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Bulletin du Comité international
d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale
The Second World War
in 20th Century History
Oslo — August 11-12, 2000
19th International Congress
of Historical Sciences
n° 30/31 - 1999/2000
Bulletin of the International Committee
for the History of the Second World War
The Second World War in 20th Century History
Contents
I - NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF THE WAR
The End of the Grand Alliance. New Documents and Materials.......................... 11
Oleg RZHESHEVSKY, Mikhail Yu. MYAGKOV (Russia)
The Bitter Fruit of Victory: Churchill
and an Unthinkable Operation, 1945 ..................................................................... 27
David D ILKS (United Kingdom)
Between Self-Determination and Subordination: the Smaller Powers
of East-Central Europe in the Policy of the Big Three.......................................... 51
Magdalena HULAS (Poland)
New Conditions for the Development of Hungarian Society
Before and During the Second World War (1938-1945)
in Comparison with Central and Eastern Europe ................................................. 65
Péter SIPOS (Hungary)
Judicial Crimes as an Instrument of Internal Warfare and Subject
of Post-War Justice in Austria, A comparison of WW I and II ............................. 75
Claudia KURETSIDIS-HAIDER , Hans HAUTMANN (Austria)
The Bomb, the People and the Media ..................................................................... 93
Tomoyoshi H IRAI (Japan)
The Sino-American Relationships in World War II:
September 1940-May 1943....................................................................................103
SHI PING (China)
II- THE LEGACY OF THE WAR IN A LONG-TERM PERSPECTIVE
A Fourth Arm - Some Aspects of the British Experience of Special
Forces and Irregular Warfare During and After the Second World War..........115
Mark SEAMAN (United Kingdom)
The Place of the Second World War in the Internal Evolution
of Post-War Slovenia and Yugoslavia ..................................................................127
BoÏo REPE (Slovenia)
The Victory of World War II and Post-War World Peace
and Development ...................................................................................................145
Li DIANREN (China)
Current Views of World War II in Japan .............................................................153
Takashi SAITO (Japan)
The Second World War in American History and Memory ................................161
Mark A. STOLER (USA)
La Seconde Guerre mondiale et la “Wehrmacht” dans la mémoire
culturelle de l’après-guerre allemand (1945-1955) ............................................175
Jörg ECHTERNKAMP (Germany)
Historiographie de guerre et historiographie du temps présent :
cadres institutionnels en Europe occidentale (1945-2000).................................191
Pieter LAGROU (France)
Bibliographical essays
World War II in the Historiography of the GDR. A Selected Bibliography.......219
Margarete PIESCHE, Gerhart HASS, Werner RÖHR (Germany)
The Second World War Revisited. New Perspectives on the Eve
of the 21st Century? Literature. 1995-2000..........................................................245
Dick VAN GALEN LAST (The Netherlands)
ABSTRACTS ...........................................................................................................309
AUTHORS ...............................................................................................................317
INDEX .....................................................................................................................323
BUREAU DU COMITÉ INTERNATIONAL D'HISTOIRE
DE LA DEUXIÈME GUERRE MONDIALE
PRÉSIDENT D'HONNEUR :
Harry PAAPE (PAYS-BAS)
PRÉSIDENT :
David DILKS (ROYAUME UNI)
VICE-PRÉSIDENTS :
Dusan BIBER (SLOVÉNIE)
Donald S. DETWILER (ÉTATS-UNIS)
Gerhard HIRSCHFELD
(ALLEMAGNE)
Oleg A. RZHESHEVSKY (RUSSIE)
SECRÉTAIRE GÉNÉRAL :
Henry ROUSSO (FRANCE)
TRÉSORIER :
Peter ROMIJN (PAYS-BAS)
MEMBRES :
Norman HILLMER (CANADA)
Magdalena HULAS (POLOGNE)
Domokos KOSARY (HONGRIE)
Ivar KRAGLUND (NORVÈGE)
Viorica MOÏSIUC (ROUMANIE)
Président
Professor David Dilks
Wits End
Long Causeway
Leeds
LS16 8EX (Royaume-Uni)
Secrétaire général
Henry Rousso
IHTP-CNRS
École normale supérieure de Cachan
61, avenue du Président Wilson
94235 Cachan Cedex (France)
Trésorier : Dr. Peter Romijn
NIOD – Herengracht 380
1016 CJ Amsterdam (Pays-Bas)
Rédaction du Bulletin n° 30/31
Gabrielle Muc-Drigeard (IHTP - CNRS)
École normale supérieure de Cachan
61, avenue du Président Wilson
94235 Cachan Cedex (France)
téléphone : 33 1 47 40 68 00
e-mail : [email protected]
[email protected]
Avant-propos*
Le lecteur trouvera dans ce numéro spécial du Bulletin du Comité
international d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale une série de
contributions pour le congrès du CIHDGM d’août 2000, à Oslo, dans le cadre
du XIXe Congrès international des sciences historiques.
