By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
Covert Operations Between The Special
Operations Executive (SOE) And The Office Of Strategic Services (OSS)
Where Stalin's endorsement
of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, guaranteeing war between Britain, France and Germany,
another factor was Roosevelt pressing Britain to take a hard line over Poland
yet giving worthless guarantees to the Poles. Churchill in turn actively
supported Roosevelt’s re-election. Both leaders wanted the war against Germany
to continue after the fall of France in June 1940, Churchill and Roosevelt
ignored opportunities to end the war, for example by avoiding negotiating with
anti-Hitler groups within Germany. For his part, Churchill fooled Roosevelt,
his opponents in Parliament and the British people into believing in a
non-existent invasion threat, to maintain American aid and prevent his
opponents pressing for peace talks. In return for Roosevelt's support, Churchill
effectively lent him British intelligence, which then mounted operations to
discredit, undermine and neutralize Roosevelt's political opponents in the US,
and to secure his re-election for a third term. The result was that British
intelligence hijacked the 1940 US Presidential elections and created 'straw
man' candidate Wendell Willkie. British intelligence also supplied fake `Nazi
documents' that Roosevelt used to further his own political ends.
The Nazis and the
USSR agreed on the final partitioning of Poland, pledging to `tolerate in their
territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other
party' and that they would “suppress in their territories all beginnings of
such agitation and inform each other concerning suitable measures for this
purpose"- i.e. no anti-Nazi activity in the Soviet zone or anti-Communist
activity in the Nazi zone. Effectively, Polish Communists in the Soviet sector
were silenced about the Nazi rule of the other sector, under pain of internment
or worse. The `communisation' of Soviet-controlled
Poland was announced by the secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita
Khrushchev. To humour Stalin's paranoia, this first
entailed executing the entire leadership of the Polish Communist Party - plus
some 50,000 Polish refugees in the Soviet zone. The Russians also handed over
to the Gestapo 600 German Communists who had fled to the USSR to escape Nazi
persecution.
When the Russians
invaded Poland, they took 180,000 prisoners of war, deporting ordinary soldiers
to Soviet gulags. Officers, together with officials such as policemen - 15,000
in all - went to three special camps in the western Soviet Union, and in spring
1940 were transported to an unknown destination, after which they simply
disappeared. In 1943, after the Nazi invasion, the bodies of 4,400 of these
people were discovered in mass graves in Katyfi
Forest near Smolensk, shot in the back of the head (NKVD style). The Russian
government only admitted in 1990 that the NKVD had been responsible, giving
locations of two other mass graves where inmates of the other two camps were
buried. Stalin had ordered the massacre (The Oxford Companion to the Second
World War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, P.646).
In the spring of
1939, Roosevelt had asked Congress to repeal the Neutrality Act, but was
rebuffed. In June, he had persuaded them to modify the arms embargo, allowing
weapons and equipment to be supplied to `non-aggressors', and then only on a `cash-and-carry' basis - i.e. immediate payment and
they picked up the goods themselves. But as Britain and France were technically
the aggressors, having declared war, the embargo stood.
In the last days of
peace, Roosevelt informed his Cabinet that if war came, he would delay applying
the embargo. He asked the State and Justice Departments to prepare the
paperwork at a snail's pace, while encouraging all American arms manufacturers
to get as much as they could aboard ships or over the border into Canada before
he signed the papers. In the event, he managed to delay only until September:
after that, the shipment of British and French ordersworth
$79 million in the pipeline ground to a halt. Although disastrous for them, it
was also a massive blow for the USA; the embargo ensured that “American
munitions factories fell idle” (Warren F. Kimball Forged in War: Churchill,
Roosevelt and the Second World War, HarperCollins, London, 1997p.35).
Having pushed Britain
and France into war with his promises, on 20 September Roosevelt petitioned
Congress again to repeal the Neutrality Act - his speech, in the words of
American historian Willard Range, `impregnated with subterfuge, never once
admitting that his real objective was to aid England and France'." He
argued that the embargo was `most vitally dangerous to American neutrality,
American security, and, above all, American peace'." His other major card
was that it was in America's financial interests to supply Britain and
France."' With the backing of Congress, FDR signed the repeal on 4
November, although it applied only to Britain and France, and then only on
cash-and-carry terms. But as the French historian Henri Michel writes: `It was
a first infringement of neutrality and acceptable because it kept business
turning over; but it was stripping the Allies of their gold reserves
Roosevelt made it
clear through private intermediaries that aid would only be forthcoming if the
British government took a tough line with Hitler: any further attempts at
appeasement would jeopardize assistance. Halifax favored peace negotiations:
therefore only Churchill could bring American support to the table.
Curiously, just a
week after war broke out, during a discussion on the neutrality of Egypt - if
it remained neutral it could be used as a `back door' for American supplies -
Churchill confidently declared, `we certainly have no need to keep her neutral
for the purpose of war purchases from the United States who will very soon give
us all we want direct. But how could he be so sure, when at that stage there
was no certainty that Congress would repeal the embargo?
In his biography of
Joseph Kennedy, The Founding Father (1965), Richard J. Whalen writes that,
despite his clash with Roosevelt over war policy, in 1940 the Ambassador served
as an accomplice in maneuvers designed to deceive the American people as to the
ramifications of Roosevelt's foreign policy. The maneuvers concerned the
repercussions following the arrest of a junior American Embassy official in
London, Tyler Gatewood Kent, on 20 May 1940.
Robert Shogan argues
that the Kent affair was shrouded in secrecy specifically to protect Roosevelt
and his secret negotiations with Churchill. Of course, while still expressing
`non-interventionist' views in public and promising to keep America out of the
war, Roosevelt's day-to-day communication with the British leader (even when
First Lord of the Admiralty) would have been suspicious enough. Also,
discussing ways of arming Britain that went beyond what was allowed by the
latest version of the Neutrality Act would have been a gift to his opponents in
an election year.
From late 1942,
William J. Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and also British secret
services in Asia were increasingly preoccupied, not with the war against Japan,
but with mutual competition to safeguard or advance national interests in the fluid
situation created in Asia after Japan’s dramatic southward expansion of
December 1941. As Aldrich points out, many of the OSS officers in Asia were
recruited from companies such as Texaco and Westinghouse, and so ‘required
little encouragement to gather economic and commercial intelligence’ on
America’s Allies.’ On the other hand, the British mostly wanted to curb the
Americans, so that Britain would be at least restored to its pre-war position
after Japan’s defeat.
In a Foreign Office
briefing in March 1943, M16’s Pacific expert Lieutenant Colonel Gerald
Wilkinson warned, ‘Wall Street imperialists were causing America to look far
more interestedly already at these Eastern prospects than ourselves? Wilkinson
was duly transferred to BSC in Washington, officially as Asia liaison with OSS,
but also to spy upon the ‘Wall Street imperialists’. He complained that while
the British had yet to realize Asia’s huge commercial potential, the Americans
were already considering how best to exploit it.
The expansion of
covert operations from 1942 led to a series of conferences between SOE and OSS
to work out ‘turf agreements’: who would be in charge where. It was agreed that
India was British ‘turf’ , the OSS could only operate there with their permission
, while China, Korea and Manchuria were the American (Significantly for the
British, this put Hong Kong on American turf.) But soon they were flagrantly
encroaching on each other’s areas.
