Tensions mount in the atomic age and shadows lengthen over Europe and Asia, the problem of coexistence with the Soviet Union in a shrinking world has emerged as the most pressing issue of the day. After two world wars, the widening rift between the Soviet Union and the West since 1945 has caused a wave of disillusionment and frustration. A growing chorus of opinion on both sides of the Atlantic has charged that the peace was lost as a result of political and strategic mistakes of World War II. It becomes all the more important, therefore, at this stage of the cold war to take stock of the wartime association of the Soviet Union with the West—its origins, development, and break-down.
The Three Partners
The story of Allied collaboration in the war against Germany is, simply put, the search for a common denominator among three sovereign partners faced with a common enemy. It is important to remember that the Grand Alliance was forged in war and essentially for war purposes. It was, therefore, a war marriage, a “marriage of expediency.” A common bond of danger drew the three countries together in 1941. But each member of the Grand Alliance, as a result of differing traditions, policies, interests, geography, and resources, looked at the European war through different spectacles.
Great Britain, the island empire, dependent upon the sea lanes for its very existence and situated precariously on the edge of Hitler’s Festung Europa, was the first to enter the war against Germany. For centuries it had put its faith in the balance of power. It could be expected to seek to revive and rally the smaller nations and to continue.to put its weight against any strong power that threatened to upset the balance on the continent. It had special political and economic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East through which ran its lifeline to the Empire in the East. Its economy, while highly industrialized, was, in comparison with that of the United States, small-scale. In any global war Great Britain’s resources would be stretched thin. Keenly conscious of its heavy manpower losses in the ground battles of World War 1, Great Britain was anxious to avoid a repetition of these. By necessity and choice, its leaders put their faith in the Navy, the Air Force, and the mechanized and armored forces, rather than a large ground army. Experienced in war, diplomacy, and empire, Great Britain had a long history of alliances with European powers. Its military were accustomed to work closely with the political leadership, and its policy in war could be expected to give political matters a primary place. Even though thrown on the military defensive and with its back to the wall when the United States entered the war, British military and political strategy were operating together wherever possible. Reduced to their fundamentals, British political aims toward occupied Europe were twofold and, as it turned out, somewhat contradictory. For the short run the British sought to encourage resistance and rebellion; but, in the long run, they hoped, once the cancer of Hitlerism had been excised from the European body politic, for a general return, with appropriate reforms, to the status quo ante bellum.
Across the Atlantic lay the other Western power in the alliance, the United Stales— young, impatient, rich in resources, highly industrialized, the country with the technical “know-how.” It was now to undergo a major experience in coalition warfare. This was the country whose whole tradition in war had been first to declare, then to prepare. Traditionally opposed to becoming involved in European quarrels, it nevertheless had strong bonds of culture, language, and tradition with Western Europe—especially England. Based on its experience in World War I, the American approach to European war seemed to be to hold off as long as possible, enter it only long enough to give the bully or bullies who started it a sound thrashing, get the boys home, and then try to remain as uninvolved as before. To most Americans, therefore, war was an aberration—an unwelcome disturber of normalcy. In the pre-World War II period, the national policy was deeply influenced by popular beliefs that the United States should neither enter into military alliances nor maintain forces capable of offensive action. But, even in this atmosphere of disillusionment, that legalistic-moral strain which has so influenced the American approach to foreign affairs, to which George Kennan has pointed, remained strong. If only the nations of the world would subscribe to principles and declarations of justice and morality, agree to disarm and to outlaw war, all would be well with the world. This idealistic strain reflected in Wilsonian policies toward Europe during and after World War I was imbedded in the pragmatism of President Roosevelt and was to find its echo in his foreign policies in World War II. Two other factors distinguished American policy from the beginning of the conflict. The loose relationship between the President and the military—in accord with what might be termed the American doctrine of the separation of military and political powers— offered a sharp contrast with the closely knit politico-military systems of Great Britain and of the U.S.S.R. And secondly, the President and his military staff could never forget the war against Japan, which, to most Americans, appeared to be a more natural enemy than Germany. This compulsion was to play an important part in the relations among the Big Three and in the development of war strategy. Given the considerations of domestic politics and the added pressure of the Japanese war, the United States simply could not fight a long war in Europe.