Fort du succès rencontré par cette formule lors du précédent congrès, à
Montréal, en 1995, le bureau a pris la décision de renouveler l’expérience du
premier « Blue Book », et d’offrir un ensemble destiné à nourrir une
discussion ouverte sur le thème retenu en cette fin de millénaire : l’histoire du
second conflit mondial dans la perspective de l’histoire générale du XXe
siècle.
L’ensemble comprend deux parties. La première porte plus spécifiquement
sur la guerre elle-même, avec des contributions sur les aspects militaires,
diplomatiques, et politiques, ainsi que sur les conséquences à court terme du
conflit. Il s’intéresse également à des événements qui ont marqué la fin de la
guerre et l’immédiat après-guerre.
La seconde partie porte sur les effets à long terme de la guerre, que ce soit
dans le cadre des relations internationales, que ce soit dans le registre d’une
histoire de la mémoire, des représentations et des usages du passé.
Le volume se clôt par deux essais bibliographiques.
Il est important de rappeler que ces textes nous ont été adressés par nos
correspondants nationaux, qui sont au nombre d’une trentaine, situés dans
toutes les régions du globe. Si le Comité a accepté de les publier, il rappelle
que ces textes n’engagent que leurs auteurs, que ce soit par leurs options
scientifiques ou méthodologiques, que ce soit par leurs éventuelles
considérations politiques et idéologiques.
Tel quel, cet ensemble nous paraît constituer un reflet, certes incomplet, de
l’historiographie actuelle de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans toute sa
diversité, mais il a pour vocation de nourrir une discussion qui n’est pas prête
de se clore sur le sujet.
Pour le bureau,
David Dilks, Peter Romijn, Henry Rousso
*
Le bureau du comité remercie Marianne Ranson, ancienne secrétaire générale de
l’Institut d’histoire du temps présent, pour son aide dans la relecture du manuscrit qui a
été également revu par David Dilks, président du Comité.
Foreword*
The reader will find in this special issue of the Bulletin of the International
Committee for the History of the Second World War a series of contributions
for the August 2000 congress of the ICHSWW, in Oslo, in the framework of
the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences.
Since this formula met with such success at the preceding congress in
1995 at Montreal, the executive board made the decision to repeat the
experiment of the first “ Blue Book ”, and to offer a collection destined to
nourish an open discussion on the theme reserved for the end of the
millennium : the history of the Second World War in the perspective of the
general history of the 20th century.
The collection comprises two parts. The first consists specifically of the
war itself, with contributions on military, diplomatic, and political aspects, as
well as on the short-term consequences of the conflict. It covers equally the
events that marked the end of the war and the immediate postwar period.
The second part focuses on the long-term effects of the war, either in the
framework of international relations, or in that of the record of a history of
memory, representations, and the uses of the past.
The volume ends with two bibliographical essays.
It is important to recall that these texts had been sent to us by our national
correspondents who, located all over the world, number about thirty. If the
Committee has accepted to publish them, we remind you that these texts are
the sole responsibility of the authors and reflect their scientific and
methodological options whatever their eventual political or ideological
considerations.
As it is, this collection appears to constitute a reflection, certainly
incomplete, of the current historiography of the Second World War in all of
its diversity, but it aims to nourish a discussion that is not ready to close the
subject.
On behalf of the Executive Board
David Dilks, Peter Romijn, Henry Rousso
*
The executive board of the Committee expresses his thanks to Marianne Ranson,
former general secretary of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent, for her help in rereading the manuscript that was also looked over by David Dilks, President of the
Committee.
The Second World War in the 20th Century
History
I – NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF THE WAR
The End of the Grand Alliance.