The US government was
eager to establish American oil companies all over the Middle East, especially
as Britain had tried for so long to keep them out. Because Britain more or less
had the monopoly of Iran and Iraq’s oil supplies, the Americans turned their
attention to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, continuing to negotiate concessions
throughout the war.
When General William
Donovan of the OSS began planning post-war espionage in the former colonies,
the first territory he turned to was Saudi Arabia. He proposed that the team
should pose as an archaeological mission, under the distinguished Harvard anthropologist
Carleton S. Coon, a wartime OSS agent. After a few months touring the area to
assess American intelligence’s military and commercial requirements, Coon
recommended that the operation be extended to cover the whole of the Muslim
world, what he called the ‘Islam show’ - and that a separate and self-contained
operation, independent of OSS, should oversee it.
On April 5, 1944
Hitler was shown the complete five volumes of Wilhelm Canaris' diaries
detailing the letters consistent attempts since 1938 to come to a understanding
with London. And a few days later Canaris was hanged together with Karl
Bonhoeffer and several others involved in the Claus von Stauffenberg plan.
But not only Canaris,
by the summer of 1942-if not before, in December 1941, when the United States
entered the War-as Jacob Wallenberg was to explain to the American secret
service, Himmler himself was convinced that Germany would lose, and so he had
begun searching for ways to ingratiate himself with the Western Allies, using
the SS and the Nazi Party security apparatus as bargaining chips in an
unrealistic scenario in which Germany, governed by him in alliance with the
Western Powers.
However already
earlier on 15 January 1944, Churchill wrote to the War Cabinet:
The expression
“Unconditional Surrender” was used by the President at Casablanca without
previous consultation but I thought it right to endorse what he said, and it
may be that at that period of the war the declaration was appropriate to the
circumstances.
Prolonging the war by
demanding unconditional surrender was exactly what Roosevelt wanted — as it
meant that the war would end with America in the position he wanted, and not
before. The demand removed any incentive for the Nazis or Japanese to seek terms,
and also Hitler and his henchmen knew that they had no option but to fight to
the finish, taking millions with them into the apocalypse. More importantly,
since the Allies refused to negotiate under any circumstances — or with any
government — it was a massive disincentive to the anti-Hitler groups to risk a
coup, Canaris calling it a “calamitous mistake”. This is detailed in the recent
book by Richard Basset, “Hitler’s Spy Chief” February 25, 2005.
The other major
question that divided Roosevelt and Churchill was the Fighting French’s role in
the Alliance, particularly in the liberation of France. FDR thought that the
liberation should be left to the Americans and British, which hardly endeared
him to De Gaulle. Although Churchill fully understood de Gaulle’s fierce desire
to lead the liberation of his homeland, for the sake of the wider picture once
again he acquiesced to Roosevelt.
De Gaulle, who knew
nothing about the so called Casablanca conference, received an invitation from
Churchill on the third day, promising that if he flew to Morocco, he
(Churchill) would arrange the meeting with Giraud. Deeply offended by this
flagrant foreign interference, de Gaulle refused to go. Churchill pointed out
that the invitation also came from the President of the United States, adding
that a refusal to attend might jeopardize de Gaulle’s position as leader of the
French National Committee. Although de Gaulle again refused, the Committee in
London insisted he went.
This was de Gaulle’s
first meeting with Roosevelt. The President was taken aback but privately
amused when de Gaulle announced solemnly, ‘I am the Joan of Arc of today’. In
turn, De Gaulle saw the President as manipulative and devious, writing,’ it was
difficult to contradict this artist, this seducer.
De Gaulle was
particularly incensed when he discovered that when Roosevelt had outlined his
‘world policemen’ idea to Molotov, he had stated that because the ‘Big Four’
(USA, UK, USSR and China) would have a monopoly on military power in the
post-war world, France would not even be allowed to have an army.
But while Churchill
turned against de Gaulle to placate Roosevelt, with the exception of Anthony
Eden the rest of the Cabinet continued to support him. The ‘Giraud-versus-de
Gaulle’ tussle was already threatening the Alliance, particularly because of
its implications for the coming liberation of France. There was a fundamental
difference in Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s antagonism towards de Gaulle: the
Prime Minister respected France as a great nation but considered the man a
complete pain, while Roosevelt detested both man and country. But their
personal dashes boiled down to important questions such as whether France would
have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
In November 1943, at
Cairo, angered that de Gaulle was openly declaring that he would appoint
France’s new government, Roosevelt had written to Cordell Hull, ‘The thought
that the occupation, when it comes, should be wholly military is one to which I
am increasingly inclined?" He declared that until France had ‘recovered
its balance’ the country would be run regionally — effectively making
Eisenhower the government.
Although Churchill
told Eden he was opposed to giving the French Committee civil authority in
liberated France, as D-Day approached, practicalities, and the usual Cabinet
pressure, made it obvious that ignoring de Gaulle and his Committee was a bad
idea. Just three days before Overlord, Churchill invited de Gaulle to join him
in the special railway train he used as his mobile headquarters, where he
finally briefed him on the operation on 4 June. When the Prime Minister
repeatedly attempted to raise post-liberation French administration, de Gaulle
refused even to consider it, it was France’s business. He always replied: ‘C’est Ia guerre, faites-la, on verra
apris? (‘This is war, let’s get on with it, we
will see afterwards."
At a meeting with
Churchill and de Gaulle, Eisenhower announced that when the invasion began he
would broadcast to the French, instructing them to follow his orders until
elections could be held. Although de Gaulle was told he could amend
Eisenhower’s draft, when he did submit his version he found the original was
already poised for leaflet-drops over France. As Raoul Aglion,
the French Committee’s representative in Washington, wrote, ‘De Gaulle was
furious. The invasion of France that he had expected for years would be done
without him, and finally the strategy of Roosevelt was going to eliminate him
at the last hour
There were other
humiliations. As the invasion began, one by one the exiled heads of state or
government were to broadcast to their nations from the BBC. The scheduled
order, set by protocol, was King Gustav V of Norway, followed by Queen
Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, the Prime
Minister of Belgium, Eisenhower and - last and by all means least - de Gaulle.
In the two weeks
following the invasion, de Gaulle’s Committee was recognized as the provisional
government of France by Belgium Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia.
De Gaulle continued
to put the Americans on the spot. Eisenhower’s liberation of Paris had to be
brought forward because of a popular uprising, Allied tanks, including
Leclerc’s, entering the city on 24 August. The dramatic figure of de Gaulle
followed the next day amid enormous rapture, declaring that the French
Committee of National Liberation was the continuation of the Republic an that he was its President.
President and Prime
Minister refused to recognize de Gaulle’s government, Churchill wavered
afterwards, telling Roosevelt in mid- October that he was now in favor of it,
clearly angling for a joint announcement. But FDR stole a march: while cabling
Churchill twice to urge further delay, on 23 October the US Ambassador in Paris
was instructed to formally recognize de Gaulle’s provisional government. Now
that Britain was the only nation not to have done so, it had to rush out its
own announcement, as if slavishly following the Americans. When an embarrassed
and irritated Churchill complained to Roosevelt, he was told, that, because FDR
had been away campaigning, the State Department had taken ‘more precipitate
action’ than he had intended. Aglion gloats: ‘The
facts spoke for themselves and Roosevelt was finally forced to give in. In
doing so, he tacitly admitted four years of error in his foreign policy towards
France
However, there was a
dividend for Roosevelt. The US elections were to be held on 7 November, and de
Gaulle had always been popular with the American people. So by agreeing to
recognize him as French leader just a few days before they went to the polls, FDR
at least managed to squeeze some advantage from it.
