PART 8 OF 8: ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA...YALTA

ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA

By GEORGE N. CROCKER

Earth is sick And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words Which States and Kingdom! utter when they talk Of truth and justice. 

WORDSWORTH

Chapter XV 

YALTA 

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT'S fourth inauguration was held on January 20, 1945. Three days later, the President boarded the cruiser Quincy. For several months his fondest dream, next to his reelection, had been another love feast with "Uncle Joe" Stalin, but now the Russian dictator had made it plain that if the President of the United States wanted to see him, he would have to trek to Russia to do it. The conference would be on the soil of the Soviet Union or nowhere. 

General John R. Deane, head of the American Military Mission in Moscow, had seen Americans, under White House policy, licking the Russians' boots ad nauseam for three years, but this troubled him more than anything. "No single event of the war irritated me more," he wrote in The Strange Alliance, "than seeing the President of the United States lifted from wheel chair to automobile, to ship, to shore, and to aircraft, in order to go halfway around the world as the only possible means of meeting J. V. Stalin." 

All of the President's advisers except Harry Hopkins opposed his going.1 Cocksure, ill-prepared, and, as at Tehran, with no strategy beyond his old obsession that the important thing was for Stalin to "like" him, he ignored them and went across the world to engage in an ostentatious spectacle of personal vanity and power which was to be his last. The Crimean, or Yalta, Conference was held in February. On April 12, Roosevelt died. 

Just before he left for Yalta, he received some momentous news at the White House. Secretary of War Stimson and General Leslie R. Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, which was secretly developing the first atomic bomb, informed him that the success of the A-bomb was"a 99 per cent certainty," that it "would probably be ready in August," and that it would be "extremely powerful."2 

If there were any lingering doubts that the United States, unaided, and without storming the Japanese homeland, would be able to blast Japan out of the war, this intelligence would probably have dissipated it. But there was no doubt in the minds of those best able to know, and Mr. Roosevelt knew this. Six months before, he had made a trip to Honolulu. There, on July 27 and 28, 1944, he had discussed the war in the Pacific for many hours with General Douglas MacArthur, who had flown up from Australia, and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the naval forces in the Pacific. MacArthur and Nimitz, in the presence of Admiral William D. Leahy, had told him that "Japan could be forced to accept our terms of surrender by the use of sea and air power without an invasion .of the Japanese homeland."3 Since then, what was left of the Japanese fleet had been crushed in the Battle of the Leyte Gulf in October, the Philippines had been retaken, B-29's were bombing Japan from Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, and Japanese peace feelers had been put out. 

When Roosevelt went to Yalta, he kept MacArthur and Nimitz far away. He asked them nothing, told them nothing. In view of what he did at Yalta, this would seem an incomprehensible neglect on his part to avail himself of the counsel of the two men most qualified to give it. The only explanation that makes any sense is that he already knew what their advice would be, that it was not compatible with his plans, and that he did not welcome having their opinions-overwhelmingly authoritative as they would be-presented. At this stage, elementary statesmanship, for the security of American interests in the Far East, required that the Soviet Union be, at almost any cost, dissuaded, discouraged, and forestalled from entering the war with Japan. Roosevelt went to Yalta and secretly did just the opposite.[The misery this one has caused DC] 

Millions of words have been written about Yalta. In a sense, the Tehran Conference was more critical, for there, Stalin and Roosevelt stacked the deck with which the game was played out at Yalta. But when they came together on the Russian shore of the Black Sea in February of 1945, they finalized decisions so malodorous-for slave labor, forcible repatriation of refugees, the uprooting of millions of human beings from their homes and lands, the breaking of pledges of the right of self-determination, and similar brutalities-that Yalta has become, more and more as each year passes, a symbol of international immorality. The reams of apologetics which the Roosevelt cultists have poured forth in an attempt to prevent the damage to their hero's reputation from becoming too devastating have had only a sparse and ephemeral success. Too much is known. The verdict of history is inevitable. 

The Yalta Papers, which the State Department at last released in March, 1955, are voluminous, but expurgated. Two department historians who worked on the compilation have exposed the pressure they were put under to "pretty up" the record and delete certain discreditable details in order to "shield" the Roosevelt administration;4 and Sir Winston Churchill opposed the publication in its entirety. But in one form or another, the story of Yalta, in all its essentials, is in the open. There are the notes of four of the American participants, Edward R. Stettinius, James F. Byrnes, Admiral Leahy, and Harry Hopkins, as well as the Bohlen transcripts, the Churchill memoirs, the Alan... brooke diary, and other sources, which, cumulatively, put the salient facts beyond challenge. No amount of varnish can alter the picture. 

It has been said, with some truth, that when Woodrow Wilson entered the cockpit of the peace conference at Versailles after World War I, he was a sheep among wolves. But if Wilson was sometimes naive, he was a meticulous scholar and was never casual. Roosevelt approached Yalta as if he were on a vacation. In fact, the Hopkins notes are frank enough to say: "I was sure the President would wind up by going to the Crimea, the primary reason being that it was a part of the world he had never visited and his adventurous spirit was forever leading him to go to unusual places and, on his part, the election being over, he would no longer be disturbed about it for political reasons."5 He rested much of the time on the Quincy's voyage across the Atlantic. James F. Byrnes, who was on board, was amazed at his lack of preparation for the forthcoming conference, although stacks of pertinent reports and data were on the ship. This worried Byrnes. 

Illness may have played a part. According to Stettinius, the President was in a bad state when he made his inaugural address on the porch of the White House on January 20. "That day he had seemed to tremble all over. It was not just his hands that shook, but his whole body as well."6 Stettinius found him "cheerful, calm, and quite rested" when the ship arrived at the island of Malta on February 2, or so he says in his book. But Admiral King later told Harry Hopkins that when he went aboard the Quincy that day and saw the President, he was "alarmed" at the state of his health and noted a deterioration since the inauguration.7 Even so, Sherwood assures us that Mr. Roosevelt was "as always buoyant and excited at the prospect of new adventures as he left the Quincy to make the rest of his journey by air." 

Churchill was already at Malta. Transport planes wafted the President and the Prime Minister and their entourages of some seven hundred people across the Aegean and Turkey and the Black Sea to Saki Airfield in the Crimea. Roosevelt flew in his luxurious new four-engine plane, the Sacred Cow, which was equipped with elevators. 

This, indeed, was the purple path of adventure. But a member of a U.S. Navy interpreting team at the Yalta Conference, who watched Roosevelt there and on one occasion acted as his personal Russian interpreter, was one American who had to smother his disgust. He felt, he tells us, that President Roosevelt "had no business" at the conference. His layman's diagnosis was a simple one: "He looked sick, he acted sick and he talked sick."8 

The President's daughter, Mrs. Anna Boettiger, was on this trip, and Sarah Churchill accompanied her father, as did Mr. Harriman's daughter, Kathleen. Back in Washington, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was knee deep in Left Wing politics. As a post-election whimsy, the President had made one of the most anomalous nominations ever sent to the Senate for confirmation, that of Henry A. Wallace to be Secretary of Commerce. Wallace had become so closely entangled with pro-Communist elements in the country that resistance to his appointment was strong even within the Democratic party. This so moved Mrs. Roosevelt that she sent two urgent messages to her husband (he was on the Quincy at the time) advising him what steps he should take to get the Wallace nomination through a reluctant Senate. By the time Admiral Leahy published his memoirs in 1950, he felt free to divulge this confidence and to add ruefully that the attitudes of Mrs. Roosevelt and Mr. Wallace "were at that time not very different" and appeared to him to be "about equally impracticable." Obviously, five thousand miles did not put Mr. Roosevelt out of the indefatigable First Lady's range. 