New Documents and Materials
Oleg A. RZHESHEVSKY
Mikhail Yu. MYAGKOV
The leaders of the States of the Grand Alliance, the Big Three, met once
again at Potsdam, near Berlin, in July 1945. Less than half a year had passed
since the previous conference at Yalta, but the composition of the
conference’s leadership had changed significantly. President Roosevelt, the
acknowledged arbitrator in the discussions of the Big Three, died shortly
before the Potsdam Conference, leaving the new president, Harry Truman, to
represent the United States. Winston Churchill left the July 1945 conference
soon after its opening and was replaced by Clement Attlee, the leader of the
Labour Party which had won the British parliamentary elections. Of those
who had built the coalition and led it to victory, only Stalin remained. The
relations between the leaders of the three Great Powers changed perceptibly,
as evidenced, in particular, from the Potsdam documents kept the in Foreign
Policy Archives of the Russian Federation. The first document, dated July 17,
1945, was submitted by Truman and demanded immediate reorganisation of
the existing governments in Rumania and Bulgaria (see annex 1). The second
is the reply of July 20 submitted by the Soviet delegation. The memorandum
refutes the arguments of the American document and points to the fact that
“terrorism rages in Greece [occupied by British troops - Auth.], which is
directed against the democratic elements that had borne the brunt of the
struggle against German invaders for the liberation of Greece”1 (see annex 2).
Measured by the international standard, the Potsdam Conference was an
important and, for the most part, productive event, which exerted a positive
effect on post-war peacemaking. Meanwhile, hardly any of the delegation
heads cherished an illusion that it was not the last meeting of the Big Three.
The parties did collaborate, but they mistrusted each other (see annex 3).
Sharp contradictions surfaced in such cardinal matters as the opening of the
second front (strategy) and the post-war order in the Eastern European States
bordering on the Soviet Union (geopolitics), and things took an irreversible
character after the United States developed and mastered nuclear weapons.
1. Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian Federation, 0639/2/1/8, pp. 40, 148-149.
12
O. Rzheshevsky, M. Mjakov
Changes that have taken place on the international arena in the past decade
and the availability of many documents declassified recently offer us an
opportunity to take a fresh approach to evaluating the basis of the conflict of
interests between the Allies in 1941-1945. All the more so since the ghost of a
unipolar world brings us back to the dilemma facing Roosevelt in the years of
the Second World War: he had no doubt that the security of nations depended
on Allied Great Powers, but he was troubled by the question of who would
control the observers themselves and how.2
For Great Britain and the United States, the opening of the second front was
more a question of implementing their strategy whereas for the Soviet Union,
it was also a problem of saving the lives of millions of Soviet people. The
Allied forces landing in France helped decrease the losses of the Red Army
and civilian population, and drive the enemy faster from the occupied lands.
However, the second front was of critical significance for the Soviet Union at
certain stages of warfare in 1941-1943. On his visits to London and
Washington in May and June 1942, Vyacheslav Molotov was assured, in
principle, by the US government and, with reservations, by the British, that
the question of the Allied troops landing in Europe was an “urgent task” of the
Western Allies and would be resolved before the end of 1942. The People’s
Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR remained sceptical about these
assurances, but Stalin, as is evident from the documents found in his personal
archives, believed at that stage of the war that aid from the Allies in the
immediate future was really coming. With this in view, the Soviet leader even
removed the demand to restore the 1941 Soviet frontiers after the end of the
war from the agenda. Agreements on the opening of the second front in 1942
were far more important! 3
Time passed, but the second front had not been established. 1942, the
hardest year for the Soviet Union, ended after the Battle of Stalingrad with its
defeats and a glimpse of victory. It became clear after the British-US
conference in Casablanca in January 1943 that the Allied forces would not
launch an offensive in France even during that year. The joint message on the
conference results sent by Churchill and Roosevelt to Stalin contained no
information on concrete operations and dates, but hopefully said: « these
2. W. F. Kimball, “’Semeiny krug’ : poslevoyennyi mir glazami Ruzvelta”,
Voprosy Istorii, 1990, n° 12, p. 5.
3. O. A. Rzheshevsky, War and Diplomacy. The Making of the Grand Alliance.
From Stalin’s Archives (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 123, 160-161.