WWII Turning Point.
A major turning point
was the fight for Stalingrad during the winter of 1942-3, the most costly
battle in history. The day after the last Nazi besieger surrendered on 2
February 1943, an incandescent and incredulous Führer announced the end of the
offensive that had begun with Barbarossa. The five-month Battle of Stalingrad
had cost nearly a third of a million German lives, and of the 90,000 prisoners
of war only 5,000 returned from the hell-camps after the war. The immediate
consequences of this were the slow, but inexorable advance of the Soviet forces
from Stalingrad to Hitlers Bunker in Berlin.
Another major
breakthrough was the Western Miles’ victory of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Casablanca had made it a priority: without a safe passage across the Atlantic,
preparations for the invasion of France were being hampered. Victory was
achieved by the middle of 1943 by breaking the German codes and by a vast
shipbuilding programme in the US. Faced with mounting
losses, on 24 May 1943 Admiral Karl Donitz suspended U-boat attacks on the
convoys: the Allies now controlled the Atlantic.
Churchill was out to
defeat the Nazi regime, and was not averse to a deal with a non-Nazi
government; his plan was to foster German implosion in order to turn the people
against the Nazis, a plan which should have prompted him to encourage internal
plots against Hitler. But Roosevelt believed German militarism was the problem,
and so bracketed the anti-Hitler conspirators with the Nazis.
As Germany stared
defeat in the face, its countrymen indeed began to turn against the Fuhrer. In
mid-February 1943, an anti-Nazi demonstration by students in Munich spiraled
out of control - and unrest spread to other cities in Germany and Austria. But
faced with the prospect of unconditional surrender, what chance did the
protesters stand?
In May 1943, Goerdeler returned to Stockholm and asked Marcus Wallenberg
to contact the British government again for a list of traites
that would be acceptable. Plus plans were made for Hitler’s assassination,
Operation flash, and for wresting control from the Nazis.
Canaris concealed the
plan for the takeover of Germany by cunningly suggesting to Hitler that a
contingency was needed in case of civil unrest by the four million ‘guest’
(slave) workers in the country. Hitler authorized the setting up of Operation
Valkyrie, in place by October 1942. At the codeword ‘Valkyrie’, martial law
would be imposed, any commanders moving swiftly to ‘protect’ Nazi institutions.
Still believing that
if they got rid of Hitler surely Roosevelt and Churchill would negotiate, on 13
March 1943 the conspirators made their first attempt on his life. Canaris
arranged for a bomb disguised as a parcel to be on Hitler’s plane when he visited
the Eastern Front, using British plastic explosives captured from the SOE in
France. When the bomb exploded, the codeword ‘Rash’ would trigger ‘Valkyrie
while agents in neutral countries would approach the British and Americans to
negotiate a settlement. However, the acid fuse froze at the high altitude, and
Hider’s curiously charmed life continued.
The opposition in
Italy was also being ignored. This is even harder to understand, as Mussolini
was considerably less secure than Hitler, being under such intense pressure
that he was virtually unable to govern. Richard Lamb summarises
the contradictions:
In 1941 Churchill was
willing to go to great lengths to encourage the anti-Fascists in Italy to end
the war, including bribing the Italian fleet to surrender, and offering a
non-Fascist Italy a colony in Cyrenaica [of libya].
Yet in 1943, when Italy was down and out, no gesture was made by the Allies to
the anti-Fascists and monarchists plotting to overthrow Mussolini, and thus a
chance was missed to occupy Italy with Allied forces before the Germans poured
over the Brenner Pass. This extraordinary and illogical volte face towards the
Italian Resistance inside Italy was extremely costly.
On 12 May 1943,
Churchill and Roosevelt’s two-week summit ‘Trident’ took place in Washington,
and although the principle of Husky had been agreed at Casablanca, in
April Eisenhower formally asked Churchill to agree to a postponement of the
Sicilian invasion, on the grounds that time German presence there , two
divisions , was too formidable. Churchill observed that this was odd,
Eisenhower even told Churchill that Montgomery agreed with him , which
turned out to be completely untrue.
Stalin was furious,
and reports appeared in the Swedish press, of secret negotiations between
German and Russian representatives in Stockholm. That these stories might be
true is seen from Himmler’s actions in July 1944 to be mentioned later in the
lecture.
According to German
officers who attended as technical advisers, von Ribbentrop proposed as a
condition of peace that Russia’s future frontier should run along the Djieper, while Molotov would not consider anything less
than the restoration of her original frontier; the discussion became hung up on
the difficulty of bridging such a gap, and was broken off after a report that
it had leaked out to the Western Powers.
Despite its
implications, this story has received surprisingly little attention. If Stalin
and Molotov were prepared to discuss terms with Germany while the Western
Allies refused to consider conditions at any price, it would be the perfect
example of the unequal partnership within the ‘Grand Alliance’. But maybe the
talks actually took place but the Russians intended them to leak in order to
put pressure on their Allies.
Most of Trident’s
wrangling centered on the problem of de Gaulle, to the frustration of both
President and Prime Minister. But just as Churchill realized he had to get rid
of him, de Gaulle himself managed to outmaneuver both of the despised ‘Anglo
Saxons’.
De Gaulle also had the
support of the French resistance, which demanded during Trident that he be
appointed head of a provisional government in Algiers while remaining their
leader. This prompted General Giraud to invite de Gaulle to Algiers to discuss
the sharing of power. (Giraud’s change of heart may also be partly explained by
his discovery that his daughter and grandchildren had been captured in Tunisia
and transported to Germany.) Churchill was somewhat mollified when he heath
about Giraud’s offer of a way out of the mess.
On 1 August, de
Gaulle became President of the French Committee of National Liberation, with
Giraud as Commander-in-Chief. At Quebec later that month, Roosevelt and
Churchill finally agreed to recognize the Committee’s authority over any
territories that acknowledged it themselves.
Although while
courting Vichy FDR had consistently maintained that Indo-China would remain in
French hands, after he broke with them, he made Indo-China "one of the
most important focuses of I campaign against Western European imperialism in
his desire n oversee the coming of a post-imperial world". Roosevelt told
the Pacific War Council in July 1943: "Indo-China should not be given back
to the French Empire after the war?" And at Cairo, he proposed it should
be given to China" but Chiang Kai-shek refused to take it.
Even so, the colony's
leadership remained loyal to Vichy until the Normandy landings, after which it
seemed wise to reconsider theft position. But if Indo-China went over to de
Gaulle, it was likely that the Japanese would invade so the Free French planned
to send reinforcements.
Roosevelt backed
neither the Vichyites nor the Free French "as either would
decolonize" decreeing in February 1944 there would be no US aid to French
forces liberating Indo-China, followed by an Executive Order in October
expressly forbidding it. In fact, until March 1945 - when Churchill presented
him with a fait accompli - Roosevelt scrupulously kept the Free French out of
any Allied operations in the Far East.