Yalta had been a favorite watering place of the aristocracy in the days of the Czars. Wooded slopes drop down·from the Crimean highlands to the beaches of the Black Sea. President Roosevelt and his retinue were domiciled in Livadia Palace, built as the summer home of Nicholas II. The British were housed in Vorontsov Villa at Alupka, twelve miles away, and the Russians occupied the Koreis Palace, which once belonged to Prince Yusupov, midway between. Churchill was not going to pop in on Roosevelt in his bathrobe this time. It was a hard and circuitous drive from Alupka to Livadia. One had to go through Koreis. 

The Soviet secret police (N.K.V.D) were everywhere and were under the personal command of the notorious Commissar L. P. Beria, who was destined to be denounced as a monster and executed after Stalin's death. Beria's duties at Yalta were, no doubt, exacting but not unpleasant. For example, he had the opportunity to jolly up with Roosevelt, Mrs. Boettiger, Secretary of State Stettinius, and the others at a dinner, at the Russian headquarters, which included twenty courses and forty-five toasts.9 Also draining vodka at this wassail were Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the grisly public prosecutor at the liquidation purge trials Stalin had staged from 1935 to 1939, and V. M. Molotov, who in August of 1939 had contrived with Hitler's von Ribbentrop the unholy pact which signaled the start of World War II. Such a feeling of fraternity welled up in Mr. Roosevelt, in the company of Marshal Stalin and Messrs. Beria, Vishinsky, and Molotov, that he offered a particularly saccharine toast in which he observed that the atmosphere at the dinner was "that of a family."[He was a damn wingnut by now DC]

The plenary sessions of the conference were held in the ball room of Livadia Palace. The ownership of this palace had changed since it was built by the Romanovs, but did the aims and ambitions of the new owners differ much from those of its former masters? Wilmot remarks that the only significant difference was that the men who now sought to fulfill Russia's imperial destiny were more ruthless and more powerful. Elliott Roosevelt tells of his father's private tirades against British "colonialism," but there is not a word to suggest any fear of or distaste for international Communism. In fact, among the dramatis personae of Elliott's book, As He Saw It, Churchill is more of a villain than Stalin. This is virtually the theme of the book. Stalin. comes through an unscathed hero; Churchill is badly tarnished. 

This is vital to an understanding of Yalta. President Roosevelt, and, of course, Harry Hopkins, too, cherished an implacable fixation that the Bolsheviks who ruled Russia were men of good will and that their expansionist aspirations, which were plainly evident, boded no evil for Europe and the world. Whether this was a sincere conviction based on a rational process, or a "peculiar aberration,"as Wilmot calls it, or sheer hypocrisy, may be a Freudian puzzle. However, that these two men knew that the Soviet Union was winning its battle to become the "dominant" power in Europe and that they embraced this concept with complete equanimity is not open to question. As we have seen, this was down in black and white as early as the First Quebec Conference in 1943. 

Throughout the war period, Roosevelt deliberately. put on blinders when any fact derogatory to the Russians turned up. Thus in April, 1943, he had scoffed when John Franklin Carter presented him a special intelligence report casting upon the Russians the guilt for the massacre of fifteen thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, and he had shown acid displeasure in May, 1944, when former Governor of Pennsylvania George H. Earle, who had been Minister to Austria and Bulgaria and Special Envoy to Turkey, brought to the White House documents and photographs attesting Russian guilt in that cold.. blooded atrocity. On March 24, 1945, two weeks before he died, Roosevelt wrote a letter to Earle, then a commander in the Navy, expressly forbidding him to publish an article contending that Russia was a greater menace than Nazi Germany. He suppressed the article and had Earle shipped off to Samoa.10 

The pro-Russian atmosphere in Washington-so hard to combat because the President himself, his wife, and his most intimate friend were at the center of it-was galling to many, including the frustrated Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal. His diaries reveal that in September, 1944, he had written to a friend that "if any American suggests that we act in accord with our own interests, he is apt to be called a ... Fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe suggests that he needs the Baltic provinces, half of Poland, all of Bessarabia and access to the Mediterranean, all hands in Washington agree that he is a fine, frank, candid and generally delightful fellow." Such was the frame of mind Roosevelt took to Yalta. 

Roosevelt also took Harry Hopkins. Harry was ill and missed some of the festivities, but the President consulted him on everything. He prompted Roosevelt with scribbled little messages at the conference table. 

As we examine the opinions Hopkins entertained about the motherland of Communism, we find a quagmire of wild nonsense. He had lost all objectivity; the words seem childish. His mirage stayed bright in his eyes until his death a year after Yalta. It seems incredible that in August, 1945, any informed man could have written this: "We know or believe that Russia's interests, so far as we can anticipate them, do not afford an opportunity for a major difference with us in foreign affairs." Germany had surrendered in May, Stalin had dishonored his Yalta promises before the ink was dry, and the black shadow of a new and ghastly tyranny had descended over eastern Europe. Yet this palpable absurdity was dictated to a stenographer by the man who for several years had been the chief adviser of the President of the United States.11 And of the Russian people, whose minds had been drugged by the Bolsheviks for twenty eight years and who had no traditions of freedom nor experience in democracy in their entire national history, he added that they "think and act just like you and I do." Any college freshman should have known better. 

James F. Byrnes was a new face in the American delegation. He had resigned from the Supreme Court to aid in the war effort and was Director of Mobilization when the President invited him to go "on this trip to the Crimea." As for affecting the outcome, he might just as well have stayed home. In fact, he was sent home before the important last day of the conference, on which the agreements were drafted and signed. 

Byrnes was kept in the dark about many things that happened at Yalta. Although in his book, Speaking Frankly, he makes a half-hearted attempt to lift his old chief out of the mire (for Roosevelt had honored him with high appointments), he takes pains to dissociate himself from the sordid aspects. Thus he did not know of the agreement condoning slave labor. That relapse into the barbarism of past ages was not discussed when he was present. "Had I known it," he writes, "I would have urged the President to oppose the inclusion in the protocol of any provision for the use of large groups of human beings as enforced or slave laborers." Nor was he let in on the secret agreement which bribed Russia, with Japanese and Chinese territory, to enter the war in the Pacific. "When the President returned, he did not mention it to me and the protocol was kept locked in his safe at the White House." 

There was another new face at Yalta. It was the handsome face of the new Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius. Unfortunately, Mr. Stettinius, whose tenure was not long, will not go down in history as one of the strong incumbents of that office. In fact, as Sherwood explains, Hopkins had instigated his appointment for the very reason that he would be a willing nonentity. Byrnes had been passed over because Roosevelt wanted to be his own Secretary of State, with Hopkins at his side, and it was doubted that Byrnes would fit into the role of "a mere mouthpiece."12 

Three State Department "experts"-H. Freeman Matthews, Alger Hiss, and Wilder Foote-had been assigned to accompany Stettinius. Whittaker Chambers had tried to warn the government against Hiss, but in vain. (The F.B.I. was to learn, in the Canadian espionage cases that grew out of the disclosures of Igor Guzenko, that it was known in the office of the Soviet military attache in Canada that the Russians had an agent who was an assistant to Secretary of State Stettinius in the early part of 1945. In 1949, Hiss was convicted of perjury, for denying that he had supplied secret State Department documents to a Communist spy ring. Unmasked at last, he was sent to prison.) Alger Hiss himself testified before a Congressional committee that "it is an accurate and not immodest statement to say that I helped formulate the Yalta agreement to some extent." Indeed he did.13 Some of his handwritten notes at the Yalta Conference went back and forth between President Roosevelt and himself.14 At the plenary sessions, the three heads of state and the senior officials sat at a great round table.·Where was Alger Hiss? He sat with Harry Hopkins behind the President.15 