THE END OF THE GRAND ALLIANCE
13
operations, together with your powerful offensive, will most likely bring
Germany to her knees in 1943 ».4
Moscow understood the hidden motives of this vague utterance very well,
as is manifest in the request made by Stalin to Churchill and Roosevelt in his
message of January 30, 1943: “[...] I would be much obliged to you, he wrote,
for informing us of concrete planned operations in this area and the scheduled
terms of carrying them out”.5
Upon consulting with Roosevelt, the British Prime Minister sent a
reassuring reply to the Soviet party: “We are also making energetic
preparations, to the limit of our resources, for an operation of crossing the
Channel in August, in which British troops and US units will be engaged... If
the operation has to be postponed because of weather conditions or other
circumstances, it will be prepared, with the participation of larger forces, for
September”.6
Some Western historians call it deliberate deceit, and with good reason.7
While reiterating their willingness to open a second front in Europe in 1943,
the Governments of the United States and Britain were actually preparing for
further hostilities in the Mediterranean theatre of war. However, deception
could not last long, and after his next meeting with Churchill in Washington
in May 1943, Roosevelt communicated to Moscow that the opening of the
second front had been postponed to 1944.
It was the same story over and over again: the Allies announced the
postponement of the second front opening on the eve of the Wehrmacht’s
summer onslaught in 1942. The same happened in 1943. The subsequent
exchange of messages only exacerbated the situation, as the United States and
Britain had exhausted convincing arguments in favour of the position they
held.8
The Allies were facing a serious crisis in their relations. In addition to the
postponed landing, the Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR were cut down. The
diplomatic relations between the USSR and the Polish government-in-exile in
London were actually severed in April, after German propaganda announced
4. Perepiska Predsedatelya Soveta Ministrov SSSR s Prezidentami SShA i PremierMinistrom Velikobritanii vo vremya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941-1945 gg., vol.
1 (Moscow, Politizdat, 1986, 2nd ed.), p. 104.
5. Ibid., p. 108.
6. Ibid., p. 113.
7. A. Levine, British, American and Soviet Political Aims and Military Strategies
1941-1945. A Study in the Beginnings of the « Cold War » (1983), p. 772.
8. Perepiska Predsedatelya Soveta..., op. cit., vol. 1, p. 159.
14
O. Rzheshevsky, M. Mjakov
that the bodies of Polish officers executed by NKVD in 1940 had been found
near Katyn. The US diplomat, William Standley, criticised the Soviet
Government for its inattentiveness to the aid the United States rendered the
Soviet Union; the US Government hastened to replace him.
Soviet ambassadors Ivan Maisky and Maxim Litvinov were recalled from
London and Washington soon afterwards. There is a version referring to that
period that Molotov met with Ribbentrop in Kirovograd.9 Available indirect
evidence suggests that it was in fact misinformation intended by the Soviet
government for the leaders of Great Britain and the United States.10
Misinformation of this kind was useful to the Soviet Union in many aspects,
urging its Western Allies to comprehend the danger of being left face to face
with Hitler and accelerate the invasion of Europe.
The second front was established in 1944. Moscow hailed this momentous
event wholeheartedly. The actions of the Red Army began to be co-ordinated
with the actions of the Western Allies in Europe. Meanwhile, from May 1942
to June 1944, the irretrievable losses (killed, prisoners, and missing) of the
Soviet Armed Forces alone reached more than five million people.11
As soon as the Red Army entered the territories of Eastern European
countries, disagreement on their post-war settlement increased. To understand
why this happened, the following circumstances should be taken into
consideration. The Soviet Union saw the creation of a safety zone on its
western borders in Europe, based on the 1941 frontiers with the friendly
neighbouring States – Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Poland,
Finland and Norway – as a major geopolitical goal to be achieved in the
course of the war. Remaining independent, these States were to serve as a
kind of watershed between the spheres of influence of the Soviet Union and
other Great Powers. Western Allies were against such developments; they
feared that the Soviet Union would go further and not confine itself to
including Eastern European States into the sphere of its influence. It was
important for Great Britain and the United States to bind the Soviet Union by
treaty commitments before the Red Army reached Central Europe. At the
same time, some Western politicians understood that the Soviet Union would
9. B. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (London, 1970), p. 488;
Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, 9/31/46.