The Allies - largely
SOE had worked with the Free French to prepare to defend Indo-China through a
campaign of subversion called Operation Belief. But following Roosevelt's
directive, the Americans were conspicuous by theft absence. Instead, ironically
in view of later events, the 055 threw its support behind the Communist
nationalist organization led by Ho CM Minh, the Viet Minh, forerunners of the
Viet Cong "not the last time US intelligence created a problem for the
future by building up a guerrilla leader who would turn against them"
which provoked serious deception and infighting between the British and
Americans, sometimes with tragic consequences.
For example, in July
1944 SOE tricked the Americans into letting them use one of theft bases in
southern China for dropping Free French agents into Indo-China. When the US
Joint Chiefs, complained to Roosevelt, American air facilities in southern
China were abruptly withdrawn from SOE. As a result, supplies for the
resistance had to be flown in from Burma by the RAF — a long and hazardous
journey. SOE also decided not to tell the Americans about these missions, even
though the RAF flew over American-controlled airspace. Several British aircraft
were shot down by US fighters!(1) With the liberation of France, at the
beginning of 1945 the colony became subject to de Gaulle's new Free French
Council of Indo China.
In autumn 1944, the
US propaganda organization OWl concentrated on
convincing the Japanese that a US-led land invasion was planned in Indo-China
as the first step to re-conquer mainland Asia.
Also Prime Minister
Sikorski’s death made life much smoother for the Big Three: as events proved,
his removal weakened the Free Polish government. Neither his successor
Stanislaw Mikolajczyk nor General Kazimierz Sosnkowski
as Commander-in-Chief (Sikorski had held both offices) approached the same
political stature, and they clashed on policy. Significantly, Mikolajczyk took
a much more conciliatory line with Moscow than Sikorski.
Six days after
Sikorski’s death, Anglo-American forces under Field Marshal Montgomery and
Lieutenant-General George S. Patton began the first strike at the ‘soft
underbelly’ of Axis Europe. By the middle of August, Sicily was under an Allied
Military Government of Occupied Territories.
Although Churchill
anticipated it would be the end for Mussolini, even he must have been surprised
at the speedy fall of his one-time hero, after 20 years in power. Since the
beginning of the year, Il Duce’s leadership had been under mounting pressure from
rivals and the Italian people, and for some time Allied agents in Switzerland
had been in contact with the anti-Mussolini faction in Italy.
Churchill believed
they should concentrate on Italy, even though the ‘soft underbelly’ was more
impenetrable than anticipated. At the week-long Quadrant Conference in Quebec
in August 1943, he recommended a revision of the cross-Channel invasion plan,
while Harry Hopkins, kept pushing for Overlord to begin as soon as possible. In
the end, they compromised: the invasion of Italy was to continue, but they
would also go ahead with a scaled-down version of Overlord, 29 divisions, not
48, on 1 May 1944. Although Churchill approved, Hopkins still worried that he
might try to sabotage the plan later.
The cross-Channel
plan was originally meant to draw some of the fire aimed at the USSR, but after
Stalingrad that was no longer so important. So why did the Americans -
particularly Hopkins - still want to invade France? As there was now little
chance of Germany giving in without fighting to the last gasp, the overriding
question was which plan would get the Allies to Berlin the fastest? And as the
Germans Were collapsing in the east, which Ally would get to Berlin first - the
Soviet Union or the Americans and British?
Churchill believed
that not only was it essential to defeat Germany, but the Russians must also be
kept as far east as possible, lessening their long-term threat to Europe and
pre-empting the Allies’ inevitable clash over post-war Poland. The Prime Minister
envisaged pushing up through Italy, opening the way for the Western Allies to
invade Austria and liberate Czechoslovakia or the Balkans, before the Red Army
arrived.’
But did the Americans
champion the cross-Channel alternative because they believed it would get them
to Berlin first? Curiously, the evidence points the other way entirely: that
they preferred Overlord , at least politically ,because it would mean that the
Western Allies would be slower in getting there, allowing the Russians to seize
most of eastern Europe and even capture the German capital itself. Preposterous
though this may seem, this was undoubtedly Roosevelt’s and Hopkins’ preferred
choice once they smelt victory. It was a cornerstone of their post-war
projections that Russia would inevitably emerge as the major Eurasian power,
counter-balancing the United Sates.
Roosevelt and Hopkins
also realized it would be easier to persuade the Allies to agree to the
post-war dismemberment of Germany if lie Russians controlled a substantial
chunk, and if the Americans were already in Europe. The assault on Germany from
east and west therefore had to be carefully choreographed so everyone ended sip
where Roosevelt and Hopkins wanted them to be — even if that meant slowing down
the advance. We will see the extraordinary consequences of this in the last
stages of the war.
Some have asked even
if Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to adopt these policies because he
believed they were in America’s interest, or was he acting under orders from
the Kremlin as a possible mole, not unlike the British spy Harold A.R.(“Kim”)
Philby.
In May, the President
sent Joseph E. Davies (former Ambassador of the USSR) to Moscow to arrange a
private meeting with Stalin. When Churchill protested, humiliated, using the
grounds that German propaganda would make capital out of a meeting from which Britain
was excluded, Roosevelt replied, ‘I did not suggest to UJ [ Joe] that we meet
alone.’ He lied.
More strategic
conferences took place in November and December 1943, in Cairo and Teheran, the
latter being the first time Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met. Chiang
Kai-shek was present in Cairo because the Japanese war was on the agenda, but
as the USSR was not at war with Japan it was inappropriate for Stalin to
attend.
In Cairo, Sir Charles
Wilson recorded:
“Ran into Marry
Hopkins, and found him hull of sneers and jibes. He had just come from a
meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, who were framing a plan of campaign to
put before Stalin at Teheran. According to Harry, Winston hardly stopped
talking, and most of it was about ‘his bloody Italian war’, many made it clear
that if the PM takes this line at Teheran and tries again to postpone OVERLORD
the Americans will support the Russians.”
But it was the
Teheran Conference that not only brought about Hopkins’ final victory on that
score, but also fundamentally changed the course of history. It was here that
Roosevelt and Stalin ganged up— on Churchill, pronouncing that Normandy was to
be the Allies’ focus, even diverting support troops from Italy. Mark Stoler
writes: For the first time the British were outvoted and overwhelmed by their
more powerful Soviet and US allies, who in effect struck a global strategic
bargain at the expense of London’s indirect approach.
Roosevelt would
deliver the long-awaited invasion of France, with Stalin supporting with a big
push from the east. Ironically, the 1942 situation was now reversed: Stalin
finally got his ‘Second Front’ by promising an offensive in the east to draw
German forces off. Clearly, he wanted to forestall the threat to his plans for
Eastern Europe posed by the Italian campaign. In return for his help, Stalin
also undertook to declare war on Japan once Germany was defeated. All his
dreams were fulfilled, because of Roosevelt’s support. As Robert Nisbet
observed: ‘At Tehran, FDR played essentially the role Chamberlain had at
Munich.
But after declining
the Prime Minister’s invitation to stay at the British Embassy, FDR elected to
stay at the Soviet Embassy, after Molotov told him that the US legation was not
secure and that German agents were plotting to assassinate him. Of course, the
President’s rooms were bugged.’ But this arrangement also allowed Roosevelt to
have three private meetings with Stalin at which they agreed some of the major
issues in advance of the official sessions. FDR refused Churchill’s requests
for one-to-one meetings.
When Roosevelt and
Stalin discussed Poland’s borders, time Russian demanded that they revert to
the position defined in time Nazi-Soviet Pact. According to the official US
minutes, Roosevelt responded that: ‘when the Soviet armies reoccupied these
areas, he did not intend to go to war with the Soviet Union on this point’.