And then there was the Soviet Union, essentially a land power with completely internal lines of communications. It represented an enigmatic, restless, and dynamic force, devoted to a political and economic ideology different from that of the Western partners. Possessing an enormous population and great resources, its industrial program, however, was still incomplete. Lacking air and naval traditions, it put its faith in geography, the endurance of its people, and its army in the desperate battle for survival. Born in revolution and come to power in a civil and foreign war, the Soviet Union had developed into a baffling hybrid in Western eyes—a combination of “Russian national socialism,” Marxist concepts, and policies and practices lingering from Czarist days. Dedicated to the proposition that war was inevitable in capitalist society until the world revolution ushered in a new millennial order, Bolshevism lived in an undeclared state of war with the capitalist world. In fact, it is a popular misconception to regard the “cold war” and “iron curtain” as purely postwar phenomena. In a very real sense they go back to November, 1917. As we get more perspective on the Russian role in World War II, it becomes evident that the period of its defensive struggle against Germany was merely a pause, an interlude, in its twin drives for security and expansion. These drives appear to have been at work in its war with Finland and even in the uneasy period of its pact with Hitler. One of the main reasons for the break with the Fuehrer was the aggressive action of the Soviet Union in pushing farther west in Europe—in asserting its claims to Poland and the Balkans—moves which Hitler, confronted with a stubborn Britain on the west, considered too dangerous to be permitted to continue. Until attacked by Germany, the Soviet war effort can be characterized therefore as warfare in pursuit of aggrandizement. The Nazi invasion only reinforced the Soviet desire to strengthen its position in Eastern Europe—an objective whose roots lay deep in Russian history and was never lost sight of in World War II. But for almost two years after the German attack the Soviet Union was engaged in a desperate fight for its very existence, and while political and territorial ambitions were by no means absent, military considerations were more immediately paramount. Still fearful of capitalist encirclement, suspicious of friend and foe alike, its position in what Major General J. R. Deane so fittingly called “The Strange Alliance” would be uneasy.
1941-1942—Roots and Origins
Of the three main phases in the story of the partnership, 1941-42 is the fascinating period of roots and origins. This period witnessed the formation of the Grand Alliance and saw the beginnings of the pattern of collaboration between the Soviet Union and the West—a pattern which in large measure was to obtain for the remainder of the war. For the Allies this was a period of defensive strategy—a strategy of scarcity. The basic fear was the fear of defeat; the great concern, the survival of the Soviet Union.
From the beginning, the inner web of the Grand Alliance was the close relationship between the United States and Great Britain. The Russians remained outside of the Combined Chiefs system—developed for the day-to-day coordination of the Western effort in the global war. Above that system were the Prime Minister and the President, whose association became as close and warm as their relationship with the enigmatic Stalin remained formal and distant. Unlike the Western partners, the Soviet Union would be at war on only one front. With their forces far apart, the West and East were operating at long range. From the start, the troubled relations of the past, the lack of free intercourse, the legacy of suspicion made genuine understanding difficult. A curious “arms-length” war partnership came into being.
The divergent approaches toward the European war were most clearly reflected in the emergence of the peripheral theory, espoused by Churchill and the British staff, and the theory of mass and concentration advocated by Marshall and his staff. For each the geography and manpower of the Soviet Union early became the key to victory, and both justified their theories and plans in terms of relieving the pressure upon the Russians most expediently. But neither side could readily win the other to its concept of strategy, and the long debate which ensued led to a delicate relationship and a bone of contention with the Soviet Union. From the beginning the Russians, locked in a death struggle on the Eastern front, had no doubts about the proper Western strategy. They wanted a second front; they wanted it soon; and they wanted it in the West. Each Anglo-American postponement of this second front added fuel to the fire.
In the first round of debate in 1942, the British notion of an invasion of North Africa won out over the American notion of a cross- Channel attack. When Torch won out, Churchill felt the full weight of Stalin’s disapproval in a stormy interview in Moscow.
