Anthony Nicholls

The Coming of the Cold War

When may the Cold War be said to have actually begun? Manifestly the challenge was present from the moment that the Soviet Union became an active belligerent and Stalin disclosed to Anthony Eden in Moscow in December 1941 the territorial claims which Russia was determined to make upon a post-war Europe. ✳ Mr Eden’s astute handling of the situation prevented an immediate endorsement of Stalin’s demands. However, in the course of the period of Western appeasement of the Soviet Government, which began at Tehran, reached its apogee at Yalta and its reaffirmation at Potsdam, the fact remains that Stalin obtained by one means or another all that he had gained from his nefarious pact with Hitler in 1939 and a good deal more. Moreover, by the time the victorious Allies met at Potsdam, it was apparent that Stalin’s ambitions in Europe and in Asia even surpassed the paranoiac schemings of the most extreme fanatics of the Tsarist school of expansionism. For what was alarming about this new menace from the East was that it germinated from an unholy mating of Marxist ideology with Tsarist imperialism and Pan-Slavism, a truly fearsome amalgam, with an inexorable drive for domination.

The Road to Yalta

The autumn and winter of 1944 saw a heightening of the tensions which had always been a feature of inter-Allied diplomacy. This was due to the changing military situation and the fact that post-war planning was becoming a more urgent problem as the Nazis were pressed back on all fronts. The differences between the objectives of the various individual Allies — over such matters as the future of Eastern Europe, the treatment of Germany, the nature of the international security organization to be set up after the war, and the restoration of colonial empires — were progressively less easy to gloss over as the time came to take firm decisions. In addition to these fundamental problems there were also important conflicts of opinion within the various belligerent Governments about the nature of diplomacy after the war.

The Japanese Peace Treaty

Of all the defeated Axis nations in the Second World War, Japan was unique in that her conclusion of hostilities and subsequent return to the status of normal diplomatic relations followed the accepted conventional and traditional processes of an armistice, involving Unconditional Surrender, followed by a period of occupation, followed by a formal treaty of peace. In the case of Italy the situation became somewhat confused by reason of her temporary excursion into the ways of ‘co-belligerency’, which permitted her defection from the Axis to the Allied camp to assume a legal aspect, while with Germany, as of this year of 1971, no peace treaty has yet been signed and, in so far as both Germanys are concerned, their official status is one of ‘non-belligerency’.

Epilogue: ‘By Manifold Illusion’

‘Peace, you must know, is perhaps a hundred times more difficult to make than war’, the great Boer soldier and statesman, Louis Botha, told cheering crowds on 24 July 1919 on his return to Cape Town from attending the Peace Conference of Paris, and he added: ‘Sometimes the action of a fool can start a war, but it takes the wisdom of the world to make peace again.’1 I In the profundity of these words, taken in conjunction with those of Thucydides with which this book began, namely that men rarely adhere to the same views during the course of war which they held upon entering it,✳ lies the kernel of the book’s purpose.

First Cairo and the Road to Tehran

While Mr Hull had been labouring in Moscow, President Roosevelt was planning a meeting with Marshal Stalin. This time it was to be a tripartite affair, and its organization proved a ticklish business. Once again, Anglo-American relations came under stress. The men in the White House were just as eager as the Secretary of State to demonstrate their independence of British influence. At the same time the atmosphere between Britain and America was clouded by many administrative difficulties, most of which were caused by quite genuine and unavoidable domestic problems in London and Washington. Nevertheless, their coincidence with real or suspected American prejudices did not help to reassure the British, who were themselves so eager for an Allied meeting that they were willing to adapt all their plans to ensure its success.

The Origins of the United Nations Organization

To understand fully the background and genesis of the United Nations Organization in 1945 it is necessary to give consideration to the nascent circumstances of the League of Nations some quarter of a century earlier, and to compare the two.

The Trial and Punishment of the Nazi War Criminals

The trial and punishment of Axis war criminals did not become an act of faith for the Allied Powers until the Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Moscow in October 1943.✳ On 13 January 1942, a Nine-Power Conference, sitting in London, had adopted a Declaration on the subject, calling Germany to book for acts of aggression, imposition of regimes of terror and other acts of violence and oppression, and warning that she must ultimately answer for these crimes ‘in order to satisfy the sense of justice of the civilized world’. Some months later, in August 1942, President Roosevelt had warned the Axis Powers that ‘the time will come when they will have to stand in the courts of law in the very countries they were oppressing and answer for their acts’,1 and the Declaration of the Moscow Conference went no further than this, save that it gave official recognition to the principle.

Unconditional Surrender of the German Armed Forces

The primordium of Unconditional Surrender lay in the principle enunciated by President Roosevelt — seemingly in the form of ‘throwaway line’ -at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943.✳ Mr Churchill at once concurred and Marshal Stalin shortly thereafter signified consent. It was apparent from the first that Unconditional Surrender had two meanings: a military capitulation in the field and an unequivocal acceptance of defeat and surrender by the Axis regimes. This latter meaning, President Roosevelt had been careful to assert, did not comprise the destruction of the German and Italian peoples, but the destruction of the philosophies in those countries based on fear and hate and subjugation of other peoples.

The Morgenthau Plan and JCS 1067

The pattern for the post-war treatment of Germany had been set at Tehran and the architect of it was Joseph Stalin.✳ Using arguments not unreminiscent of those employed by Georges Clemenceau twenty-five years before at the Peace Conference of Paris, the Marshal demanded Draconian measures against Germany to the end that she might never again be capable of aggression. These measures included complete dismemberment and the prevention of any sort of war-potential remaining in German hands after the Reich had been partitioned. Stalin’s interpretation of this latter measure was all-embracing. While President Roosevelt thought in terms of the control of war industries, the Marshal proposed the virtual de-industrialization of Germany, claiming that civilian industries, like watch-making and furniture manufacture, were easily capable of being turned to military production and that the Germans could therefore not be trusted with them.

The Road to Potsdam

The morrow of the termination of the war in Europe found the counsels of the Grand Alliance in considerable disarray and the cause of this disconsonance lay in the altered policy of the Soviet Union. At Tehran and at Yalta Marshal Stalin had been in a position to chaffer and he had driven a hard bargain. Though the way had been made easy for him by President Roosevelt’s determination to develop a special relationship with the Soviet Union, Stalin had impressed the Americans at Yalta by his apparent willingness to make concessions, but most of these related to such matters as the United Nations and the Far Eastern War and did not affect the sensitive issues involved in Eastern Europe. On those questions Stalin had given nothing away, and platitudinous formulas like the Declaration on Liberated Europe — so dear to Mr Stettinius — could but disguise the fact that the Russians had obtained virtually all they required. Indeed, Stalin had some reason to suppose that his allies were really resigned to the inevitability of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, since both his ‘percentage’ arrangement with Mr Churchill in Moscow in October 1944 and his private conversations with Roosevelt — not to mention General de Gaulle — seemed to point in that direction. The British were clearly concerned about the Poles, but it was also evident that Polish representatives in London were beginning to exasperate the British Government. As for the large phrases about free elections which had been bandied about at Yalta, they could hardly be taken seriously by a man of Stalin’s kidney.