Privately with
Stalin, Roosevelt also pushed his ‘Four Policemen’ idea, in which France was
conspicuous by its absence. In fact, he and Stalin agreed that France deserved
nothing from the war, and should be stripped of its colonies.’ FDR also told
Stalin he would like to discuss India with him some time, astonishingly saying
he preferred to see Indian reform ‘somewhat on the Soviet line’. It was
just as well Churchill was not present.
Clearly, Roosevelt’s
main agenda was to ensure that the Soviet Union became the dominant power in
Europe. The two leaders agreed that to prevent further German aggression,
Germany should be hacked up into its original constituent states after the war.
But FDR assured Stalin that France would also be reduced to a ‘third-rate
power’. There would be nothing to stop the Soviet domination of Europe.
Teheran was a major
humiliation for Churchill, not just politically but personally. Even in the
official sessions, Roosevelt delighted in insulting the Prime Minister in front
of Stalin - signaling that he and bluff Uncle Joe were new best friends."
At Stalin’s banquet at the Soviet Embassy, Stalin openly taunted Churchill: ‘In
1919 you were so keen to fight and now you don’t seem to be at all. What
happened? Is it advancing age? How many divisions do you have in contact with
the enemy? What is happening to all those two million men in India?’
During the serial
vodka toasts, when Stalin proposed that at the end of the war 50,000 randomly
selected German officers should be shot as a lesson to Germany, Churchill was appalled,
declaring emphatically that no one, ‘Nazi or no’, should be dispatched without
a proper trial. Pretending to compromise, Roosevelt facetiously proposed to
reduce the number to 49,500. As Elliott Roosevelt recorded: ‘Americans and
Russians laughed. The British, taking their cue from their Prime Minister’s
mounting fury, sat quiet and straight- faced.’
The anti-Hitler cabal
certainly wanted the war to end. On l9 July, when von Stauffenberg was summoned
to Hitler at Rastenburg in East Prussia, yet again
Operation Valkyrie was dusted off. The next day, he placed the briefcase-bomb
under the table where Hitler was receiving his daily briefing, before leaving
the room.
Having witnessed the
explosion, von Stauffenberg made the fatal error of assuming the Führer was
dead, returning to Berlin to initiate Operation Valkyrie. A few hours
afterwards, as scheduled, Hitler met Mussolini off a train, telling him: ‘After
my miraculous escape from death today I am more than ever convinced that it is
my fate to bring our common enterprise to a successful conclusion?
Yet, unknown to the
slightly battered Hider, Valkyrie was swinging into action. It called for a
state of emergency, the arrest of pro-Hider officers and Nazi and SS leaders,
and the army to take over the rank and file. The formation of a new, non-Nazi
government would then be announced.
That night, Berlin
was electric with tension. Remer’s troops surrounded the Staff headquarters
where the coup leaders, including General Beck and von Stauffenberg (still
convinced he had killed Hider), were trying to retain control of the uprising.
Dispatching tanks to
besiege the SS headquarters, a battle on the streets of Berlin seemed
inevitable. As the coup crumbled, General Fromm, to cover up his own role on
the fringes of the conspiracy ordered the immediate executions of von
Stauffenberg and other plotters, but allowed the elderly and respected General
Beck the option of suicide. Ironically, Valkyrie went smoothly in Paris: all
1,200 SS officers in the city were arrested. But when the coup fell apart in
Germany itself, there was no point in going it alone, and they were freed.
The British War
Cabinet agreed their official stance about the plot before the Commons debate
on 2 August: they would discourage any remaining anti-Hitler plotters,
reinforcing the message that unconditional surrender was required from any
German government." So near to victory, they needed the Americans.
Where the
Stauffenberg plan was to replace the Nazi Governement
with that of an ultra-conservative meaning German Royalists but also
Catholics, Himmler’s proposals the details of which have been
published in the 2002 book by John H.Walker
“The Devil’s Doctor” was more along the lines of the proposal carried to the UK
by Hitler’s right hand Hess, with the difference that Himmler would illuminate
Hitler and take his place with the argument, that it would avoid dividing the
spoils of Europe with Stalin.
To prove his
intention Himmler told by Hitler to “kill all Jews left in the
concentration camps” stopped doing so (shortly before the end of the war)
after a private arrangement with Count Folke
Bernadotte.
And although
Himmler's peace overtures were directed mostly towards London, he also
contacted Allen W. Dulles in Bern, and General William ("Wild Bill")
Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), received secret
peace overtures from spy chief Schellenberg , and Kersten, Himmler’s
masseur (Waller , The Devil’s Doctor, 2002, p. 142.).
On March 20,1944,
General William Donovan, passed on to President Roosevelt a memorandum
sent to him by Abram Hewitt (code designation number 610), Hewitt's message,
which summed up his conversations with Felix Kersten and Walter Schellenberg,
emissaries of Himmler, must surely have caught the president's attention. Not
only were its contents startling, but the report had been sent by Hewitt, his
longtime friend whom he had sent to Stockholm under the aegis of OSS to get a
feel for the role and significance of Scandinavia. William Donovan's position
and his personal relationship with the president gave him easy access to the
White House. Hewitt's report, however, was more important than most
communications that required Roosevelt's personal attention: it concerned a
secret proposal proffered by Heinrich Himmler, and iterated by Schellenberg and
Kersten, for ousting Hitler and negotiating peace with the Western Allies.
Hewitt described in
the report how he met Kersten in October 1943, although the OSS officers had
usually brushed off “earlier” efforts by the Nazis to make contact (Waller, The
Devil’s Doctor, p.143).
T. Roosevelt
according to Waller, “did not want to aggravate Stalin by any apparent
machination that left him out of the picture” (Waller, 143).
Hewitt elaborated on
Swedish-German industrial and banking ties, including Enskilda
Banken, a bank dominating Sweden's mining and manufacturing sector of the
economy and controlled by the powerful Wallenberg family.
Hewitt explained that
he had first met Jacob Wallenberg in 1932 and ware that Hewitt was well
connected in the United States and was even a friend of President Roosevelt,
Wallenberg, secretly tied in with the German Resistance, confided freely in him(Allen
W. Dulles, Germany's Underground (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 142, 143)
Explaining that he
was "in touch with a cross-section of the high ranking German financial
and manufacturing interests," Wallenberg told him that Resistance
"cells were forming in Germany for the purpose of overthrowing
Hitler." He asked Hewitt if he "would be willing to meet with
representatives of such cells." Because of the highly sensitive political
nature of this information, Hewitt informed Herschel Johnson, the American
minister in Stockholm, who telegraphed it to the State Department.
In commenting on
Hitler, Wallenberg explained to Hewitt that "his friends" in
Germany-a euphemistic reference to Resistance members he knew-were somewhat
perplexed about the Reichsführer's true motives.
While Himmler was supposed to be entirely loyal to Hitler, certain changes were
taking place in Germany that could only raise questions in the minds of
intelligence observers. Hewitt drew the conclusion that Wallenberg, though
vague on this score, meant that Himmler's intention was to oust Hitler and take
over Germany's government himself as a prelude to reaching a peace agreement
with the Western Allies. It was Wallenberg's opinion that by the summer of
1942-if not before, in December 1941, when the United States entered the
War-Himmler was convinced that Germany would lose, and so he had begun
searching for ways to ingratiate himself with the Western Allies, using the SS
and the Nazi Party security apparatus as bargaining chips in an unrealistic
scenario in which Germany, governed by him in alliance with the Western Powers,
would turn their guns on the Russians and defeat the mutually hated Communist
bogey.(Waller , The Devil’s Doctor, p. 144).