Irritations also developed over lend-lease. The Western Allies offered their assistance generously and without question when the Russians were fighting with their backs to the wall, and, in return, the Soviets gave little, if any, information. In addition, the Russians never showed much sympathy with, or understanding of, the pressing problems and competing demands on the Western partners for shipping, aircraft, and materiel in their global war. When, therefore, deliveries fell behind schedule in 1942, Soviet suspicions mounted even as Western sensitivity increased. In spite of these annoyances, however, lend-lease did form a narrow bridge of cooperation between the partners throughout the war.
By the close of 1942, certain characteristics of the war relations had become apparent. Though Western Allied plans were tied to the outcome of the struggle on the Eastern front, the West had still not agreed on strategy, and its plans had not been coordinated with those of the Soviets. The Russians, on the other hand, even in the darkest days of 1942, had turned down the offer of Roosevelt and Churchill to send an Anglo-American air force to support the Soviet forces in the Caucasus. Soviet representatives made it quite plain that Western military forces were not wanted in Soviet territory to fight alongside Soviet soldiers. It became clear that the political aspect of the project—the “comradeship in arms” in a strategically important area—which made it desirable from the viewpoint of the Prime Minister, made it undesirable from the Soviet point of view. To the West the Soviet Union looked not for closer military cooperation and fraternization but for more lend-lease and a Second Front. Its expectations for both had not been met.
On the part of the West a guilt complex was rising—resulting from the failure to fulfill Soviet hopes and from the burden of sacrifice borne by the Soviets in the fighting. The two Western approaches to war had had their first conflict, and British opportunism or peripheral strategy had scored the first victory. But this was only the first round, and the issue was not yet squarely joined. That British notions of strategy had tended to prevail was not surprising. Its forces had been earlier mobilized and were in the theaters in far greater numbers than the American. The Americans were still mobilizing their manpower and resources. The better part of a year after Pearl Harbor passed before their forces gained any appreciable weight or effect in the theaters. In the absence of a common agreed strategic plan, the only links with the Soviet Union were supplies, common subscription to general principles and declarations, such as those of the Atlantic Charter and Declaration of the United Nations, and, above all, the common enemy.
The Torch decision, which disappointed American military hopes, also complicated relations with the Soviet Union. Sensitive as they were to Soviet reactions, the West was relieved to learn that Stalin did not protest their dealing with Darlan. On the contrary, Stalin went so far as to pass on to Churchill the illuminating observation that in war it was justifiable not only to use Darlan but, to quote an old Russian proverb, “Even the Devil himself and his grandma.” The fact that the West had tried to compensate for the immediate effects of Torch on aid to the Soviet Union through such friendly gestures as offering direct military assistance in the Caucasus, developing the Persian Gulf route, and building up the Alaska- Siberia air ferry route meant little. The Western Allies were beginning to learn that there was no banking good will with the Soviet Union. They could expect no real improvement in military relations with the U.S.S.R. except where such collaboration would clearly contribute to the one common interest—the early defeat of Germany. In other words, what the Russians wanted, above all else, was the Second Front. That question remained critical.
The Soviet Union and the Mid-War Debate:1943-1944
In 1943 the debate over European strategy and the collaboration of the Allies entered a new phase. If the strategic ideas of each partner remained basically the same, the circumstances of their application changed. This mid-war period—roughly down to the landing in Normandy—was the period of relative plenty. The power to call the turn and choose the time and place to do battle passed from the Axis powers to the Allied coalition.