En route to Yalta, Secretary Stettinius, with Hiss, Matthews, and Foote, made a little side trip. Lured perhaps by the ideal North African winter climate, they flew from the Azores to Marrakech, Morocco, where the sumptuous Villa Taylor was at their disposal. There they went over all the questions that might arise at Yalta and decided what they would recommend to President Roosevelt. The treatment of Germany, the boundaries of Poland, the future of the Balkan States, the revision of Turkish control of the Dardanelles to insure Russian access to the Mediterranean, the admission of Communists into a coalition government in China-all of these topics were explored in the warm sunshine, and concise answers were written down for the President's convenience. After four days devoted to reformation of the world, they flew to Naples to meet Harry Hopkins before proceeding on their trip to Yalta. After all, one did not tinker with the future of mankind without checking in frequently with Harry. Thus briefed, with the tutoring of Alger Hiss and Harry Hopkins fresh in his ears, the neophyte Stettinius was now considered ready to go through his act, as the American opposite number to crusty, crafty Russian Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. It was never intended that he should have much to say, but at least he would not say the wrong thing. The rubber stamp was well inked. 
(There has been a studied attempt to cleanse the Yalta Conference of the Hiss taint. His notes are still suppressed, and from reading what the State Department has published, one would suppose that Hiss was there only to carry the Secretary's briefcase. Such, of course, is far from the truth. Byrnes saw him "frequently consulted by Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Stettinius" in the conference room. "Hiss performed brilliantly throughout ... the Yalta Conference," wrote Stettinius. This is not the way one compliments a mere flunky. This particular praise, moreover, was not undeserved. Alger Hiss was, indeed, quite a performer.) 

Yalta, of course, was Stalin's show. He was the star. At the conference table, he was at once the most blunt and the most subtle. As a host, he overwhelmed his impressionable guests with lavish care, so that Churchill telegraphed home that the Russians' "prodigality exceeds belief." On one occasion some... body said casually that there was no lemon peel in the cocktails. The next day, a lemon tree, loaded with fruit, was in the hall,brought from far away by air. Mesmerized from the start, Roosevelt presented a spectacle that can only be described as pitiful this fading President, floating slowly out of this life, outmatched and outwitted at every point, mouthing meaningless cliches, and dripping with flummery in the presence of the dictator. 

How did the host of Yalta look in the flesh? "He has got an unpleasantly cold, crafty, cruel face," wrote Alanbrooke in his diary, "and whenever I look at him I can imagine his sending off people to their doom without turning a hair. On the other hand, there is no doubt he has a quick brain." 

To call the Yalta Conference "one of the biggest drunken brawls I ever saw,"16 as did one of the American interpreters, who observed more than one participant helped out, in a stupor, from the banquet table, is no doubt an extravagance. To say that an alcoholic atmosphere pervaded it is more felicitous. Stalin, and even Molotov, and the square-faced, stubble-topped generals and commissars in the Russian contingent could be genial when it served their purpose, even to the British, about whom they always had some reservations. Certainly they were more accomplished consumers of vodka and champagne than their British and American guests, who, by all accounts, brought to the festivities of this eight-day Saturnalia a do-or-die spirit, if inadequate preparation for such rugged competition. 

On these occasions the toasts proposed by Churchill and Roosevelt were long, windy speeches, Churchill's being excruciatingly eloquent and Roosevelt's alarmingly rambling. Stalin could easily see that the Americans present, taking their cue from the President, were eager to lap up his every word and exalt him. Naturally, he played on this credulity. Sly and disarming, he was an expert at the Communists' forensic device of giving special emphasis to an assertion of which the exact opposite was the real truth. "I am talking as an old man; that is why I am talking so much," he said at a dinner at the Yusupov·Palace on the eighth.

"But I want to drink to our alliance.... In the history of diplomacy I know of no such close alliance.... In an alliance the allies should not deceive each other. Perhaps this is naive? Experienced diplomatists may say, 'Why should I not deceive my ally?' But I as a naive man think it is best not to deceive my ally even if he is a fool." Yet no man at the table could have doubted that Stalin would make an alliance with the Devil, or with angels, if it would be to his advantage, or break it whenever it suited him. Even at this moment, he was scheming with Roosevelt to pounce on the Japanese, with whom he had agreed in writing not to do so and was bound by a treaty of friendship. 

Drinking-bout diplomacy had served the Russians well. They had discovered the American weakness for conviviality and had been exploiting it with consummate skill. General Deane, as American attache in Moscow, had seen enough. Fed up at last, he had written to Washington two months before Yalta as follows: 

I have sat at innumerable Russian banquets and become gradually nauseated by Russian food, vodka, and protestations of friendship. Each person high in public life proposes a toast a little sweeter than the preceding one on Soviet-British-American friendship. It is amazing how these toasts go down past the tongues in the cheeks. After the banquets we send the Soviets another thousand airplanes, and they approve a visa that has been hanging fire for months. We then scratch our heads to see what other gifts we can send, and they scratch theirs to see what else they can ask for.17 

General Deane had also learned from experience that to a Communist, "the party of the second part is either a shrewd trader to be admired or a sucker to be despised." He had so reported to Washington, with the warning that the Americans should get off the sucker list. But at Yalta, the Russians were still playing the old game, and the Americans were still straining to show what uncritical, trusting, jolly fellows they were.

At the end, there was, as usual, a communique. Who drafted it? Admiral Leahy says the draft was "prepared by Secretary of State Stettinius." Stettinius does not say that, but we do learn in his book that Alger Hiss was his expert in "wording." We also learn that "while the communique was being drafted, the Prime Minister gave a dinner." That was on the night of February 10, the last night. Since Stettinius himself was at the dinner, it must be presumed that Mr. Hiss was hard at work. 

By Stettinius's appraisal, the dinner was "excellent" and the evening "historic." Stalin had his guards posted at the Vorontsov Villa hours ahead. Churchill staged the affair with pomp and opulence, from the cocktails before a glowing fire in the fireplace to the inevitable succession of toasts. Lest it be thought that no serious business was transacted in the alcoholic milieu of these banquets, Stettinius reveals that Stalin, who had been rebuffed that afternoon on the reparations question, brought the subject up again at this dinner party and won an important concession. 

The President seems to have been in a rather garrulous mood that night, touching on a wide range of subjects, including constitutions. Chiding Churchill for "always talking about what the British Constitution allowed and what it did not allow," he informed the Prime Minister that actually there was no constitution and added that an unwritten constitution was better than a written one.18 No doubt this dissertation was amusing, if academic, to "Uncle Joe," to whom nothing could have been less restraining than a constitution, written or unwritten. 

The Big Three and their advisers met briefly at noon the next day in Livadia Palace to go over the public communique and the secret protocol which embodied their conclusions. After making slight revisions, they all repaired to the dining room. "While the formal papers were being prepared," Admiral Leahy relates, "the final luncheon was held."The historic documents, which were to have an impact upon the balance of the twentieth century and which condemned millions of human beings to homelessness and other millions to slavery or death, were signed as a luncheon divertissement in an atmosphere perfumed with rich gravy and wine. "During the meal, the formal papers were brought in and the final report and communique signed by the three principals." 

The German nation was to be dismembered. The details were referred to a committee, but this much was settled,a huge chunk was to be torn off and given to Poland as a sop for the mayhem to be performed on that unhappy country; some choice morsels, such as the city of Konigsberg, were to be donated to the Soviet Union outright; and the rest of eastern Germany was to be spread-eagled for forced Communization by Russian masters, since occupation by the Red Army meant nothing less than that. How and when this nightmare would ever end was too unpleasant a subject to be faced at Yalta. Technically, the exact western Polish boundary was to he fixed at "the Peace Conference." This was a way of deferring the blame. Actually, the present OderNeisse line was, roughly, the demarcation contemplated at Yalta. 