In fact British
RAF planes dropped blocks of Deutsches Reich stamps
with a portrait of Himmler rather than Hitler onto the bemused Austrian
peasants beyond Bad Ischl and other parts of the
German Reich. The stamps can be viewed in Austria at the Fischerhuette
Archiv, Toplitzsee
/Styria.
Undaunted, Himmler
July 1944 got in touch with the Zionist leader Weizmann and as a sign of good
faith, rounded up and shot all the Germans who were attempting to reach a
settlement with Russia, to insure there would be no double dealing. This is
evidence by the document Mallet PRO 15-12-- 1944 FO 371/35178; Prem 3/197/1,
quoted on p. 285 of Basset “Hitler’s Spy Chief”, 2005.
Stalin was also
treated as an equal when the victors divided up Germany and Europe. The
original plan was that the "four victorious powers" would draw up a
peace treaty, set up a new democratic government in Germany and then withdraw.
However, disagreements soon set in between the three Western Allies and the
Soviet Union, and in 1948 Britain, France and the USA began to create a new
state in their zones of occupation, while the Soviet Union set up its own
regime in its zone. The division into East and West Germany would last for
nearly half a century. Stalin also quickly tightened his grip on the nations
that had fallen into his sphere of influence - including Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria - until they were nothing more than Soviet
puppets.
What they failed to
anticipate was the development of the atomic bomb and the to deliver this new
weapon between continents, in the shape of the long-range bomber and, late; the
Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. Their grand design backfired badly, creating
the Cold War and t threat of nuclear annihilation that chilled the lives of
generations. It is easy to forget just how dose this came, and that the Cold
War blew exceedingly hot for many millions of people.
Shortly after the
German surrender, tensions surfaced between the two new superpowers,
particularly when Stalin blatantly ignored the Yalta agreement on Poland. One
brazen breath particularly shocked the Americans: 16 leaders of the Polish
underground visited Moscow for talks about the new government, on a guarantee
of safe conduct but once there they were arrested and charged with treason. The
nervous Polish government-in-exile in London wanted the mess sorted out before
they became involved in the Moscow talks.
In May 1945, Averell
Harriman and Chips Bohlen proposed that Truman ask Hopkins - inevitably the
continuity between the two Presidents' foreign policy's to visit Moscow to try
to resolve matters with Stalin. Hopkins duly left on his last major adventure on
23 May: as Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky write: "A number of
historians, though unaware that the NKVD/NKGB regarded Hopkins as a Soviet
agent, have nonetheless been struck by his pro- Soviet approach to the
negotiations."
Hopkins stated the US
position: "We would accept any government in Poland which was desired by
the Polish people and was at the same time friendly to the Soviet
government." Of course, Stalin achieved this simply by ensuring that any
Poles who sought any other form of government were eliminated, deported or
intimidated into inaction. He proposed that the new government in Warsaw could
include up to four non-Communists (out of twenty) provided he could nominate
them. George McJimsey writes clearly with no sense of irony:
The question of the
Polish Soviet border having been decided at Yalta, the Polish-German border was
defined at Potsdam, although less controversially, as members of the
provisional Lublin government were allowed to participate. The border would
follow the rivers Oder and Neisse, hiving off land from Germany to recompense
Poland for its losses to the USSR agreed at Yalta. Not only was the Polish
border moved some 125 miles west but the 3.5 million Germans there were also
expelled, to resettle in the new, smaller Germany. Poles living in the areas
now belonging to Stalin were also evicted, to settle the areas taken from
Germany but soon found themselves under Soviet control anyway.
The Soviet Union now
controlled Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic and the Balkans. The new
western border added 21 million people to its population, and the governments
of all the adjacent nations were now acceptable to Moscow, becoming even more
amenable as the Iron Curtain clanged shut on huge tracts of Europe. The Baltic
states were quietly re-absorbed into the USSR as "Soviet Republics";
as Polish specialist Norman Davies points out, this "dearly breached
international law; but it passed without challenge".
The Free Poles in
Britain, Italy, the Middle East and part of Germany agonised
over whether to return to a Soviet-dominated home or stay where they were if
they could.
Lublin Communists and
5 from the government-in-exile, including Mikolajczyk as Deputy Prime Minister
- was formally recognised by Britain and the US a
month later. Elections in 1947 unsurprisingly resulted in an overwhelming
victory for the Communist Party; a few months later, Mikolajczyk fled to
Britain, in fear of his life.
Nearly six years previously,
the British had gone to war in order to keep Poland free; now they allowed it
to be handed back to one of the original invaders. Poland was both first victim
of the Second World War and first victim of the Cold War.
By the time of the
Yalta conference, it was dear that an Allied victory was inevitable even
without the atomic bomb: it was just a question of how long it would take and
how many lives it would cost.
In Burma, Japanese
forces continued to be pushed back steadily. Rangoon was recaptured by Indian
troops on 3 May 1945, just as the European war was coming to an end. The
Japanese attempt to break out of the Arakan region produced one of the most
mismatched battles of the war, with 17,000 Japanese casualties to just 95 on
die Allied side. The assault on Okinawa, just 350 miles from the Japanese
mainland, began on 1 April, but there was ferocious resistance, even from the
local children. Of 77,000 Japanese troops on the island, less than 10 per cent
were taken prisoner.
There always had been
an active peace movement, although because of the military caste's grip on the
government during the war it remained unobtrusive. But as the tide turned, it
began to re-emerge, led by General Koisi's Deputy
Prime Minister, Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa. There was
another change of leadership in Japan in April 1945. Koisi
had made a bumbling attempt to persuade Chiang Kai-shek's government to break
away from the Alliance, but when this was leaked he was forced to resign. He
was succeeded by the 78-year-old Admiral Suzuki Kantaro,
who had the backing of the peace lobby.
By the end of July,
Japan was under siege, heavy bombardment and blockade causing economic chaos
and food shortages. The government and military was split between those who
believed that Japan should defend its honor to the last breath and those who
wanted to save it by suing for peace. Under Suzuki, the first tentative peace
feelers were put out. Navy Secretary James Forestall noted on l3 July 1945:
The first real
evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war came today through
intercepted messages from Togo [Foreign Minister, to Sato, Jap Ambassador in
Moscow, instructing the latter to see Molotov if possible before his departure
for the Big Three meeting [and if not then, immediately afterward, to lay
before him the Emperor's strong desire to secure a termination of the war.
Before Potsdam,
Emperor Hirohito had already made it clear that although he was prepared to
talk peace, unconditional surrender was not acceptable. On 26 July, the Pots
dam Proclamation reiterated the demand and those of the Cairo Declaration, that
all territory outside Japan itself would be removed from Japanese control. A
more democratic system would be introduced, Japan being occupied until this was
done.
Both sides believed
the Pacific war would run at least for another year, because even very few
Americans knew about the atom bomb. In advance of the test, Churchill cabled to
Truman: "Let me know if it's a flop or a Truman replied," It's a plop.”