The great debate on European strategy between the Americans and the British— opened by the decision for Torch—endured clear down to the summer of 1944. Soviet behavior and tactics during this mid-war debate were for the West as puzzling as they were disturbing. Its curious position as half- ally—in the alliance but outside the regular Anglo-American CCS-conference network— meant that the Soviet Union did not directly participate in most of the debates. But it appears clear that, interested as it was in the outcome, it resorted to a variety of tactics and pressures vis-d-vis the Western partners to influence the result. At the end of each of their conferences the Western partners would announce to the Soviet Union the general decisions reached and their expectations for the Second Front. For a while Soviet hopes would rise, but cycles of irritation followed those of good feeling as the promises and prospects of the Second Front gradually receded from 1943 to 1944. A chain reaction of displeasure would be generated throughout the whole mass of Soviet officialdom which came into contact with the West and would color dealings on all levels and problems—even those remotely associated with the issue at hand. There is fleeting evidence —difficult to weigh—suggesting that at least at one point the Soviet Union may even have seriously considered a separate peace with Germany and entered into tentative negotiations. The Soviet press kept up its campaign of registering displeasure at the delay of the Second Front, at times even going so far as to question the good faith of the Allies, especially of the British. Shortly after the Washington (Trident) Conference in May, the Soviet Government tried a diplomatic gambit, going so far as to recall its ambassadors both from London and Washington. But perhaps the most puzzling move of all was its tactic at the Moscow Conference in October, 1943. Here the foreign ministers of the three partners came together to lay the ground-work for the later meeting of the Big Three at Teheran. To the great surprise of the Americans, the Soviet representatives hinted that they might be willing to accept increased pressure in the Mediterranean, even at the expense of a delay in Overlord, and accept aggressive action in Italy as a Second Front. In the weeks that followed, as the Allies prepared for the showdown on issues in European strategy, General Deane, Chief of the American Military Mission in Moscow, reported to Washington further hints along the same line. Certainly, on the eve of Teheran, the Americans, concerned over what seemed to them to be signs of British lukewarmness to Overlord, were disturbed by the threat of a reversal in the Soviet position—a turnabout that, if true, would strengthen the British strategic case. But the negotiations at Teheran were soon to suggest that this latest move was only a maneuver, perhaps designed to throw the Western partners off balance and stiffen the American stand for the long-promised but often-delayed Second Front. Aware of Anglo-American differences in European strategy, the Soviets were apparently not averse to sending up a trial balloon—especially one that might in the process of playing off one Western partner against the other enable it to win through to its own ends.
Teheran was the decisive conference in European strategy. There for the first time in the war, the President, the Prime Minister, and their staffs met with Marshal Stalin and his staff. The Prime Minister made eloquent appeals for operations in Italy, the Aegean, and the eastern Mediterranean, even at the expense of a delay in Overlord. But the U.S.S.R., for reasons of its own, unequivocally put its weight behind the American concept of strategy. Confident of its capabilities, it asserted its full power as an equal member of the coalition. Stalin came out strongly in favor of Overlord and limiting further operations in the Mediterranean solely to the one directly assisting Overlord, namely, an invasion of southern France. In turn, the Russians promised to launch an all-out offensive on the East front to go with them. Stalin’s stand put the capstone on Anglo-American strategy. In a sense, therefore, he fixed Western strategy. The final blueprint for Allied victory in Europe had taken shape. Germany was to be crushed by a great pincers—the Anglo-American drive on the west and a Soviet drive from the east. Stalin’s blunt query put to the Western leaders about the name of the commander also speeded Roosevelt’s decision. General Eisenhower was named the commander for Overlord and preparations for the big blow began.
The resolution of the mid-war debate on European strategy broadened the range of opportunities for military cooperation— hitherto limited almost exclusively to the field of lend-lease. But the end of the debate did not, ipso facto, lead to closer collaboration with the Soviet Union. Despite the military agreement reached at the highest levels at Teheran, it proved difficult in practice to extend the coordination very far. General Deane has recorded in detail the exasperating slowness, the delays, suspicions, and obstacles encountered by the U. S. Military Mission in trying to bring the partners closer together on a military level as the western and eastern drives began to take shape. In each case it was the Western partners who took the initiative, and in practically every case results were obtained only as a result of heavy Western pressure and protracted negotiation. One fascinating example, unique in the annals of coalition warfare, concerned the initiation of the shuttle-bombing project. Suspicious as ever of foreigners and foreign aircraft on Soviet soil, the Russians insisted on setting up a complicated procedure of group visas for the American airmen who entered the Soviet Union—a system which broke down in practice. With all its bureaucratic red tape—Soviet style—• this project was, however, one of the rare cases during World War II when military cooperation between the Russians and the Anglo-Americans was attempted on an operational level.