Ten million Germans were doomed to be turned out of their homes and set out on the roads to flee westward, for all of the territories to be detached were ethnically German. East Prussia, Pomerania, and Brandenburg had never in six hundred years even been under dispute, with the exception of the Marienwerder and Allenstein districts of East Prussia, in which, in plebiscites held in 1919 in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles, the population had voted, by large majorities, to remain with Germany. Konigsberg had never been Russian. Founded by the Teutonic Order in 1255, it was sentimentally revered as a-fountainhead of German learning and the birthplace of Germany's greatest philosopher, Immanuel Kant.. The city of Breslau, in Silesia, had won independence from Poland in 1163, had been destroyed by the Mongols in 1241, had risen from the ashes as a Germanic city, and had remained such ever since. Its cathedral, its Kreuzkirche, its church of St. Elizabeth, with its fine stained glass and Cranach's portrait of Martin Luther, are part of Germany's heritage of religion and art, while its SchweidnitzerKeller has been celebrated in the lore and song of German-speaking people since 1355. As big as San Francisco, it was the chief industrial center of eastern Germany. It is not extravagant to say that Konigsberg and Breslau had been Germanic cities almost as long as London had been English. 

What followed Yalta was a mass expulsion which Churchill himself was impelled to allude to as "tragedy on a prodigious scale." Actually, never in history, even·in the worst of pagan times, has there been such a millionfold uprooting of human beings. By the fall of 1945, shocked voices in England were heard to say that it was the most enormous official atrocity in all of the world's history, and Churchill admitted in the House of Commons in August that the land grab, "comprising as it does one-quarter of the arable land of Germany, is not a good augury for the future of Europe." 

Reparations were to be exacted from the rest of Germany "in kind," said the communique. This meant factories, locomotives, goods, etc. The secret protocol added that reparations were to include human labor. This was, as Byrnes said when he learned of it, an authorization for forced or slave labor, which it was known the Russians intended to impose but which was, of course, abhorrent to the American people. Franklin D. Roosevelt had always taken pains to pose as a humanitarian, so it is not surprising that no inkling of this item of the Yalta agreements was allowed to creep into the public announcements. 

Poland also was to be dismembered. Some eleven million people who lived east of the so-called Curzon Line in prewar Poland were to be surrendered to the Soviet Union without any semblance of a plebiscite. Thus Roosevelt, Stalin,·and Churchill decreed Soviet annexation of almost half of Poland's territory and about one-third of her population. Roosevelt weakly proposed that Stalin allow Poland to keep LWQW and the nearby oil fields. He was as aware as Stalin was that the Drohobycz oil region was essential to the Polish economy, but he showed his hand too quickly. "He pointed out," says Stettinius, "that he was merely suggesting this for consideration rather than insisting on. it." Naturally, the dictator scooped up all the chips. 

The Polish government-in-exile, under which whole regiments of Poles were fighting valiantly for the Western powers in Italy and on the western front, was now betrayed, and the Lublin Committee,a group of Polish Communists domiciled for years in Moscow, where they had been trained in Stalin's tough school for the task of administering Poland, was described in the communique as "the present Provisional Government of Poland." This meant the surrender of Poland to Communism. For four days Churchill fought against this faithlessness, but his American colleague would not stick to his guns with him. Sharp differences between Churchill and Stalin came to the surface on the first day this subject was discussed. That evening, the President made a fatal move. He compromised his independence ,by sending a letter to Stalin in which he announced: "I am determined there shall be no breach between ourselves and the Soviet Union." With that statement he admitted that if Stalin made an issue of Poland, the United States would give way. 

Thus fortified, Stalin tossed to the Prime Minister and the President only some high-sounding words to take home. He agreed that the puppet provisional government would be "reorganized" by the inclusion of "democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad," but he refused to mention names. Since in Communist diction Communists were "democratic," this was a hollow promise. He also agreed that "free and unfettered elections" would be held. If, as we suspect, the men at the conference table-who were, surely, not insensitive to·the incongruous-found' it necessary to suppress smiles at this, the fact is not recorded; yet the scene is not without humor. Such elections had never been held by the Communists in Russia or elsewhere, and it could not have been seriously expected that they were about to be held in Poland unqer Stalin's hand-picked cabal and the occupying Red Army, particularly since it was specified that only "democratic and anti-Nazi parties" would have the right to put up candidates, and, in the Marx-Lenin-Stalin tradition of interpretation, only pro-Russian, pro-Communist, anti-capitalist political elements could possibly merit that description. 

The British demanded that the elections be under the supervision of the American, British, and Soviet Ambassadors. Stalin bluntly rejected this, arguing that it would be an affront to the pride and sovereignty of the Poles! When, at the end, Eden, knowing that an unsupervised election would be a mockery, endeavored to insist upon this safeguard, Stettinius announced that Roosevelt was willing to eliminate it, saying "the President was anxious to reach agreement and that to expedite matters he was willing to make this concession." Freedom in Poland was doomed. Admiral Leahy quickly recognized the loosely worded Polish formula as a "phony." He spoke up before it was signed. "Mr. President," said Leahy, "this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it." Roosevelt said he knew that.19 

One Russian coup at Yalta which would have titillated Machiavelli was the wording of the "Declaration on Liberated Europe." Surely a deft hand was at work here. The net result was to liberate Russia from the·restrictions of the Atlantic Charter. The Third Point of the Charter had declared for the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.. Its solemn wish was "to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them." Now this language did not please Stalin at Yalta. What about Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which independent countries he had already swallowed up? And Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary? He had his own plans for them as his Red forces clenched their talons on the frightened populations of eastern Europe. 

They should take who have the power, 

And they should keep who can. 

These words of the poet were more congenial to Stalin than the Golden Rule. So when Point Three was lifted out·of. the Charter and put into the new Declaration on Liberated Europe, a remarkable grafting operation was performed. There is strong circumstantial evidence that Dr. Hiss had something to do with the plastic surgery, with Dr. Hopkins and Dr. Molotov as consultants. Be that as it may, the final product, a subtle transformation, emerged as part of the Yalta version of the Frankenstein monster. The words "by the aggressor nations" were inserted after the clause "to those who have been forcibly deprived of them." And it was made clear by the context that "the aggressor nations" were Germany and Italy, period. This neatly excluded all Russian depredations, past and future. 

Then there followed some unctuous phrases about assisting the "liberated" states to hold free elections and establish democratic governments, but these things were to he done in "con.. cert" and "jointly" and only when "in the opinion of the three governments" (U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R.) conditions "make such action necessary." The loophole nullified the whole Declaration, as far as it might ever circumscribe the Russian "liberators." In effect, the Western powers were agreeing not to lift a finger for freedom in eastern Europe without the consent of the Soviet Union. 

It was also arranged that the permanent "United Nations" body would be impotent to interfere effectually with the incipient Communist empire. At Yalta the veto was agreed upon, and Roosevelt acceded to Stalin's preposterous demand that the Soviet Union have three votes in the General Assembly. The State Department's "specialist" on setting up the United Nations was none other than Alger Hiss. In fact, he was slated to become the spark plug and presiding officer at its organizing convention in April. To a man of Stalin's foresight, the potentialities which this new polyglot conglomeration of nationalism's and basically disunited world factions would furnish to Soviet tacticians for propaganda and mischief were obvious. (Its very name was fraudulent from the beginning. The world has since split into old..fashioned military alliances, such as NATO, SEATO, the Warsaw Pact and the Baghdad Pact.) 

As for Roosevelt, he was floating in a cloudland of self-delusion. Intoxicated with the name "United Nations," he actually professed to believe that alliances, military pacts, and balances of power were things of the past. Slyly, the Russians encouraged this fantasy, all the while making sure that the balance of power in Europe and Asia would be well tipped in Russia's favor. 

A dark moral blot upon the Yalta. record was the promise to Stalin that the Russian nationals rounded up by the Americans and British in Germany, France, and Italy would be deported to Russia,.by force if necessary. There were about two million of these. Some had been captured by the Germans; others had voluntarily fled from Communism early in the war. Many were found in German uniforms, but others were civilian escapees who wanted only to find freedom. Most of them begged not to be sent back to Russia, knowing their fate would be the firing squad or Siberian slave camps. 

