In the weeks that followed, Truman leaned heavily on Davies, his trust in Ambassador Harriman and the State Department shaken. The president regretted the nasty exchange with Molotov and was now comforted by Davies’s counsel to be nicer to Stalin.
No doubt Winston Churchill would have preferred for Truman to be forceful with the Soviets. As he contemplated the postwar scene in Europe, he grew disconcerted to learn about American plans to redeploy troops for the war against Japan. On May 12 he wrote Truman a prescient letter about the future—it sounded like his later speech about the iron curtain:
What will be the position in a year or two, when the British and American armies have melted away and the French has not yet been formed on any major scale, when we may have a handful of divisions mostly French, and when Russia may choose to keep two or three hundred on active service?
An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of [the] line Lübeck-Trieste-Corfu will soon be completely in their hands. To this must be added the further enormous area conquered by the American armies between Eisenach and the Elbe, which will I suppose in a few weeks be occupied, when the Americans retreat, by the Russian power. All kinds of arrangements will have to be made by General Eisenhower to prevent another immense flight of the German population westward as this enormous Muscovite advance into the center of Europe takes place. And then the curtain will descend again to a very large extent if not entirely.33
Truman was inclined to agree, yet like Roosevelt he instinctively sought to avoid creating the impression in Moscow that he was going along too much with Churchill. The two presidents admired the British prime minister but did not want to be seen as “ganging up” on Stalin and assumed (quite wrongly) that it would be easier to get his cooperation if they could meet with him alone. They were both fortunate that Churchill persisted, because he provided both presidents with badly needed expertise and support.
Joseph Davies had advised Truman to go easy on Moscow, but not two weeks later, on May 12, the White House unceremoniously stopped shipments under the Lend-Lease program to Europe. That aid had been granted to Great Britain since March 1941 and to the Soviet Union since October of that year. According to the Lend-Lease Act, the assistance was to run until the end of the war. As that day approached, American officials discussed what should happen. Secretary Stettinius and Ambassador Harriman favored gradual reductions to pressure the Soviets into granting more democratic rights to the people in countries like Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. However, both warned against “abrupt changes,” which would “anger the Russians.”
Others in the administration (like Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew) said that the aid should be cut immediately, the day Germany was defeated. Although the president later denied it, at the time he went along with what turned out to be a most ill-considered decision.34 Not only was Lend-Lease stopped short, but ships at sea laden with essential supplies, including food, even those nearing the coast of the USSR, were ordered to turn back. The outcry from Moscow left the U.S. government trying to explain that it was all a “misunderstanding.”35
We should note that Lend-Lease was not just cut to the Soviet Union; to the horror of the White House, shipments of vitally needed food were also stopped to Britain, France, and Western Europe.36 There was an instant backlash, and Truman hastily reversed himself, so that the aid resumed and continued until several weeks after the end of the war against Japan.
The embattled president was delighted to get another call from Davies on May 13, who again came over for talks. He generously offered to cable Stalin to smooth things out. He impressed Truman, who wondered whether it would be possible for this former ambassador to visit Moscow as his special envoy. Davies had recently been hospitalized and had to decline on health grounds. Nevertheless, he strongly advised that the way forward with the Soviet Union was to return to conciliation and cooperation, or what might more accurately be called appeasement.37
Ambassador Davies was not entirely out of step with the mood in America, where there was a groundswell of good feelings, especially in liberal circles, toward the Soviet Union. When Ambassador Harriman, on his trip home, spoke off the record about problems that Moscow was causing in Europe, he faced the open hostility of the press. He recalled that “their faith in the future was great and they could not believe at the time that the Russians, who had suffered so deeply in the war, would not want to live amicably with their neighbors and ourselves.”38
It was in this context that Truman reached back to Harry Hopkins, a man known for getting on well with Stalin, to ask him to act as an envoy to Moscow. Davies, at the request of the president, then contacted the Kremlin to ask how it would respond to such a visit. He received an enthusiastic reply and, along with it, news that he had been awarded the prestigious Order of Lenin for his unstinting efforts on behalf of Soviet-American relations.39
Truman was hardly leading an anti-Soviet campaign; nor was he about to follow Churchill, who now favored a tougher attitude toward Stalin. In fact, he was quite tentative in the first days of his presidency and listened to those like Davies who thought the fiery British leader might rub Stalin the wrong way and make a lasting peace harder to find. When the president asked Davies to visit London on his behalf, he did not realize that sending someone known for being sympathetic to Moscow would create alarm there. Churchill was furious when Davies asked him to understand the president’s wish to talk alone with Stalin before the next Big Three meeting.40
British foreign secretary Eden’s response to Davies’s visit to London was that the man was “a born appeaser and would gladly give Russia all Europe,” except for Great Britain, so as to keep the United States from getting embroiled in conflict. Eden noted in his diary that Davies demonstrated “all the errors and illusions” of their own prewar prime minister Neville Chamberlain, only now Davies worked on behalf of Stalin instead of Hitler.41
With men like Davies and Hopkins advising him, Truman reverted to Roosevelt’s approach to the Soviet Union. He would change only if and when Stalin’s provocations became impossible to overlook, as indeed soon happened with a combination of events in Poland, and even more in Iran and Turkey.
STALIN’S HARD LINE IN POLAND (SPRING–SUMMER 1945)
After the beginning of 1945, the Soviet leader became slightly bolder about arranging the postwar political map of Eastern Europe. In February he told the NKVD to “eliminate the irregular situation” in Poland by tracking down the leaders of the opposition parties.42 They were lured out of hiding by Red Army officials, who told them of the “absolute necessity and crucial importance” of talks with Soviet authorities. The army commander in the area near Warsaw personally vouched for their safety and promised to fly them to London for consultations with the exiled Polish government.
It was a lie. On March 26 and 27, the top sixteen underground political figures were arrested. The group included General Leopold Okulicki (commander in chief of the Home Army) and the deputy prime minister (of the Polish government-in-exile), Dr. Jan Stanisław Jankowski.43 They were among the leaders of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, who had gone over to resisting the Soviet occupation in some places after the retreat of the Nazis. Stalin wanted to remove these influential proponents of a democratic Poland.44