10. P. Sudoplatov, Razvedka i Kreml. Zapiski nezhelatelnogo svidetelya, Moscow,
1996, pp. 173-174; Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers, 1943,
vol. III (Washington, 1963), pp. 683, 686, 695-697, 698-699.
11. Grif sekretnosti snyat. Poteri vooruzhennykh sil SSSR v voinakh, boevykh
deistviyakh i voyennykh konfliktakh (Moscow, 1993), pp. 157-158.
THE END OF THE GRAND ALLIANCE
15
not abandon the goal of securing its post-war frontiers and would not tolerate
the restoration of a hostile “sanitary cordon” there.
The heads of the Soviet and British delegations did not reach mutual
understanding about the issues of frontiers and spheres of influence during the
visit of the British Foreign Secretary Eden to Moscow in December 1941. The
Soviet additional protocols to the draft of the British-Soviet treaty of alliance
required the acknowledgement of the 1941 western frontier of the Soviet
Union, which was unacceptable to the Western Allies at that time.12
Churchill cautioned Eden against being sharp with Stalin.13 In principle, he
was not against making certain territorial concessions to the Soviet Union.
However, the official position of London, expressed in Churchill’s telegram
of December 21, 1941 to Attlee boiled down to saying that the articles of the
Atlantic Charter must be observed and that compromise on Finland, the Baltic
States, and Rumania was impossible.14 But such a state of affairs did not
satisfy the Soviet leaders.
Back in London, Eden and other members of the British government
continued to examine the issue of restoring the 1941 Soviet frontiers and
possible extension of Soviet influence over Eastern Europe. The British
Foreign Secretary noted in a secret memorandum submitted to the Cabinet on
January 28, 1942 that when Germany was defeated, there might be no other
force left in Europe capable of withstanding Russia. Soviet policies should be
evaluated in terms of the course of war. Taking into consideration the position
of the United States, it was practically impossible to neglect the Atlantic
Charter now. Moreover, there were no grounds to assume that Stalin’s
demand was final. Eden proposed not to make any concessions to the Soviets
unless getting something in return.
In Eden’s opinion, by making its demands, the Soviet Union was trying to
test its Western Allies and find out whether they were ready to accept a
compromise in the interest of establishing post-war collaboration. “Any
proposal we are going to make must be based on the requirement of Russia’s
‘security’ which the Soviet Union has been striving for since 1917, i.e.,
creation of such strategic situation which would make it possible for the
Soviet Government to complete social and economic corporation inside
12. O. A. Rzheshevsky, op. cit., pp. 22-26.
13. W. S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3: The Grand Alliance (Boston,
1978), p. 620.
14. See M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7: Road to Victory, 1941-1945
(London, 1986), p. 15.
16
O. Rzheshevsky, M. Mjakov
Russia without being intimidated by foreign intervention or war [...]”15 Eden
seemed to touch upon the very essence of the Soviet position. However, he
proposed to put a ceiling on Soviet demands by offering Russia military bases
in the Baltic States in exchange for the implementation of British plans (see
annex 4).
After the German 6th Army was encircled at Stalingrad – which
demonstrated that the Soviet Union was capable of crushing Germany
unaided – the position of Western Allies on post-war Soviet frontiers
underwent some changes. Informing the British Foreign Office of a
conversation with the US Under-Secretary of State, Summer Welles, Lord
Halifax wrote that Welles thought that if the German machine collapsed soon,
the American and British Governments would witness the Red Army’s entry
into Eastern Europe, and would be unable to bring pressure on Soviet leaders
any more. “Such expansion of Bolshevism would produce an utterly
unfavourable impact on American public opinion, let alone the damage to
European reconstruction”. Welles found it imperative to reach joint BritishAmerican agreement with the Soviet Government beforehand. As for
Roosevelt’s opinion, the US President thought that Stalin “would be satisfied
with the acquisition of Estonia, Latvia, and Bessarabia, turning Petsamo into a
Russian port, and creating a neutral zone in Karelia. Lithuania and Bukovina
must not be attached to the Soviet Union... Wilno and Lwow must remain
Polish [...]”.16
Western leaders watched the successes of the Red Army in the following
months of the war with increasing alarm, and viewed them as a threat of
European Bolshevisation. Speaking figuratively, “Behind the wartime screen
of diplomatic formulae and propagandistic flourishes, ‘Big Three’ alliance
politics were strained affairs barely concealing fundamental antipathies and
animosities, at best momentarily smothering them in the interests of
bargaining for or buying the immediate prospects of survival and possibly
nurturing hopes for a better post-war world”.17
Soviet troops advanced to the territories of Poland, Hungary, Rumania,
Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, and practically stood on the Greek border in the fall
of 1944. Churchill arrived in Moscow in October, bringing a plan for dividing
the spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, on which he had conducted
15. See the complete text of the memorandum in: Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi
vneshnei razvedki, vol. 4: 1941-1945 (Moscow, 1999), pp. 552-558.