The State Department had decided to disallow forcible repatriation and abide by the provisions of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, but a message was dispatched to Washington from Yalta overruling this decision. As a consequence, when the war ended, a sickening drama was enacted. All·the Russians were herded indiscriminately-screaming, in tears, at bayonet point or dragged bodily-into boxcars and sent to Russia. Not the slightest attention was paid to the Geneva Convention, the doctrine of asylum, or the humane regard for individual choice which had ameliorated man's cruelty in less barbarous years. The gruesome spectacle was singed in memory, but not until ten years later, when the State Department published the so-called "Yalta Papers," was it known for sure that this unholy crime against humanity had been connived at Yalta. The contemporary publicity was silent about it. 

It was also silent about any furtive promise by Roosevelt to Stalin to let the Russian army reach Berlin and Prague first. Yet, as we have seen, President Benes of Czechoslovakia was convinced there was one. So was General George S. Patton, who was ordered to halt his troops only a dash from the Czech capital to allow the Russian army time to "liberate" the city and seize two of the biggest prizes in Europe: the vast Skoda munitions works and the uranium deposits at Jachymov. 

Patton's deductions were not likely to be erroneous on a point so tender·to him. However, the full details of the humiliating checkrein put on Patton at Pilsen and Bradley's strange sit-down at the lightly defended Elbe River, with Berlin only fifty-three miles away and his own American patrols in its suburbs, remain obscure to this day. Eisenhower's utterances on the subject have been guarded and divergent. It is definitely known that Churchill considered the capture of Berlin and Prague by the Western Allies to be a matter of transcendent postwar importance and that his stern pleas struck no spark in Roosevelt. Eisenhower's final battle plans were drawn up in March, the month after Yalta. They left Berlin and Prague to the Russians. Without getting British approval or even mentioning the subject to Air Chief Marshal Tedder, his deputy, he sent his plans by a direct telegram to Stalin for clearance on March 28.20 Naturally, Stalin approved them with alacrity. It is hardly plausible that Eisenhower would have followed such a course and made such a decision without word from the highest level. Churchill was furious and protested at once to both Eisenhower and the President, but in vain. Churchill's messages to Roosevelt on April I and April 5 were pathetic entreaties, serious warnings.21 It was "a pity," he said, that Eisenhower had sent the telegram to Stalin. "I say quite frankly that Berlin remains of high strategic importance." He might as well have been shouting at a tree. 

Of this period, Churchill writes in his memoirs: 

The United States stood on the scene of victory, master of world fortunes, but without a true and coherent design. Britain, though still very powerful, could not act decisively alone. I could at this stage only warn and plead. Thus this ... was to me a most unhappy time. I moved amid cheering crowds ... with an aching heart and a mind oppressed by forebodings.22 

Churchill knew the secret, too-the secret in the White House closet, the face of reality which Roosevelt and Hopkins had kept in murky banishment through three years of artifice and propaganda. Three wars were raging, not one. One of them was the expansionist onslaught of Communist imperialism, the Juggernaut of the twentieth century, the rapacious destroyer which Selwyn Lloyd has described as "a horse of strange parentage, by Karl Marx out of Catherine the Great." It was in this war that Roosevelt refused to man the ramparts, leaving Churchill a lonely figure, impotent to act alone. Thus the paradox: the moment of "victory" was for Churchill "a most unhappy time." Veiled by the temperance of his words is a branding accusation which history will not overlook. The discretion of a statesman permitted him to say no more at the time. 

After lunch on the afternoon of February 8, Stalin and Roosevelt, like two arch-conspirators slinking off to hatch the direst plot of all, vanished behind the locked doors of a room in Livadia Palace. At the President's request, Churchill was not there. Roosevelt knew what to expect: the Russian dictator was to state his price for entering the war against Japan at some time in the future. An old-fashioned, ante bellum secret deal, like those that had turned the stomach of Woodrow Wilson when they came to light at Versailles after World War I, was about to be made. Roosevelt brought only Averell Harriman, and Stalin brought Molotov. Two interpreters were present. 

Why Harriman? It happened that he was one of the few Americans who knew of Roosevelt's resolve not only to allow Russia to intrude into the Pacific war at the eleventh hour, which would have been injudicious enough, but even to coax her-yes, bribe her-to do so. Roosevelt had made him Ambassador to Russia after Ambassador Standley, a retired admiral, had been recalled for blurting out to American reporters the embarrassing fact that the Soviet government was keeping from the Russian people the knowledge that it was receiving vast quantities of aid from America.23 The suave New Yorker was not likely to commit such an indiscretion. 

One of Harriman's assignments had been to act as messenger in the business of selling the Japanese War to Stalin. So in October, 1944, he had called upon the dictator in Moscow, bringing him a portrait of Roosevelt as a present, and he had conceived this a fitting occasion to ·broach the subject. Since Stalin had already, at Tehran and before, given his firm assurance that he would come in after Germany was defeated, this too-eager salesmanship on the part of the American Ambassador no doubt had opened up in the Russian's mind a green vista of grandiose profit and loot. "These simpletons," we can imagine him thinking as he listened to the Ambassador's cultivated cadences and observed his deferential manner, "are actually entreating me to say I will do what I have three times promised to do, and what I would be a'fool not to do when the, time comes, for the simple reason that it will be to my own advantage to do it. Here is my 'chance to make hay,," For then he had blandly asked that the United States furnish supplies and equipment for a Russian Far East force of 1,500,000 men, including 3,000 tanks, 75,000 motor vehicles and 5,000 airplanes. Harriman, who had been given his instructions, had smilingly agreed on, the spot, and Stalin had said he would enter the war against Japan about three months after the German surrender (well knowing, as they must all have, that by that time, Japan would have little or no fight left in her). In the following months, 860,410 tons of dry cargo and 206,000 tons of liquid cargo were·extracted from American arsenals and depots to build up Soviet military power in the Far East, and this flow, to be transported in a hundred American ships, was just starting when Rooseveltsat down with Stalin at Yalta.24 

Here, sensing Roosevelt's mood, Stalin quickly perceived that the time was ripe to make more hay. Why be bashful? He would not only demand some Japanese territory, but he would,more importantly, ask for the key to the political and economic mastery of Manchuria, the industrialized powerhouse of China. In short, he would present a preliminary blueprint for the Communist conquest of China, which, following the familiar tenets of Lenin and himself, meant the eventual mobilization of her manpower and resources for war against the capitalist democracies. To give a farcical twist to America's war with Japan, he would insure that its only results would be the reversal of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the replacement of a Japanese hegemony in China by a Russian one, all paid,for by the blood and money of the childlike Americans, who knew not what' they were doing. 

So, although he had at least three times previously promised to enter the Japanese War, Stalin·now, for the first time, laid down his conditions. Behind the closed doors of the room in Livadia Palace, he named his price to the President of the United States. It was high. At the expense of Japan, Russia was to annex South Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. At the expense of China, Russia was to gain possession of Dairen as an "international" port and the naval base of Port Arthur under a long-term. lease; the Manchurian railroads were to be put. under a "Soviet-Chinese Company" which was to safeguard "the pre-eminent interests of the Soviet Union"; and "the status...quo in Outer Mongolia'' (which by infiltration and pressure had been turned into a puppet of the Soviet Union) was to be preserved. Obviously, no part of this price was Roosevelt's to give. And such back-room trading was a butchery of the Atlantic Charter. 

The President of the United States might have withdrawn from the room, stung by the insolence of Stalin's presumptions. Or he might, at the least, have politely demurred on grounds of principle and changed the subject. But Mr. Roosevelt did neither. He agreed to everything. He guaranteed that the price would be paid. Stalin agreed only that "in two or three months after Germany has surrendered ... the Soviet Union shall enter the war against Japan." (She entered it six days before Japan surrendered and two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Her contribution to Japan's defeat was nil.) 