If by the summer of 1944 Stalin could rejoice in the direction Allied strategy and operations had taken, he could also take satisfaction that his own share in them had not been made at the expense of any commitment on post-war policy. During the crucial mid-war debate, territorial and political questions concerning central and eastern Europe had simply been left open. Though Stalin showed no disposition to abandon his ambitions, he did not press them at either the Moscow or Teheran Conferences. He continued to subscribe to Western declarations—Declaration of Iran, the “Four Power” Declaration, and the like. Whatever doubts he may have entertained about the practicability of the unconditional surrender formula, announced unexpectedly by the President in January, 1943, he subscribed to that too.
Behind the Anglo-American debate of mid-war, significant changes had taken place in the balance of military power within the coalition—a phenomenon which had as important implications for the determination of war strategy as for the future relations among the partners in the wartime coalition. At the close of 1943, the Americans, with their mighty industrial and military machine now in high gear, had, with Soviet help, made the British yield to their notions of continental strategy. The growing flow of American military strength and supplies to the European theater assured the triumph of the American staff concept of a concentrated, decisive military war—an objective reinforced by the addition, from Casablanca onward, of the unconditional surrender concept. Despite the impressive flow of lend-lease to the Soviet Union in mid-war, the long delay in opening the Second Front, added to the heavy Soviet losses, had continued to keep the West on the defensive in its dealings with the Soviet Union. Capitalizing on lend-lease, its production behind the Urals, the sacrifice of its armies and people, and the effects of a war of attrition on the German invaders, the Soviet Union had shown unexpected strength and recuperative powers. Steadily gathering strength and confidence after Stalingrad, the Soviet bear had been able to make its weight felt in the strategic scales at a critical point in Allied councils. At the end of the period massive Russian armies were driving West. The Soviet Union was coming into its own. Britain had practically completed its mobilization at the end of 1943, and strains and stresses had begun to show up in its economy. The Americans in mid-war drew up to and threatened to pass the British in deployed strength in the European theater. Britain’s military power, along with her notions of fighting the war, was being outstripped. Via the military doctrine of concentration, the strategists of the Kremlin and of the Pentagon had found common ground. Teheran, which fixed the final European strategy, marked the beginning of a wartime realignment in the European power balance. The foundations of the Alliance were changing.
1944-1945—the Military Pay-Off
This brings us to the third phase of Allied relations in the war in the West, the last nine months of the conflict—the period of the military pay-off. This is the period when the problems of winning the war began to come up against the problems of winning the peace. In this phase, the course of the war started to shape the conditions of the peace. The main outline of events is familiar—how, after the successful landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Western Allied forces broke out of their beachheads and knifed across the Continent, while the Russians picked up capital after capital in east and central Europe, beating the advancing Americans to Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, and flowed into the Balkans to fill the vacuum left by the retreating Germans. The direction of their movement suggested that the flow of their power against key political and strategic positions was more than merely coincidental. The curtain began to lift on the divergent national objectives and war aims of the Allies—objectives hitherto obscured by the common military danger, the military strategy hammered out on “the anvil of necessity,” and the political declarations to which they had subscribed.
The full impact of American concepts was to be felt even more strongly from the summer of 1944 to the surrender of Germany in May, 1945. Once the Allied forces had become firmly ensconced on the European continent, the war became, for General Marshall and his staff, essentially a matter of logistics and tactics, with the Supreme Allied Commander to take over and make his decisions as military exigencies in the field dictated. But to Churchill, warily watching the swift Soviet advance into Poland and the Balkans, the war had become more than ever a contest for great political stakes, and he wished Western Allied strength diverted to forestall the Russian surge. As the strategy unrolled in the field, the two approaches to the war boiled down therefore to a question of military tactics versus political maneuvers.
