiracy theorists suggest he was murdered) but he left behind “Plan 712, Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia” that also included an element of island-hopping.

Earl Hancock (Pete) Ellis

While the strategy made sense, the men who would be required to carry it out looked to the gross failure of the landing at Gallipoli and concluded that they needed to perfect their amphibious landing techniques, and develop a better way of moving troops from ship to shore. The execution of amphibious operations hadn’t changed for centuries. The whale boats of an earlier era left assaulting troops exposed to fire from new weapons such as machine guns at the waterline, ensuring massive casualties even before they arrived on the beach. How should they meet that challenge, and what was the best way to incorporate aircraft and submarines in an amphibious assault?

Beginning in the 1920s the Marine Corps Advanced Base Force began a series of exercised with the that was originally designed to establish mobile and/or fixed bases overseas. To develop appropriate policies and procedures for amphibious landings they carried out exercises in Panama, Culebra, and even Hawaii. These were amphibious operations, still based on suing ships boats to transport troops to shore, but they also included some air elements.

 

General Victor H. Krulak

In 1933 the Advanced Base Force gave way to the Fleet Marine Force. In a series of Fleet Exercises (FLEXs) the Marines began experimenting with improvements in landing craft. The British Beetle boat proved unsatisfactory, as did several American designs. During the Sino-Japanese War, an American observer, future Marine Corps General Victor Krulak, took photographs of Japanese boats which had a bow that could drop down, allowing the troops to land “feet dry.” He sent sketches and photos to the Navy Bureau of Construction and Repair, where they were filed away with no action taken. As the Flexs progressed it became clear that amphibious landings required a new form of landing craft. When Krulak returned stateside, he got his materials out of bureaucratic limbo and took them to Headquarters USMC.

At the same time, two American civilians hit upon the answer to the problem of a proper landing craft.  Andrew Jackson Higgins a lumberman in Louisiana developed a shallow-draft boat to transport timber through the bayous, but quickly saw the value to the USMC. After initial tests in 1938 of his Eureka boats, and some modifications, including a bow ramp which dropped down, the Eureka’s, also known as Higgins boats, were included in the FLEXs for 1939 and proved to be vastly superior to other designs. The Eureka boat became the platform for the famed LCP that saw many modifications and improvements throughout the Pacific Campaign. 

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Higgins Landing Craft

Donald Roebling, great-grandson of the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge was another important figure in the development of amphibious landing craft. After several disastrous hurricanes in Florida, Roebling, in 1935, developed a shallow-bottomed rescue vessel to navigate Florida’s swamps. Known as the Alligator, the Marine Corps first learned about it through an article in Life Magazine. After consultation with Marine Corps Headquarters, Roebling redesigned the boat, adding tracks similar to those used on tanks which would allow it to traverse reefs and some underwater defenses. Eventually they “amphibious tractor” became known as the amtrac, or the Landing Vehicle, Tracked (LVT). Select this link for more information. 

 

Marines landing on Guam

These vessels which made the Island Hopping campaign possible. It became crystal clear at Tarawa, the first of the many amphibious landings of the Pacific campaign, that without an adequate number of such landing craft, the extraordinary defenses constructed by the Japanese would inflict such devastating casualties as to make the landings prohibitively costly. Being able to deliver men and materiel within wading distance of the beach, or in some cases even onto the beach was a life saver. This USMC video of the Tarawa landing is graphic, and clearly illustrates the importance of landing craft in the Pacific.

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13
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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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The Tripartite Pact powers 749

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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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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The Tripartite Pact powers 749

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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