It had been known since the days of Theodore Roosevelt that whoever controls the Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian railroads dominates Manchuria. Surely Franklin Roosevelt knew it. Whether he was also aware that the United States Navy had its eye on the Kuriles as the site for a base to shield both Japan and North America from Russia in the uncertain future is not known,25 but a glance at a map would have told him why Stalin wanted them. They stretch, like a giant armada,from Hokkaido into the North·Pacific. They lie athwart the shortest route between Japan and Alaska. Yet on that Thursday afternoon at Yalta, Roosevelt lightly handed .them to Stalin. "I like this man," he had said to Frances Perkins, "and I want to keep on good terms with him." (The Kuriles are now Russian submarine bases.) 

After the secret came out, a predecessor of Harriman's as Ambassador to Russia, William C. Bullitt, who, like Standley, had tried in vain to dispel Roosevelt's hallucinations about the Soviet regime, wrote a chilling article entitled "How We Won the War and Lost the Peace."26 In it, he held up the Yalta deal so that it could be seen in perspective: 

At Yalta ... President Roosevelt broke the pledge which he had made to the Chinese government at Cairo and-secretly, behind the back of China-signed ... an agreement by which the vital rights of China in Manchuria were sacrificed to Soviet imperialism. By this secret agreement Roosevelt gave to the Soviet Union not only "preeminent interests" in the great Manchurian port of Dairen and full control of the great naval base which protects it, Port Arthur, but also "pre-eminent interests" in the railroads which lead from the Soviet Union to Dairen and split Manchuria from the northwest to the south. 

In view of Roosevelt's Cairo pledge that Manchuria would be restored to China this secret agreement was entirely dishonorable. It was also potentially disastrous not only to China but also to the United States, because it gave Stalin a deadly instrument.... 

As an additional payment for this repetition of his promise to fight Japan, Stalin persuaded the President at Yalta to agree that the Communist state which he had set up in the Chinese province of Outer Mongolia should be permanently detached from China, and that the southern part of Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands, which cut the great circle airplane route from Alaska to Japan, should be annexed by the Soviet Union. 

The agreement ... was kept secret from the American people ... not even Mr. Byrnes knew it existed. And the exhausted President returned from Yalta to Washington amid the almost unanimous applause of his bamboozled fellow countrymen. 

The stunning thing is that Roosevelt's action was utterly willful. There was no force majeure pressing on him. He faced no  Hobson's choice. He should have spurned what he was bargaining for even if it had been tendered as a gift. 

It has been said, and uncritically repeated, that Roosevelt acted on General Marshall's advice in order to save American lives in a house-to-house invasion of Japan by inducing the Russians to engage Japanese forces in Manchuria. That is the Stettinius version, for example. After the war, Stettinius tossed the hot potato to Marshall. Washing his own hands, he wrote: "The Far Eastern agreement was not handled by the State Department.... The President ... in signing ... acted on the advice of his military advisers." But when Marshall was called to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he dropped the hot potato. Of the Yalta "arrangements," he said, "I personally was unaware of them." Then, according to the stenographic report: 

REPRESENTATIVE WALTER H. JUDD: Was it considered necessary ••• that we promise her [Russia] control of the ports and railroads in Manchuria...? 

GENERAL MARSHALL: As I say, I never saw those things. I never saw them and they were never published.27 

It is true that in earlier months Marshall had given.lip service to the propaganda theme, nurtured by the White House and Left Wing groups, that America needed the Soviet Union in the Pacific war. Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias, who was Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, was amazed, when he came to Washington in the fall of 1944, to find a lack of disposition there, particularly in the Office of War Information, to depart from the "line" that Japan was capable of prolonging the war for several more years. He explains: "It was due undoubtedly to directives and instructions received from other and higher quarters that this line was taken."28 It was because of these political undercurrents that nothing was done to exploit the. opportunities to bring about a quick Japanese surrender. 

In the summer of 1944, .the cabinet of the bellicose Hideki Tojo had fallen. His successor, Kuniaki Koiso, for the first time brought the army and navy heads into a responsible relationship with the civilian authorities. The progressive decline of Japan's stocks of aircraft, oil, steel, and coal made the end just a question of time. u.s. Naval Intelligence saw the situation clearly: the Japanese had lost their gamble, they knew they had lost, and they longed for a way to quit, if only they could keep their emperor. The secret branch of the Navy which operated under the code name of OP-I&'W, which had intelligence reports from all over the world, was "frankly opposed," as were all echelons of the Navy, to Russian participation in the Pacific war.29 The same thinking was prevalent in Military Intelligence as well, regardless of whatever posture General Marshall may have assumed.30 

Although an irreverent fellow-officer has said that·Marshall would have prescribed an invasion of Patagonia if Roosevelt and Hopkins had wished him to, it should be said, in fairness to Marshall, that it has never been proved that at the time of Yalta he believed or advised that American soldiers would have to storm the beaches of Japan itself to force a surrender. It is incredible that he could have been guilty of such a miscalculation. 

A gross miscalculation it would have been. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, after studying the effects of aerial warfare on Japan, reported the following conclusions to the War Department in 1946: "Based on detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." Significantly, the report was entitled "Japan's Struggle to End the War." As Professor David Nelson Rowe declares in the Introduction to Tochikazu  Kase's memoirs, "It now becomes even more difficult than before to understand the heavy price paid to Stalin.. at Yalta to bring the U.S.S.R. into a war which, as this book shows, was already won by us and lost by the Japanese at the·time of the Yalta meeting."31 

The senior staff officer at Yalta was Admiral Leahy. Did Roosevelt consult with him before his fateful talk with Stalin? "I was of the firm opinion," Leahy records, "that our war against Japan had progressed to the point where her defeat was only a matter of time and attrition. Therefore, we did not need Stalin's help to defeat our enemy in the Pacific."32 

Certainly Admiral King, Chief of Naval Operations, was asking no Russian help. General Arnold, head of the Air Force, whose Super fortresses were now sweeping the skies over Japan from island airfields, was not at Yalta, but his thinking at this time coincided with Leahy's;33 and he had sent General Laurence S. Kuter to represent the Air Force and to present a strategic report which concluded that Russian entrance would be inimical to American interests at this late stage. Kuter reached Harry Hopkins; he was not consulted by the President. MacArthur and Nimitz, who knew more about the Pacific war than any two men alive, were not summoned to Yalta. They had, as we have seen, already advised the President that "Japan could be forced to accept our terms of surrender by the use of sea and air power .without an invasion of the Japanese homeland." MacArthur has said: 

Neither directly nor indirectly did I have the slightest connection with the Yalta Conference. My views on the advisability of Soviet Russia entering the war at that late date were never solicited. Neither I nor any member of my command was present at the Yalta Conference and I personally did not even know it was being held. The imminent collapse of Japan was clearly apparent.

... Had my views been requested with reference to Yalta I would  most emphatically have recommended against bringing·the Soviet into the Pacific war at that late date. To have made vital concessions for such a purpose would have seemed to me fantastic.34 

The evidence is overwhelming. Roosevelt's generosity to Stalin that afternoon at Yalta was a willful caprice of his own. The Russophilism which possessed his mind at this time blinded him to all other considerations. The claim that he acted under military advice has always been a sham. 

Roosevelt accepted one more dishonorable role in the betrayal of China. He agreed to coerce the Chinese government to accept the terms, the plain implication being that if Chiang Kai-shek resisted, the United States would join with Russia to compel Chinese compliance, by force if necessary. Stalin was a practical man. He was not disposed to allow his American benefactor to leave the scene without giving an airtight commitment. So before Roosevelt left the room, he had promised Stalin not only to ' get Churchill's acquiescence but to guarantee that the Russians would receive their booty whether the Chinese liked it or not. We therefore find in the secret pact this extraordinary .sentence : "The Heads of the three Great Powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated." Surely this will long stand as a monument in the history of international turpitude. It reduces the plot to the level of gun-point banditry. 

