This remained the primary impulse to the very end. In April 1945, with Germany already beaten in all but name, Roosevelt could still declare that, even with regard to post-war arrangements for Germany itself, ‘our attitude should be one of study and postponement of final decision.’ There were good reasons for taking this stance—the search for a settlement of the German Question was going to prove horribly difficult, as perceptive observers could already see, and it made sense to sustain for as long as possible the anti-German alliance that bound the wartime partners together. But as a result, the shape of post-war Europe was dictated in the first instance not by wartime deals and accords but rather by the whereabouts of occupying armies when the Germans surrendered. As Stalin explained to Molotov, when the latter expressed doubts over the wording of the well-meaning ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’: ‘We can fulfill it in our own way. What matters is the correlation of forces.’
In south-east Europe the war was over by the end of 1944, with Soviet forces in full control of the northern Balkans. By May 1945, in central and eastern Europe, the Red Army had liberated and re-occupied Hungary, Poland and most of Czechoslovakia. Soviet troops were through Prussia and into Saxony. In the West, where the British and Americans were fighting virtually separate wars in north-western and south-western Germany respectively, Eisenhower certainly could have reached Berlin before the Russians but was discouraged by Washington from doing so. Churchill would have liked to see a Western advance on Berlin but Roosevelt was conscious both of his generals’ concern for loss of life (one fifth of all US troop losses in World War Two were sustained at the Battle of the Bulge in the Belgian Ardennes in the previous winter) and of Stalin’s interest in the German capital.
As a result, in Germany and in Czechoslovakia (where the US army initially advanced 18 miles short of Prague and liberated the Pilsen region of western Bohemia, only to hand it over to the Red Army shortly afterwards), the line dividing what were not yet ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ Europe fell a little further west than the outcome of the fighting might have suggested. But only a little: however hard Generals Patton or Montgomery might have pressed forward, the final outcome would not have been significantly altered. Meanwhile, further south, on May 2nd 1945 the Yugoslav Army of National Liberation and the British Eighth Army came face to face in Trieste drawing through that most cosmopolitan of central European cities a line that would become the first true frontier of the Cold War.
Of course the ‘official’ Cold War still lay in the future. But in certain respects it had begun long before May 1945. So long as Germany remained the enemy it was easy to forget the deeper disputes and antagonisms separating the Soviet Union from its wartime allies. But they were there. Four years of wary cooperation in a life or death struggle with a common foe had done little to obliterate nearly thirty years of mutual suspicion. For the fact is that in Europe the Cold War began not after the Second World War but following the end of the First.
This point was perfectly clear in Poland, which fought a desperate war with the new Soviet Union in 1920; in Britain, where Churchill built his inter-war reputation in part upon the Red Scare of the early 20s and the theme of anti-Bolshevism; in France, where anti-Communism was the Right’s strongest suit in domestic affairs from 1921 until the German invasion of May 1940; in Spain where it suited Stalin and Franco alike to play up the importance of Communism in the Spanish civil war; and above all, of course, in the Soviet Union itself, where Stalin’s monopoly of power and his bloody purges of Party critics relied heavily on the charge that the West and its local associates were plotting to undermine the Soviet Union and destroy the Communist experiment. The years 1941-45 were just an interlude in an international struggle between Western democracies and Soviet totalitarianism, a struggle whose shape was obscured but not fundamentally altered by the threat posed to both sides by the rise of Fascism and Nazism at the heart of the continent.
It was Germany that brought Russia and the West together in 1941, much as it had succeeded in doing before 1914. But the alliance was foredoomed. From 1918-34 the Soviet strategy in central and western Europe—splitting the Left and encouraging subversion and violent protest—helped shape an image of ‘Bolshevism’ as fundamentally alien and hostile. Four years of troubled and controversial ‘Popular Front’ alliances did something to dispel this impression, despite the contemporary trials and mass murders in the Soviet Union itself. But the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, and Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler in his dismemberment of their common neighbours the following year, considerably undermined the propaganda gains of the Popular Front years. Only the heroism of the Red Army and Soviet citizens in the years 1941-45, and the unprecedented crimes of the Nazis, helped dispel these earlier memories.
As for the Soviets, they never lost their distrust of the West—a distrust whose roots go back far beyond 1917, of course, but which were well irrigated by Western military intervention during the civil war of 1917-21, by the Soviet Union’s absence from international agencies and affairs for the next fifteen years, by the well-founded suspicion that most Western leaders preferred Fascists to Communists if forced to choose, and by the intuition that Britain and France especially would not be sorry to see the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany engage in mutually destructive conflict to others’ advantage. Even after the wartime alliance was forged and the common interest in defeating Germany was clear, the degree of mutual mistrust is striking: there was, revealingly, very little wartime exchange of sensitive intelligence between West and East.
The unraveling of the wartime alliance and the subsequent division of Europe were thus not due to a mistake, to naked self-interest or malevolence; they were rooted in history. Before the Second World War relations between the US and the UK on the one hand, and the USSR on the other, had always been tense. The difference was that none of them had had responsibility for large tracts of the European continent. Moreover they had been separated by, among other considerations, the presence of France and Germany. But with French humiliation in 1940 and German defeat five years later, everything was different. The renewed Cold War in Europe was always likely, but it was not inevitable. It was brought about by the ultimately incompatible goals and needs of the various interested parties.
Thanks to German aggression the United States was now, for the first time, a power in Europe. That the US had overwhelming strength was self-evident, even to those mesmerized by the achievements of the Red Army. US GNP had doubled in the course of the war, and by the spring of 1945 America accounted for half the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses and virtually all international financial reserves. The United States had put 12 million men under arms to fight Germany and its allies, and by the time Japan surrendered the American fleet was larger than all other fleets in the world combined. What would the US do with its power? In the aftermath of the First World War Washington had chosen not to exercise it; how different would things be after the Second World War? What did America want?
So far as Germany was concerned—and 85 percent of the American war effort had gone on the war against Germany—the initial American intent was quite severe. A directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, JCS 1067, was presented to President Truman on April 26th 1945, two weeks after Roosevelt’s death. Reflecting the views of, among others, Henry Morgenthau, the US Secretary of the Treasury, it recommended that: