They would not listen to anyone else; they had to have their own way. One of the main thoughts was that it would have been best to place Germany under extreme economic pressure, which would have damaged the country more than if the Allies waged full-scale war against them.
The Tehran Conference caused some tension between the powers, specifically Britain. Churchill wanted the second front to open up in the Balkans rather than Western Europe, and there was some suggestion that the British Empire was a larger threat to global peace than the Soviet Union. Churchill , With the substantial benefit of hindsight, it is easy to be critical of FDR and his approach to certain issues at Yalta.
For example, it has been argued, among others by Eden, that Stalin needed no encouragement to enter the war against Japan following the defeat of Nazi Germany. Indeed, on the eve of Yalta, George F. Kennan, then the Minister-Counselor of the U. Embassy at Moscow, wrote a prophetic letter to his friend, Chip Bohlen, expressing profound skepticism about the prospects for cooperating with the Soviets in postwar Europe.
Yet, especially given the general climate of public opinion in early , I find persuasive the broad counter—argument enunciated at the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies by scholar—diplomat John C.
As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. We can deal with it in our own way later. It may be useful to conclude this consideration of the FDR- Stalin relationship at the time of the Yalta Conference with the following points:. In the two months between the end of the conference and his death, he was confronted with several Soviet actions which must have weighed on his mind during the last weeks of his life.
These actions came in rapid succession shortly after he left the Crimean conference. One might speculate as to the reasons for the immediate post-Yalta actions by the Kremlin which aroused concern in both Washington and London. Nonetheless, it was probably unrealistic to expect that a man like Stalin would have credited this explanation grounded in the military facts of life confronting the German people in the early spring of Additionally, a reliable British source has recorded a noteworthy instance involving Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who was a member of the American delegation to the founding UN Conference in San Francisco.
She will now blackmail us again by threatening to withdraw from the U. Even allowing for the fact that FDR, the consummate politician, was speaking informally to Vandenberg, a leading Republican spokesman on foreign policy, there is still a ring of truth in this statement. Moreover, the question of his real intentions in the matter of Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR after the end of the war in Europe remains unclear. According to one source, on the day he left Washington, D.
For instance, as the British historian Robin Edmonds has speculated, FDR would have handled the announcement to Stalin of American possession of the atomic bomb differently than President Truman did at Potsdam. Or, put another way, he wished to defer any major decision on American relations with the USSR for the time being, especially as the atomic bomb had not yet been tested and Japan had still not been defeated.
All of which leads one to the question of why both FDR and Churchill were so eager to confer personally with Stalin that they traveled thousands of miles to meet the Soviet leader in places, in effect, chosen by him and very much closer to Moscow than to Washington or London. Louis Fischer has suggested that:. Roosevelt, pre-eminently, and Churchill too, loved the drama of great confrontation, especially with so powerful, and at that time so enigmatic, a figure as Stalin.
Few leaders can resist the limelight when there seems to be a chance to remake the world or at least to make history. I submit that a critical one was the key role of Stalin in all major Soviet decisions.
The record is replete with examples of the difficulty of getting subordinate officials to do or say anything without clearance from the Soviet dictator. No one but Stalin himself would do. Had we not gone into them, it is my guess that we would still be hearing reproachful voices saying: You claim that cooperation with Russia is not possible.
How do you know? You never even tried. It seems clear, for example, that FDR overestimated the power of the UK in the postwar period; one can speculate that this reaction was stimulated by his close wartime relationship with Churchill. He was not to live to see the overwhelming electoral defeat of Churchill in the UK elections held in the summer of Indeed, there are indications that the Kremlin on more than one occasion probed the possibility of such a peace, especially in the important period in between the German recapture of Kharkov in mid-March and early September.
While Hitler always declined to consider seriously a separate peace with the USSR, FDR could not have been certain of the refusal of the Nazi leader to take this step, which would have freed German power to concentrate on the struggle with the Western powers. Whatever the motives and calculations of FDR and Stalin, it is important to recall the basic dilemma confronting the American leader throughout most of the war. There was no possibility of a compromise peace with a man like Hitler, and the Western Allies, fighting Japan as well as Germany and Italy until late in , may not have had the military capability to defeat the Germans without total Soviet participation in the war against the Third Reich.
Anthony Eden, Memoirs — The Reckoning. See also Kennan, Memoirs , Chip Bohlen mistakenly wrote that the committee never met; Bohlen, Witness to History, Bohlen, Ibid. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, , Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Albert Resis. See also Bohlen, Witness to History , New York: Random House, , Cited in a letter from Ambassador Kennan to this writer dated January 17, See also Weinberg, A World at Arms, Schecter, Special Tasks.
Boston: Back Bay Books [Paper], , New York: Routledge, , For the massive Soviet espionage operations which kept Stalin informed about Western efforts to develop atomic weapons, see Sudoplatov, Special Tasks , , For the pitfalls involved in any effort by U.
New York: Penguin Books, , Djilas died in Belgrade on April 20, , and the Balkans in particular and the West in general lost an outstanding writer and a courageous man. New York: E. Dutton, Indeed, the thought that Stalin had, at the very least, pronounced paranoid tendencies has occurred to several Western biographers of the Soviet leader.
For greater details, see the outstanding two-volume biography of Stalin by Robert C. Harold Nicholson, Diaries and Letters London: Collins-Fontana Books, , New York: Pocket Books, , The Taft amendment was narrowly defeated, with Vice-President Truman casting the decisive vote. See, e. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, Washington, D. New Haven: Yale University Press, , Russell D. The conference was to convene at 4 p. Stalin arrived early, followed by Roosevelt, who brought in his wheelchair from his accommodation adjacent to the venue.
Roosevelt, who had traveled 7, miles 11, km to attend and whose health was already deteriorating, met Stalin for the first time. Churchill, walking with his General Staff from their accommodations nearby, arrived half an hour later. The U. Stalin agreed, but at a price: the U. The leaders then turned to the conditions under which the Western Allies would open a new front by invading northern France Operation Overlord , as Stalin had pressed them to do since Opening the meeting, Roosevelt and Churchill sought to ensure Soviet cooperation in achieving the Allies' war policies.
Stalin was willing to comply: However, in exchange, he demanded Allied support for his government and the partisans in Yugoslavia, as well as border adjustments in Poland. Agreeing to Stalin's demands, the meeting moved on to the planning of Operation Overlord D-Day and the opening of the second front in Western Europe. Though Churchill advocated for an expanded Allied push through the Mediterranean, Roosevelt who was not interested in protecting British imperial interests insisted that the invasion take place in France.
With the location settled, it was decided that the attack would come in May As Stalin had been advocating for a second front since , he was very pleased and felt that he had accomplished his principal goal for the meeting. Moving on, Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated.
As the conference began to wind down, Roosevelt, Churchill , and Stalin discussed the end of the war and reaffirmed their demand that only unconditional surrender would be accepted from the Axis Powers and that the defeated nations would be divided into occupation zones under the U. Other minor issues were dealt with before the conference's conclusion on Dec. Departing Tehran, the three leaders returned to their countries to enact the newly-decided war policies.
As would happen at Yalta in , Stalin was able to use Roosevelt's weak health and Britain's declining power to dominate the conference and achieve all of his goals. Among the concessions he gained from Roosevelt and Churchill was a shifting of the Polish border to the Oder and Neisse Rivers and the Curzon line.
He also gained de facto permission to oversee the establishment of new governments as countries in Eastern Europe were liberated.
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