It is interesting that even the faithful Sherwood condemns this. He calls it "the most assailable point in the entire Yalta record," for, as he correctly interprets it, "if China had refused to agree to any of the Soviet claims, presumably the U.S. and Britain would have been compelled to join in enforcing them." But he does not let his hero down without providing a soft cushion. Mr. Roosevelt, it seems, meant no harm; he was just worn out. Sherwood gives it as his belief that "Roosevelt would not have agreed to that final firm commitment had it not been that the Yalta Conference was almost at an end and he was tired and anxious to avoid further argument." 

Stettinius bridles up at this opinion and asserts that "the Far Eastern agreement was carefully worked out and was not a snap decision made at Yalta." It would seem that in his mind, malice aforethought is a lesser charge than impulsiveness or tired dereliction. "Carefully worked out" by whom? Was Stettinius perchance recalling those preparatory talks with Alger Hiss back at Marrakech? Or the preliminary American meeting in Livadia Palace on February 4, to brief the President on the agenda and procedure for the conference, when Hiss was one of the two officials called in? 

We do know that the British were aghast when they learned what Stalin and Roosevelt had cooked up. Anthony Eden and others in the delegation did all they could to dissuade the Prime Minster from setting his signature to the discreditable agreement;35 but he concluded that he must sign, for he felt that if he angered Roosevelt on this issue, "the whole position of the British Empire in the Far East might be at stake." He was not forgetting that Roosevelt had often made serious hints that Britain should hand over Hong Kong to China. And, like Leahy, he may have foreseen that the United States would have a poor case to push the British out of Hong Kong while inviting the Russians into Dairen and Port Arthur. 

In Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill takes pains to point out that Roosevelt, not he,.was the architect of the China sellout. It is as though he is beseeching History to clear his name of the political crime that was perpetrated: 

I must make it clear that, although on behalf of Great Britain I joined in the agreement, neither I nor Eden took any part in making it. It was regarded as an American affair and, we were not consulted but only asked to approve. 

Rightly or wrongly, he felt his own country's interests compelled him to acquiesce rather than isolate himself by a lonely dissent and risk retaliation. 

Months passed before the Chinese government even knew what had happened. At Stalin's insistence, Roosevelt agreed that they should not be told until the Russians were ready to march. This denied Chiang Kai-shek any opportunity to initiate moves in advance to thwart the stripping of Manchuria by the Russians and their seizure of the arms and supplies of the surrendering Japanese forces at the moment of victory. In the end, of course, the hapless Chinese had to go through the form of consenting to the deal. They were bereft of choice. But the coerced stroke of a pen could not expunge the iniquity of the Yalta conspiracy. Those whom it pleases to believe that it did might well heed the words of Plato: "That is the greatest wrong, which is accomplished in the form of right." 

The eventual consequences, as the world now knows, were catastrophic. The vast stores of the Japanese Kwantung Army, denied to the government of China, which had been fighting the Japanese for twelve years, were in time presented by the Russians to the Chinese Communists, who were invited to infiltrate the towns and cities of Manchuria under the protection of Russian troops. Thanks to the Kwantung arms, the Communist army for the first time became a well-equipped force capable of challenging Chiang Kai-shek's trained troops. With Manchuria a subjugated domain, the Chinese Communists were able to sweep down upon the Yellow River Valley and prepare the doom of the Chinese Republic. The Soviet Union, with the concessions agreed to by Roosevelt, had a strangle hold on the railroads and ports, the lifeblood of North China. Those writers who hold to the sacrosanctity of Franklin D. Roosevelt at any intellectual cost usually fall back, in moral desperation, to a final line of defense on the Yalta issue. "What, with the possible exception of the Kuriles," asks Stettinius, "did the Soviet Union receive at Yalta which she could not have taken without any agreement?" Better a bad excuse than none at all. A burglar's accessory, it would seem, is absolved if the burglar could have done the job without any accessory. 

The factual assumption is dubious at best. The United States at that time stood on a summit of power rarely scaled by any nation. When the war ended, her army was overwhelmingly superior in equipment of all sorts, including the atomic bomb. Her navy and air forces were supreme everywhere. Her industrial machine was intact, while Russia's was backward, damaged, and, to a large degree, dependent upon the bounty of others and the plunder she could seize in occupied countries. As Bullitt says, "We held power to enforce our will throughout the earth." Would Stalin have·violated the sovereignty of China if Roosevelt, at Yalta, instead of handing out vital concessions, had said firmly that Manchuria must and would remain inviolate? We shall never know, but it can be argued persuasively that he would not. Furthermore, fantastic as it seems, in the six months after the Yalta Conference, the United States actually equipped the army with which Russia snatched Manchuria. 

In either case, Stettinius' last-ditch question, which he probably hoped would remain rhetorical, has provoked devastating replies of another sort. For example, Professor John A. Lukacs asks in return: "But is it not the aim of war and diplomacy to avoid such situations (especially at the threshold of victory) ?" And William Henry Chamberlin: "... what a mockery this makes.. of our professed war objectives. Was it· worthwhile to fight a costly and exhaustive war merely to give Poland and other east European countries Russian rather than German gauleiters, to substitute the Soviet Union for Japan as overlord of China?" And from Chester Wilmot: 

That question [Stettinius'] does not pose the real issue which surely was: What did the Soviet Union receive at Yalta which she could not have taken without flagrantly violating the fundamental principles of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations to which she had subscribed? The real issue for the world and for the future was not what Stalin would·or could have taken but what he was given the right to take. This agreement provided Stalin with a moral cloak for his aggressive designs in Asia, and, more important, with almost a legal title enforceable at the Peace Conference to the territories and privileges which he demanded.36 

As Wilmot points out, that Thursday afternoon tete-a-tete of Stalin and Roosevelt was the turning point of the Yalta Conference. "If this was not realized by the Western delegations at the time, it seems to have been fully appreciated by Stalin."37 Having abandoned principle in Asia, Roosevelt could hardly expect to apply it in Europe the next day; not against a realist like Stalin. 

During the rest of the conference, Roosevelt was a broken drum. This man, who had just crossed the dictator's palm with the tarnished silver of old-fashioned, nineteenth-century-style imperialism in China as a bribe to induce him to break a treaty of non-aggression with Japan, could only appear ludicrous, in this company, prattling about "sovereign rights" and "the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned." He had betrayed himself ·to Stalin as a consummate windbag to·whom the tub thumping of the Atlantic Charter had never been more than a politician's expedient. It did not require the acumen of a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky to perceive this. Stalin was no fool. He correctly concluded that Roosevelt would be satisfied with a few fine phrases with which to cover himself at home. That is all he spared him. 

En route home, the President paused near the Suez Canal to  be visited on his cruiser by King Farouk of Egypt, King Ibn.. Saud of Saudi Arabia, and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. In a note, Harry Hopkins sized up this interlude as "in the main, a lot of horseplay."38 It was no surprise to him that Mr. Roosevelt was just the one "to thoroughly enjoy the colorful panoply of the sovereigns of this part of the world." Smooth talk flowed, and costly gifts were exchanged. 

Back in Washington, the President addressed a joint session of Congress sitting in a wheel chair. He had not been ill "a single day" since leaving Washington, he bragged; it was just that the braces on his legs weighed ten pounds and it was "a lot easier" sitting down. Those in the front rows listened incredulously, for what they were looking at was an obviously failing man. However, a man is surely entitled to his own appraisal of his own health, and perhaps a cheerful one is salutary. We could hardly expect Mr. Roosevelt to report, as did one of his observers at Yalta, that he "looked sick, he acted sick and he talked sick." Nor need it be blameworthy that his statement to Congress does not jibe with the observations of Churchill, who writes that at Yalta "the President was ailing.... His face had a transparency ... and often there was a far-away look in his eyes" and that when they said good-by at the end of the conference, "the President seemed placid and frail. I felt that he had a slender contact with life."39 In any event, in the carefully staged performance on Capitol Hill, an admirable show was put on, all photographs were screened, and only the authorized ones were ever published. This was before the days of television. 