Had the President joined with the Prime Minister, as he often had in the past, the American military staff’s concentration on bringing the war against Germany to a swift military conclusion might still have been tempered and the war steered into more direct political channels. But the President would not, and the Prime Minister by himself could not. There are many reasons which may account for the President’s position— reasons of health, desire to get on with the Japanese conflict, desire to get on with the tasks of peace, etc. But of none of these can we yet be certain. In any case, let me suggest this: By 1944-45 the Commander in Chief was caught on the horns of a political dilemma confronting any American President involved in an extended coalition war abroad. There is reason to believe that he was not unconcerned about the unilateral efforts of the Soviet Union to put its impress on the shape of post-war Europe—as witness his stand on the reconstruction of the Polish Government. But from the viewpoint of domestic political considerations he had to fight a quick and decisive war—one that would justify American entry and the dispatch of American troops abroad. Once the bullies were beaten, it was doubtful whether the American people would countenance any prolonged occupation in Europe, or a more active role in southeastern Europe as the Prime Minister desired. Besides the President’s policy for peace seemed to lie in the same direction as Wilson’s—national self-determination and an international organization to maintain the peace—not in reliance on the balance of power. To achieve this aim he had to take the calculated risk of being able to handle Stalin and winning and maintaining the friendship of the U.S.S.R. While the Prime Minister appeared willing to go a long way in the same direction, he also seemed to hedge more in the traditional balance of power theory. Whatever the explanation may be, the fact remains that American national policy in the final year placed no obstacle in the way of a decisive ending of the European conflict.
The inability of the Prime Minister in the last year of the war to reverse the trend bore eloquent testimony to the changed relationships between American and British military weight and to the shifting bases of the Grand Alliance. If the military power which the American staff had managed to conserve for the big blow on the Continent gave the United States a powerful weapon, it did not choose to use it for political purpose; the Prime Minister had the purpose but not the power. After the middle of 1944, the British production became increasingly unbalanced, and the British fought the remainder of the war with a contracting economy. Clearly the last year of the war saw the foundations of the coalition in further transition, British influence on the wane, and the United States and the Soviet Union emerging as the two strongest military powers in Europe.
In the absence of political instructions to the contrary, the American military staff fell back upon the task of applying the given resources and manpower to getting the disagreeable business over with as quickly as possible. Thus the war against Germany was to be concluded—on the Western side— as the American military chiefs had wished to wage it from the beginning—a conventional war of concentration, a technical soldier’s game. On the Eastern side, the war was also to be concluded as it had been fought from the beginning—a combination of political and military strategy, and the Soviets began to gather in the fruits of victory.
In the closing months of the war, there were signs that the West was beginning to re-analyze its approach toward the Soviet Union. Day-to-day coordination as the troops drew closer became more feasible but remained difficult. From a variety of sources came appeals for a greater firmness in American policy toward the Soviet Union, and a firmer note began to creep into its dealings. What negotiations with the Soviets on bomblines in southern Europe could not produce, General Eaker’s strong arbitrary action established. From Moscow, General Deane, frustrated as ever in trying to establish closer coordination with the Russians, strongly urged a reversal of policy on lend- lease, a quid pro quo. To General Eisenhower, in January, 1945, General Marshall recommended forgetting diplomatic niceties in future dealings with the Russians and urged on him a direct approach “in simple Main Street Abilene style.” It is one of the ironies of historical fate that President Roosevelt, pragmatist that he was and flexible on most issues, should go down in history as almost inflexible on the Russian issue. But his last message to Churchill, written an hour before his death, with the Polish crisis evidently very much on his mind, while expressing the optimistic hope that this problem like others with the Soviet Union would also pass and that the course toward the Russians had so far been correct, at the same time urged firmness. Taken in the context of their wartime correspondence, some of Roosevelt’s last exchanges with Stalin were most sharp.
