denazification, etc., measures were, on the face of it, strictly in accord with previous decisions; on the face of it, too, Germany was placed under the joint control of the Four Powers. The unity of Germany as a political and economic entity was implicitly
recognised, and the Russians later claimed great credit for having firmly opposed, as early as March 1945, any Western proposals for the partition of Germany into a western part centred on the Ruhr and Rhineland, a southern part, including Austria, and with Vienna as its capital; and an eastern part, with Berlin as its capital. But while such a partition was not brought about, Potsdam undoubtedly laid the foundations for a different kind of partition. All Russian attempts to secure a foothold in the Ruhr were firmly rejected; but what made the "zonal" division of Germany even more obvious was the agreement that was finally reached on reparations—ostensibly in return for the Western Powers' acceptance of the fait accompli of the Oder-Neisse Line as the western boundary of the German territories "under Polish Administration", pending the final German peace settlement. These territories were not to be regarded as part of the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany.
If, as Stettinius complained, Britain and the United States were not in a strong position at Yalta, Truman and Byrnes thought they were in a very strong position indeed at Potsdam.
The American atom test bomb had just been successfully exploded and Truman, in the
words of Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, was "immensely pleased" and "tremendously pepped by it". The President said "it gave him an entirely new feeling of confidence" in talking to the Russians.
He [Truman] stood up to the Russians in the most emphatic and decisive manner,
telling them as to certain demands that they absolutely could not have and that the United States was entirely against them... He told the Russians just where they got off and generally bossed the whole meeting.
[Stimson, quoted by W. A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, New York, 1962, p. 249.]
Churchill was delighted with the new President, and fully supported his "tough" line with the Russians and what came to be known as his "Open Door" policy in Eastern Europe.
He also blew up at the Russians' "effrontery" in wanting to control one of the former Italian colonies on the Mediterranean.
The Russians were glad to see the last of Churchill, but when, after the British General Election, Churchill and Eden were replaced by Attlee and Bevin, they found that they had nothing to congratulate themselves on. According to Mr Byrnes, Bevin was very
"aggressive" indeed in his "forceful opposition" to the new Polish boundaries.
[James F. Byrnes, Frankly Speaking (London, 1948), p. 79.]
Soon after Potsdam, a member of the Russian delegation remarked to me that he had
found Mr Bevin an "ochen volevoi chelovek" —a "very strong-willed man", which was a polite way of saying that he had found the new Foreign Secretary extremely pigheaded.
The foundations for the real division of Germany, officially still to be under Four-Power control, were laid by the reparations agreement reached at Potsdam. Even before Potsdam the Russians had been helping themselves indiscriminately to reparations—still termed
"booty" at the time—from the Soviet Zone. But they continued to hope that the reparations questions would be put on an all-German basis at Potsdam. This was not to be. On July 23, Mr Byrnes declared Stalin's Yalta figure of twenty billion dollars (half of it for the Soviet Union) to be "unpractical", and refused to name any other. He also reiterated the United States Government's opposition to the Russians' meddling in the control of industry in the Ruhr and other parts of Western Germany. And there followed this conversation:
Mr Molotov: I understand that what you have in mind is that each country should take reparations from its own zone. If we fail to reach an agreement, the result will be the same.
Mr Byrnes: Yes.
Mr Molotov: Would not your suggestion mean that each country would have a free hand in its own zone and would act entirely independently of the others?
Mr Byrnes: That is true in substance.
[ Quoted by W. A. Williams, op. cit., p. 251.]
The Russians fought this proposal for over a week, but, in the end, accepted it, together with the following provisions: they would also have a free hand in collecting German assets throughout Eastern Europe; they would receive a small percentage of the
reparations available from Western Germany; and, finally, the Western Powers would
"provisionally" recognise the Oder-Neisse Line—rather to Churchill's disgust, as expressed in the final pages of The Second World War. What this meant in fact was that the all-German treatment of reparations, for which the Russians had fought so
desperately, was down the drain. Even the small face-saver for this "all-German"
treatment—the minor reparations deliveries to Russia from Western Germany—was
scrapped less than a year later, apparently on the personal responsibility of General Lucius Clay, the Military Governor of the American Zone.
This reparations settlement was cruciaclass="underline" it started the process whereby Russia was kept strictly outside Western Germany but, at the same time, strengthened her economic—and therefore also political—hold on Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe as a whole. This apparent ratification of a "spheres of influence" policy was, of course, in flat contradiction to Truman's Open Door policy, and American experts have continued to
argue on the real significance of this apparent contradiction.
There was a direct connection between the American atom bomb and the singular
reparations deal at Potsdam. This was, in fact, symptomatic of the temporary (as Truman thought) division of Germany and of Europe in two. Although appearances were kept up to some extent for the next two or three years, Potsdam marked in the reality the
beginning of the end of that "Big-Three Peace" of which the main pillar—as the Russians saw it—was the joint control of Germany.
Chapter VI THE SHORT RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR-
HIROSHIMA
There were two periods in the Soviet-German war when the Russians dreaded a Japanese attack on them. First, during the very first months of the war, and indeed, right up to Pearl Harbour; and again during the disastrous summer and autumn of 1942. As a
precaution against a Japanese attack, the Russians had to keep substantial forces in the Far East, about forty divisions according to the post-war History. Although in extreme emergencies—during the Battle of Moscow and, again, at the time of Stailingrad—the
Soviet Supreme Command had to draw on its Far-Eastern forces and bring some
particularly tough Siberian troops to the Soviet-German Front, the fact remains that, especially during the first eighteen months of the war, Japan rendered Hitler a great service by tying up with its one-million-strong Kwantung Army important Russian forces which would have been of the greatest value in Europe.
After Stalingrad, and with the war in the Pacific not going quite as well as the Japanese had expected, a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union was "postponed". As the History says:
Stalingrad struck an irreparable blow at the Japanese plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union. Having been bogged down in their war against China, the United