16. Ibid., pp. 592-593.
17. J. Erickson and D. Dilks, Barbarossa. The Axis and the Allies (Edinburgh,
1994), p. VIII.
THE END OF THE GRAND ALLIANCE
17
preliminary negotiations with both Washington and Moscow.18 Information
that Stalin rejected the plan, found in the literature of the Soviet period 19, does
not represent the facts.20 The recently declassified Soviet records of
negotiations, as well as subsequent events, testify that Great Britain and the
Soviet Union undertook certain steps for practical division of the spheres of
influence (Britain in respect of Rumania, and the USSR in respect of Greece).
It is our opinion that from the point of view of recent knowledge, it should be
recognised that the two leaders tried to come to an understanding about this
issue and searched for a compromise in the matters relating to the post-war
order in Europe. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs plans to publish a
collection of Foreign Policy Documents, dated 1944, where these subjects will
be analysed objectively.
The year 1945 came. The Allied armies advanced swiftly from west and
east to close in. The decisions of the European Consultative Commission on
the occupation zones in Germany and the triumph of the Yalta Conference
seemed to alleviate the growing discord. Meanwhile, British documents
declassified in 1998 show that soon after the Yalta Conference, Churchill
ordered preparations for military operation aimed at ousting the Russian
troops by force from Eastern Europe – first from Poland – and to inflicting a
defeat on the USSR (see annex 5). As the British Chiefs of Staff Committee,
followed by the US military command, voiced their negative attitude to this
plan by reason of the Red Army’s overwhelming superiority in Europe, the
plan’s further development had been frozen.
Creation of a nuclear weapon by the United States and its employment at
the end of the war were decisive factors in the growing controversy between
the three Great Powers. The USSR State Committee for Defence learned
about the Western Allies’ work on a nuclear project back in late 1941. Similar
research was started in the Soviet Union a little later.
American policies toward the Soviet Union changed seriously after the
United States achieved nuclear monopoly and Harry Truman acceded to the
presidency. The Allied principles came to be replaced by claims and unilateral
decisions. Churchill’s February 1946 speech in Fulton, attended by Truman,
in which he attacked the Soviet Union, was evaluated in Moscow as “a
dangerous act designed for sowing the seeds of contention between the Allied
18. See Churchill and Roosevelt. The Complete Correspondence. Edited with
commentary by W. Kimball, vol. 3 (Princeton, 1984), p. 560.
19. Istoriya vtoroi mirovoi voiny 1939-1945, vol. 9 (Moscow, 1978), p. 472.
20. See M. Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 991-1083; A. Utkin, Churchill (Moscow, 1997), p.
501.
18
O. Rzheshevsky, M. Mjakov
States and impeding their collaboration”.21 The futile attempts to outlaw or
establish control over nuclear weapons signified a cardinal change in the
balance of the war potential of the Big Three – primarily the USA and
USSR –, which resulted in the post-war arms race and a chain of international
crises and local wars, and put the world on the brink of a nuclear war. In the
early 1970s, when the Soviet Union and the United States attained a relative
parity in nuclear weapons and weapon delivery means, the threat had been
reduced and the international situation had been stabilised to an extent.
The Grand Alliance had neither been legalised nor disbanded by some
particular decisions. Upon achieving its principal goal, it became an object of
careful and protracted studies. Now, a century later, it can be stated with
confidence that the Grand Alliance occupies a prominent place in the history
of the 20th century.
21. I. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol. 16 (Moscow, 1997), p. 25.
THE END OF THE GRAND ALLIANCE
19
ANNEX 1
Proposal by the US Delegation on the Implementation
of the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe.