But these were only straws in the wind and symptomatic of the fact that the three powers approached the end of the war quite far apart on European issues. American policy remained opposed—in principle—to recognizing territorial settlements before the peace conference and the firm establishment of the new international organization. The United States, as Roosevelt categorically announced at Yalta and Truman’s approach confirmed at Potsdam, was determined to withdraw its troops from Europe soon— within two years after the end of the fighting. The British were more amenable to recognizing at least the moderate Soviet demands. They were even willing to enter into temporary expedients with the Soviet Union, like dividing up the control of the Balkan states on a percentage basis—a curious, but short-lived wartime application of the sphere of influence principle. The Soviets began to show their political hand more openly and strongly. What they could not get by negotiation, they sought by direct and unilateral action. Their policies in 1945 were tuned to capitalize on the weakness of Europe and the dichotomy in Western thinking. Part of their success was inevitable with the shift of the power balance, and part helped along by the failure of the West to agree. From this point of view, the much publicized and debated conferences of Yalta and Potsdam—about which so much controversy revolves—must be regarded not as the causes but the symptoms of Western weakness and growing Soviet strength and influence.
The Balance Sheet
What, then, are some of the conclusions to be drawn from the study thus far of the experience of the Western Allies with the Soviet Union in the past European war? In treating the wartime relations of the Soviet Union, the Western scholar is dealing with a phenomenon where only that part of the iceberg that appears above the water is clearly visible. Many questions are still unanswered. The experience of World War II sheds light but provides no clear-cut answer on the problem of motivation—which has so preoccupied Western students of the Soviet Union. Has the prime motivating force been national security, Russian imperialism, Soviet power politics, or Communist world revolution? Certainly whatever the ultimate or theoretical goal—necessarily held in abeyance during the wartime period of crisis —the initial objective was to secure a firm hold on Eastern Europe—the borderlands. The territorial aims it had sought from Hitler it sought from the Grand Alliance. Success whetted its appetite and emboldened it. Before the war was over it was striving for a firm hold on Central Europe—Germany as well as Poland. It appeared ominously to be reaching out not only to close the historic exits to the Soviet Union but also to open a gateway to the West—perhaps the first steps —now that it had achieved the inner concentric belt—in what may be a program for control of all Eurasia. At Potsdam it even put in a bid for Italian colonies in the Mediterranean. Certainly where Soviet security stopped and expansion began was not clear in Western, perhaps not even in Soviet, eyes. In the light of World War II experience it is probably safest to assume that Soviet foreign policy is multi-motivated.
If Soviet objectives were consistent, its tactics were varied. The same power could flit first from an effort to cooperate with Western powers against Hitler, after Munich, to a non-aggression pact with Germany, and after June, 1941, to a wartime partnership of sorts with the West. But it is also clear that it had one foot in the alliance and the other out. What it could not obtain by negotiation with the partners, it sought by unilateral action. Within its own theory of dynamics, it found the capability of surviving on the defensive and of asserting itself in the offensive. Throughout it showed a determination to fight the war its own way. In fact, it may well be argued that the European war was really composed of two wars—the one fought by the West and the other by the Soviet Union; that there never really was an Allied strategy in World War II; that Soviet strategy remained tangential to that of the West and just happened on a military basis to be compatible with it. The same power that on V-E day could acknowledge the great achievement of the West and toast Allied unity and its leaders could, within two years after the end of the conflict, cancel V-E day as a national celebration, subject Roosevelt as well as Churchill, popular wartime figures, to violent attack, claim that the West had launched Overlord to forestall the Soviet advance on Berlin, and again reassert the need of the Soviet state to remain prepared for attack from a hostile world. It may prove correct in the history of the Soviet foreign relations to view its wartime relationships as a phase of the cold war—a war that began as far back as November, 1917—and Soviet participation in the Grand Alliance as a temporary cycle of attraction with part of the West under the compulsion of necessity. In any event, World War II which gave the Soviet Union its greatest test also gave it its greatest opportunity for extending its sphere of control—an opportunity its leaders did not hesitate to grasp.