If the robustness of earlier years was gone, the old habit of prevarication was undiminished. "This Conference concerned itself only with the European war and the political problems of Europe, and not with the Pacific war," he swore. This was, of course, a deliberate.falsehood, for he had in his safe the secret agreement signed at Yalta concerning the Pacific war. He had, it is true, promised Stalin to keep the secret, but had he also promised to perjure himself before the Congress of the United States? 

The partition of Poland and the acceptance of the Communist clique known as the Lublin Committee as the provisional government were glossed over with the phrases he had imported for the purpose. All this, said he, had been "agreed to by Russia, by Britain and by me." Intimate, rambling, and disarmingly optimistic, the speech went far to hide the grim future which now was certain. Yet we know that Admiral Leahy, who was close to the President, came home from Yalta in a different mood. In his words, "the proposed peace seemed to me a frightening 'sowing of dragon's teeth.'" He did not share the "exultation" of some members of the American delegation because he realized the decisions of the conference would make. Russia "the dominant power in Europe." It seemed elementary to Leahy that this spelled trouble. "That in itself, in my opinion, carried a certainty of future international disagreements."40 

There was no hint of this in Roosevelt's speech. "The Crimea Conference ... spells-and it ought to spell-the end of the system of unilateral action, exclusive alliances, and spheres of influence, and balances of power.... I am sure that-under the agreement reached at Yalta-there will be a more stable political Europe than ever before." This may well rank as the most blustering, the most reckless-and the most wrong-prediction ever made within the walls of the National Capitol. That very evening, in Bucharest, Russia's Vishinsky, unilaterally and with Red troops to back him up, issued an ultimatum to the King of Romania demanding that he appoint as prime minister Petru Groza, the choice of the Romanian Communists.41 

By this time, American public opinion was so drugged and fooled by wartime propaganda that it was possible for the President to make such a statement and be believed by millions. There  were strong voices of critical dissent, too, and widespread uneasiness in the country, but people believed because they had made great sacrifices for-they hoped-something and because they desperately wanted to believe. To a large extent, the radio commentators, the newspaper and magazine writers, and the academic community failed them, supinely echoing the fashionable inanities and platitudes which flowed in a torrent from Communist...front organizations and .the Roosevelt administration. To question the wisdom or veracity of Franklin D. Roosevelt was, for these, a kind of sabotage; to be suspicious of Joseph Stalin showed want of soul. 

For years, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt had been effusing her quaint homilies throughout the land in a popular daily column in which she cleverly interlarded her views on domesticity with her and her husband's attitudes toward the Soviet Union and its "great leader," Stalin. Her' influence in conditioning the American mind was immense. Such writers as David Lawrence, who promptly attacked Yalta and accurately prophesied its consequence, were, in such competition, offering unpalatable fare to the more than half of the population who were living in a fog of cliches and for whom wishful thinking had become the exclusive mental process. Even Time magazine abdicated its proper function so far that it permitted itself blithely to assert that "all doubts about the Big Three's ability to cooperate in peace as well as in war seem now to have been swept away." Autosuggestion is, indeed, a powerful force, yet it seems impossible that the magazine's own staff could have been without doubts. However, in fairness to those who were carried away on a wave of optimism, it should be remembered that some of the most fetid details of the Yalta Conference were still under wraps. 

After the Yalta Conference, it became harder to keep the secret in the closet. The Russians were running roughshod over all the mealy mouthing's President Roosevelt had boasted about. As Wilmot summarizes it, "Before the end of March the Yalta Agreement had been broken or disregarded by the Russians in every important case which had so far been put to the test of action." Even Harriman was now alarmed in his messages from Moscow. Roosevelt was "vacationing" in 'Georgia. Churchill was on the edge of despair, as much because of the President's equanimity as because of the Russians' truculence.42 

To the last, Franklin D. Roosevelt clung to the pretense. Finally, Churchill consulted him about what he should say to the House of Commons about the deteriorating situation in Poland. Resting at Warm Springs, Roosevelt was having his portrait painted again. On the morning of April 12, he drafted a cable in reply. In this cable he said: 

I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out.43 

An hour later he suffered a stroke. That afternoon he died. 

On February 12, General Marshall, coming from the Crimea, met General Anders, the leader of the fighting Polish forces, in Florence, Italy. Anders did not know it yet, but he and the majority of his fellow-officers would never be able to return to their homes in Poland because the land on which their homes stood would no longer be Polish. The issuance of the. Yalta communique was only a few hours away. It vitally concerned Poland, yet the American Chief of Staff refused to say a word to his Polish colleague about what had happened there. And when the emotional Anders painted a dark picture of Europe's future, an irritated and weary Marshall answered him: "We continue to march with Soviet Russia against the Germans; what will happen afterwards, God alone knows."44 

Whether General Marshall grasped the real meaning of his admission is not known. "Who," asks Professor Lukacs, "had let  the Second World War reach that total,·dead, political impasse?" Who, indeed, had let a war in which millions had fought and died sink to such a nadir of aimlessness and futility? Did God alone know? General Marshall underestimated his fellow-mortals. Many people knew. The logic of cause and effect is as inexorable in the field of human action as it is in the realm of physical science. As a matter of fact, there was an unsavory character in Berlin who knew. Hitler's mouthpiece, Herr Goebbels, had made many turgid predictions which were wide of the mark, but this time he knew whereof he spoke. The following words were penned by him about the same time that Marshall made his statement to Anders. They were printed in his February 23 editorial in Das Reich:

If the German people should lay down their arms, the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin would allow the Soviets to occupy all Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, together with the major part of the Reich. An iron curtain would at once descend on this territory, which, including the Soviet Union, would be of tremendous dimensions. Behind this curtain there would begin a mass slaughter of peoples.... All that would remain would be a type of human being in the raw, a dull, fermenting mass of millions of proletarian and despairing beasts of burden who would know nothing of the rest of the world except what the Kremlin considered useful to its own purposes. Without leadership of their own, they would he at the mercy of the bloody dictatorship of the Soviets. The rest of Europe would be engulfed in chaotic political and social confusion which would only represent a preparatory stage for the coming Bolshevization. 

Geographically, the shadow of immediate doom was slightly overdrawn. Otherwise, all but the last sentence has become history. The fulfillment of Herr Goebbels' last black prediction is still in doubt-thwarted, or at least postponed, by the retention of American troops and airfields in Europe and Africa since the end of the war, the pouring in each year of billions of dollars of military and economic aid, and the feverish preparation for a war of survival. 

"A preparatory stage" -these are Goebbels' words. The last chapter has not been written. Will a ghastly new holocaust be the price that must be paid to avert "the coming Bolshevization" ?Prayerfully, men hope that the follies and crimes of World War II may be. atoned for some other way. It is a hope that flickers low. Optimism is now a pleasant indulgence which there is little in human experience to justify. For Yalta was more than the unhappy culmination of Roosevelt's long series of blunders in Weltpolitil( It was a moral debacle of unimaginable evil to the world.) 

Not the least·calamity was the dissipation of mankind's faith in America. Disillusionment and cynicism are the dross that remains where a high reputation for integrity once flourished. In their present bewilderment and frustration, the American people have too quickly forgotten that their dazzling wartime President gave away more than the lands and freedoms of people in Europe and Asia; he tossed away something, just as precious, that was theirs alone. Perhaps in the long run that was Franklin D. Roosevelt's most tragic disservice to his fellow countrymen.

notes
https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Roosevelts%20Road%20to%20Russia_3.pdf