The tentative
decision to continue bombing until Japan surrendered was made by Roosevelt and
Churchill n September 1944, although ironically it
was their successors who were faced with the terrible responsibility. The first
of only two atomic bombs ever to have been used in war was dropped on the city
of Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945. The bomb was nicknamed "Little
Boy" after Roosevelt, the Nagasaki bomb was "Fat Man", after
Churchill.
Five square miles of
city were flattened. Of the 350,000 people in Hiroshima, besides the 92,000
destroyed by the searing flash and blast, others were to experience a slow
death, sometimes many years later, from the after-effects of the heat and
radiation. Within a year over 118,000 deaths had been recorded, the eventual
total being approximately 140,000. Through the genetic damage caused by the
radiation, the horror was also visited on mutated unborn children.
The next day, when
the Japanese Ambassador in Moscow asked Molotov to act as a mediator for peace
talks, he received instead declaration of war — the million-man Russian
offensive on Manchuria and northern Korea beginning just two hours later.
Soviet forces also attacked southern Sakhalin (the large island off the
Siberian coast that had been divided between the two nations since 1905) and
the Kurile Islands. There is little doubt that Stalin only joined the war so
late in the day because Japan's surrender was imminent, and if he stood aloof
from the Allies he would never get the territory he wanted.
As the Japanese hawks
and doves were still deadlocked, Suzuki appealed to the Emperor to make the
final decision: on 10 August, the Japanese informed the Allies that they
accepted the terms, except for one condition, "that it does not comprise
any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of the Emperor as sovereign
ruler". As Truman accepted, technically it was not actually unconditional
surrender after all. On 14 August, Hirohito broadcast to his people
"despite an armed attempt to prevent the broadcast" telling them
hostilities had ceased. Predictably, Stalin only ordered his forces to lay down
their arms when they had taken everything he wanted in China, Sakhalin and the
Kuriles, prolonging hostilities by another two weeks. The formal surrender took
place on 2 September, bringing Britain's involvement in the Second World War to
an end just one day short of its sixth anniversary.
Undoubtedly,
according to international law, dropping the bombs on japan
as a war crime pure and simple the Geneva and Hague Conventions forbid the
deliberate targeting of civilians in order to put pressure on their government.
Its apologists argue that it saved lives "mostly American" as an
attempt to invade Japan would have been the most savage battle yet, while many
others argue that such apocalyptic carnage could never be justified.
However, between the
stark choices of these two evils lies the specter of unconditional surrender.
Had peace talks and some form of compromise been possible to save Japan's lice,
neither invasion nor the Bomb would have been necessary. Yet the unconditional-
surrender policy remained unyielding to the last. The Allies' priorities were
curious, to say the least: faced with a choice between vaporizing thousands and
an invasion of carnage beyond imagining, they still considered backing down on
unconditional surrender less acceptable than either.
After Japan
surrendered, close to two-thirds of a million soldiers and civilians in
Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin and the Kuriles were deported to the Soviet gulags,
mostly in Siberia.
Shattered Britain
felt the shockwaves from the Japanese surrender in very immediate terms, for as
David Dimbleby and David Reynolds explain: "Eight days after they ended
with Japan's surrender, President Truman cancelled Lend-Lease. . . The British Food
Mission, dispatching tons of supplies from the United States, only learnt about
it when one of theft ships was refused permission to sail. Next day, die
official announcement was made Keynes aptly called the decision a
"financial Dunkirk".
To be fair to Truman,
this was not his initiative, but that of Congress. As the Lend-Lease Act gave
the President unprecedented control over the terms of supplies, Congress had no
wish for this to continue into the phase of post-war reconstruction. Wanting to
control the aid and its conditions, they stuck rigidly to the letter of the
law: Lend-Lease applied only while a state of war existed.
By 1945, Britain had
a balance-of-payments deficit of around $3 billion and had sold off a huge
amount of its assets. War production had diverted 1.5 million workers from
export industries "which meant they were unable to carry out the export
drive necessary for economic recovery. Britain also needed imports for its
reconstruction, and, as the only industrial nation left intact, the United
States was the only real source of what it needed" but, thanks to Harry
Dexter White and Morgenthau, the British dollar reserves were insufficient to
buy it.
In order to survive,
once again Britain had to go cap-in-hand to the US Treasury. Keynes was sent to
Washington to negotiate a loan, asking for $5 billion and eventually getting
$3.75 billion (and $1.25 billion from Canada), repayable with 2 per cent interest
in 50 annual installments, beginning in 1951.
Congress approved the
Marshall Plan in March 1948, but largely because of events that had prompted
fears of a Soviet takeover in Europe. In February 1948 came the first great
crisis of the Cold War "when it seemed it was about to become very hot"
with a Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia. The American commander in Germany
reported that war "may come with dramatic suddenness." In response to
this threat, Truman urged Congress to approve the Marshall Plan, as well as
re-introducing the draft.
The crisis also led
to the Brussels Defense Pact of March 1948, in which Britain, France, the
Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg undertook a mutual defense agreement, and
to the first discussions with the United States that culminated in the
formation of NATO in April 1949.
Roosevelt's and
Hopkins' division of Europe, creating a menace that now required Truman's
doctrine of containment, meant that, unlike the First World War, this time the
American GIs did not go home; this time, they stayed in Europe in case
hostilities flared up with the Soviet Union.
On 4 September 1945,
Hopkins was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by Truman, only just in
time. He died on 29 January 1946, aged 56. Although not many people today even
know his name, Hopkins' legacy was of truly epic proportions. This sickly man "unelected
and holding no official post in the US administration" actually shaped the
world according to his own grand design.
With a grotesque
irony, Britain, the United States, France and the other Allies fought in
partnership with a regime that equaled that of the Nazis in brutality,
repression and totalitarianism, whose alliance with Germany had caused the war
in the first place and even participated in the invasion of Poland that had
exploded the war into being. It was also a regime that explicitly sought the
downfall of its Allies indeed, it boasted a political creed with world
domination at its very core.
And yet at the end of
the conflict the Soviet Union was handed nearly half a century's domination of
eastern and central Europe. Millions of people who had been promised liberation
were enslaved by a brutal totalitarianism - with the blessing of the British
and American governments. And, much to the disgust of those who knew the truth
about his regime, Stalin and his henchmen were elevated to the same moral high
ground as the other victors.
As the Allies were
locked in a struggle for post-war supremacy, the conflict was deliberately and
cynically extended as each player battled for prime position for after the dust
settled. Lives were lost and terrible destruction visited on Allies and Axis
alike to an extent that was unnecessary had victory been the only goal. The
devastation of Europe need never have happened, yet without it, there would
have been no necessity for the United States to step in again with the Marshall
Plan.
In conclusion one
could say that every one of the wartime governments had its own agenda,
the Roosevelt administration actively encouraged the war between Britain and
Germany, yet Anglo-American relations during the Second World War were
characterized by suspicion, mistrust and a struggle for future supremacy.
British agents
tricked Hitler into declaring war on the US in order to bring America into the
European conflict and under the guise of war aid, the US gave the USSR the
means to establish itself as a world superpower - including, from 1943, the
secrets of the atom bomb.
How much sooner could
the war have ended? What opportunities were missed? The choices open to the
Allies are usually depicted as either fighting to total victory or ignoble
surrender followed by abject enslavement. However, there were several other
options, but history has been deliberately distorted in order to make it appear
that those alternatives never existed.