On the part of the West in its relationships with the Soviet Union, it would appear to be true, in retrospect, that mistakes were made. Certainly Soviet strength and capabilities were miscalculated, its political ambitions underestimated. More flexibility in objectives, plans, and methods would appear to have been desirable. Certain concepts and policies with which the West began the war or introduced in its earlier phases were probably held too long and rigidly—notably the generous lend-lease policy and the unconditional surrender concept. But even here, simple pat judgments in postwar writing must be carefully reassessed. Much has been made, for example, in postwar writing of the external effects of unconditional surrender as a war aim—in prolonging the war and adding to its costs. But there is another aspect which must also be weighed in the scales of historical judgment. Leaving aside its external consequences, this formula was to have important effects within the Allied coalition. It served to conceal further the divergent postwar national objectives back of the common goal—-the defeat of Germany. Its limitations as a political formula began to show up in the last year of the war when the time had come—perhaps was long overdue— to replace a common war aim with a common peace aim. But it is, of course, still a moot point whether anything more or less than the single-track idea of unconditional surrender would have succeeded in this “strange alliance.” The question of the Balkans versus the cross-Channel invasion about which so much controversy has raged in the postwar period is also a complex and highly debatable issue and must be carefully re-examined in the light of the known evidence. Suffice it to say here, this is purely a postwar debate— the Balkan question was never argued out in frank military or political terms by the Western Allies during World War II. But all these so-called mistakes must, of course, be taken in the context of their times. And far more important than the alleged mistakes reflected in the “hard-pressed” strategic and political decisions of the war in and out of conferences was the inability of a wartime relationship to bridge the gap between West and East—the legacy of suspicion, of divergent conceptions of international morality, power, war, and peace, and the failure of an Allied military victory to prevent the further weakening of the West—a weakening begun in World War I. It should be noted that the weakening of Great Britain and its close dependence on the United States were well underway before the close of 1943—- when peripheral strategy, to which the Prime Minister was so devoted, was still in its heyday. It should also be noted that proponents of the strategy of the “indirect approach” have uniformly oversimplified the American strategic case, glossing over its compulsions and strong points, even as they have closed one eye to World War II experience with Mediterranean operations—which gave a striking demonstration of how great the costs of a war of attrition can be. It also seems clear that, with all the advantages of hindsight and all the persuasive and eloquent arguments that have been marshalled against the alleged American political and strategic naivete in World War II, there is no certainty that the war could have been programmed to produce a faster or cheaper victory over Germany and at the same time have put the West in a fundamentally more secure position in postwar Europe vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. In a sense the cards were stacked against the West from the beginning, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as the strongest continental power was an almost inevitable product of the shift in the power balance, a shift which had its roots in World War I. World War II, which marked the defeat of Germany and the further decline of the Western European states, only reinforced the shift begun with the weakening of the Western states in World War I and the decline in the European political system in the years between the two world wars.
The war ended with the United States and the United Kingdom—close partners that they were—almost as far apart on European problems as the West was from the East. The war ended with the United States giving up two bargaining weapons—vis-à-vis the Soviet Union—represented in lend-lease and in the United States troops abroad—one the path of appeasement, the other of force. Puzzling as its behavior had been earlier in the war, in success the Soviet Union was a bigger question mark than ever. Henceforth Europe would look to the two powers—the one from the new world, the other from the old—that had emerged out of the war to positions of world leadership—the one as reluctant to grasp the nettle as the other was eager.
The events of 1945 demonstrated the capacity of allies with divergent aims to wage a war that was completely successful on a military plane. Their military strategy, as we have seen, was a hybrid product—a composite of American directness, British caution, and Soviet bluntness. It had found its common denominator in the defeat of Germany—by a giant nutcracker squeeze on the Continent. But as the forces of the coalition partners came closer and the defeat of Germany more certain, their political differences became more apparent, and the cement which had held them together—the “common bond of danger”—began to crumble. What the West and East had set out to do in common was to defeat Germany, and this they had successfully accomplished. By May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered. But Poland and eastern Europe were already in the grip of another dictator, and Germany, which had brought the East and West together, was already a bone of contention between them. The shooting war was over, but, in the eyes of the West, Europe had been liberated only to the Elbe. Out of the strange comradeship-in-arms was to come a new rivalry for power. A firm peace was still to be won.