In Germany, Hitler's
reaction to Hess's flight was largely motivated by fear of losing face before
his own people should they discover that their Führer, whilst exhorting them to
fight on in his war of conquest, had actually been secretly involved in negotiations
with certain top Britons to make peace and end the war. Indeed, he had even
offered to at some point to withdraw all German forces from occupied western
Europe in order to attain a deal.
Aus der Akte Nr. 462a im Bestand 5 Verzeichnis 30 im Russischen
Staatsarchiv für Zeitgeschichte, Moskau. (English text
continues underneath)
„Aus Hitlers Umgebung sickerte durch, dass die
Entscheidung, Heß für geistesgestört zu erklären, in Hitlers Besprechung mit
Göring, Ribbentrop und Bormann gefallen war.
Als aus London die Meldung kam, der Duke of
Hamilton bestreite, mit Heß bekannt zu sein, entfuhr es Hitler spontan: »Was
für eine Heuchelei! Jetzt will er ihn nicht einmal kennen!«
Bei den Gesprächen in Hitlers Stab über den Flug von Heß wurde
unter dem Siegel der Verschwiegenheit geäußert, dass dieser ein Memorandum über
die Friedensbedingungen mit England bei sich habe: Heß hätte es aufgesetzt und
Hitler zugestimmt.
Dessen Hauptpunkt sei gewesen, dass England Deutschland freie
Hand gegenüber Sowjetrussland lassen werde, während Deutschland England den
Erhalt seines Kolonialbesitzes und die Vorherrschaft im Mittelmeerraum
garantiere.
Außerdem würde in dem Memorandum herausgestellt, dass ein
Bündnis »der großen Kontinentalmacht Deutschland« mit der »großen Seemacht
England« ihnen die Herrschaft über die ganze Welt sichern werde. Zudem wurde
bekannt, dass Heß seit dem Februar 1941 intensiv- mit der Ausarbeitung der
politischen und wirtschaftlichen Vorschläge befasst gewesen sei, die die
Grundlage der Verhandlungen mit den Engländern bilden sollten. Daran waren
weiter beteiligt: der Chef der Auslandsorganisation der nationalsozialistischen
Partei Bohle, der Ministerialrat im Reichswirtschaftsministerium Jagwitz, General Karl Haushofer und Heß' Bruder Alfred, Bohles Stellvertreter. P. 145 from:
The extraordinary
truth is that, for sixty years, a potentially devastating political secret has
been covered up by subterfuge. This secret was related to British fears in 1940
and 1941 that the country might go down to crushing defeat, and to how
Britain's top political minds determined that Britain would survive. The means
they used to accomplish this were ingenious and extremely subtle, but also
unscrupulous. They were the acts of desperate men, faced with the options of
either catastrophic defeat or national survival.
By its very nature,
what was done became a secret that could never be revealed. The decision to
promulgate the legend of the standalone nation - that Britain had survived
through pure military endeavour and luck - meant that
disclosure during the dangerous years of the Cold War would have resulted in
the shattering of Britain's international credibility, and the ruin of many
political careers.
Yet it could also be
said that there was another, more noble, purpose to keeping this secret for all
time. The impression has always been maintained that the Nazi leaders were a
bizarre range of individuals, devoid of compassion for humanity - and, in many
cases, evil personified. If, however, the truth should turn out to be that some
of these men had considerable political acumen, but that the inexorable spread
of the Second World War resulted largely from their inability to control the
situation, the distinction between pernicious men of evil intent, and
politicians unable to control the flames of war they had themselves lit,
becomes less clear-cut.
As early as January
1936, shortly after succeeding to the throne, King Edward VIII had sent word to
Hitler via a German kinsman, Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to say
that he believed an alliance between Great Britain and Germany was politically
necessary and that it could even lead to a military pact including France. It
was therefore his wish, King Edward said, to speak personally to the Reich
Chancellor as soon as possible, either in Britain or Germany.
Hitler thus saw
Edward's abdication as a victory for those forces in Britain that were hostile
to Germany. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, confirmed
Hitler's view that `the King had been deposed as the result of a
“Jewish-Masonic conspiracy” (the traditional view of the Nazi’s overall, see: Hitler’s Secret Protocols.
After Edward's
abdication One of the first big projects the Windsors
undertook in 1937 was a trip to National Socialist Germany. Now would come the
meeting that Edward had wished for: as Duke of Windsor he visited Adolf Hitler,
Chancellor of the German Reich, albeit not in Berlin, but at his private
residence, the Berghof, near Berchtesgaden in Bavaria.
There have never been
any British disclosures of the details of what the Duke of Windsor was
negotiating with Hitler and later the German government when he was working for
the British Foreign Office in Portugal. The only clues to have surfaced allude
to a seven-point plan, which was of sufficient importance for Hess secretly to
meet the Duke in the privacy of the Sacramento a Lapa home of the German
Ambassador to Portugal, Hoyningen-Huene, on Sunday,
28 July 1940, for a series of secret meetings. Unfortunately, the Duke was
spotted by expatriates living nearby.
And on 1 August the
Duke, under increasing pressure from the London, departed for the faraway
Bahamas. His endeavours to negotiate a peaceable
accord proceeded not one jot further, for the British government refused to
countenance any more interference from the man who had caused such
constitutional turmoil less than four years before. Also, unbeknownst to the
Duke of Windsor, peace with Germany was the last thing on Winston Churchill's
mind.
The next (some say it
was the fourth) peace offer would emanate directly from Hitler himself, and it
would be so secret that the Führer told no one in Germany about it at all, not
in the diplomatic service, the government, or the party; not even his inner
circle.
This latest attempt
to open peace discussions caused considerable consternation in Whitehall. The
very few men in the British Foreign Office who knew about it feared that the
more impressive these peaceable attempts became, the greater the likelihood that
they might dent Lord Halifax's determination to stand by Churchill and his `no
surrender' policy, and the resolve of those in the government who might be
tempted to accept a quick fix today, and worry about a Europe dominated by Nazi
Germany tomorrow. There was concern that the British government might split
between those determined to defeat Germany, and those who might vote against
Churchill in the House of Commons for peace, to save Britain from any further
suffering. This new initiative came at the height of the Blitz, those crucial
weeks of the Battle for Britain, which made the situation all the more
worrying.
Hitler's offer on
this occasion indicated that he was now approaching peace from a geopolitical,
rather than military, point of view, revealing the continuing influence of his
long discussions with Karl Haushofer in the 1920s and thirties. It also perhaps
indicates that the intellect and the foreign affairs interests of Rudolf Hess
lay behind the offer now being proposed to the British Ambassador in Stockholm,
Victor Mallet, via Swedish High Court Justice Dr Ekeberg, duly reported back to
London that:
Hitler's peace
terms as follows:
1 The Empire remains
with all the colonies and mandates.
2 The continental supremacy of Germany will not be called into question.
3 All questions concerning the Mediterranean and the French, Belgian and Dutch
colonies are open to discussion.
4 Poland. There must be `a Polish State'.
5 Czechoslovakia must belong to Germany.
But, that Hitler
wished to re-establish the sovereignty of all the occupied countries 'auf die dauer' [i.e. later on, on a permanent basis]. In the
economic sphere, however, the occupied countries must be part of the European
continent, but with complete political liberty (Doc. No. FO 371/24408 - Public
Records Office, Kew, England).
Also, enter the Palestine Question:
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