Submitted by President Harry Truman at the Meeting
of Heads of Governments on July 17, 1945
(Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian Federation, 0639/2/1/8, p. 40).
In the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe, signed on February 11, 1945, the
three Governments assumed certain commitments to the liberated nations of Europe
and the peoples of the States – former satellites of the Axis. The commitments assumed
on the basis of this Declaration have not been carried out since the Yalta Conference. In
the opinion of the Government of the United States, the continuing nonfulfillment of
these commitments would be viewed in the whole world as proof of lack of accord
between the three Great Powers and would undermine trust in the sincerity of the goals
they proclaimed.
Therefore, the Government of the United States proposes the following measures to
be coordinated at the present meeting with the aim of carrying out the commitments
ensuing from this Declaration:
1.
the three Allied Governments shall agree on the need for immediate
reorganisation of the existing governments in Rumania and Bulgaria, in
compliance with the article “c” of the third paragraph of the Yalta Declaration
on Liberated Europe;
2.
consultations shall be held promptly to work out any procedures that might be
necessary for the reorganisation of these governments for the latter to include
representatives of all significant democratic groups. As soon as the
reorganisation takes place, these countries will be afforded diplomatic
recognition, and peace treaties will be concluded with them;
3.
in keeping with the commitments stipulated in the article “d” of the third
paragraph of the Declaration on Liberated Europe, the three Governments shall
consider the best ways of assisting any interim governments in holding free and
unfettered elections. Assistance of this kind is required urgently in respect to
Greece and will be required, in due time, in Rumania, Bulgaria and, possibly, in
other countries.
20
O. Rzheshevsky, M. Mjakov
ANNEX 2
Memorandum of the USSR Delegation on the Yalta Declaration
on Liberated Europe. Submitted by Molotov
to Byrnes and Eden at the Meeting of Foreign Ministers
on July 20, 1945 (Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian Federation, 0639/2/1/8,
pp. 148-149).
In connection with the memorandum of the US delegation on the Yalta Declaration
on Liberated Europe, the Soviet Government finds it necessary to state that it cannot
agree to the proposals concerning Rumania and Bulgaria set down in the memorandum.
The Soviet Government considers it necessary to draw the attention of the US
Government to the fact that there have been proper order and legitimate governments
enjoying authority and trusted by the population in Rumania and Bulgaria, as well as in
Finland and Hungary, in the period since the governments of the said States signed
statements of capitulation. The governments of these States faithfully perform the
obligations they assumed under the acts of capitulation. Rumania and Bulgaria
provided serious help in armed forces to the United Nations for the fight with German
troops, each putting 10-12 divisions against our common enemy. In these
circumstances, the Soviet Government sees no grounds to interfere in the internal
affairs of Rumania and Bulgaria.
However, there is one country, Greece, where proper order has not been
established, where law is not observed and where terrorism rages, which is directed
against the democratic elements that had borne the brunt of the struggle against
German invaders for the liberation of Greece. Moreover, the present Greek government
violates peace with its neighbours and threatens war on Albania and Bulgaria. All these
circumstances bring about the necessity of taking urgent measures to do away with such
a situation in Greece.
In view of the above, the Soviet Government finds it expedient:
(1)
(2)
to resume, within the next few days, diplomatic relations with Rumania, Bulgaria,
Finland, and Hungary, since further delay in this matter is unjustifiable;
to recommend the Greek Regent to take urgent measures for establishing a
democratic government in the spirit of the agreement concluded in Varkiza on
February 12, 1945 between the representatives of the then Greek government and
the representatives of Greek democracy.
The Soviet Government expresses its confidence that the measures set above will
be met with support by the Governments of the United States of America and
Great Britain and will be put into effect.
THE END OF THE GRAND ALLIANCE
21
ANNEX 3
From the History of Soviet Intelligence
[(Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi vneshnei razvedki,
vol. 4: 1941-1945, Moscow, 1999, pp. 275-277).
Soviet intelligence had to do much work on the Allies – Great Britain and the
United States – in the years of the Second World War. This was necessitated by the
interests of inflicting quicker defeat on Nazi Germany and its allies and creating a postwar world order which would exclude any possibility of a repeated aggression against
the Soviet State.
The reader may ask a legitimate question: “why then should the Soviet Union spy
on its own allies?”. The answer is that although the Allies had a common objective – to
stop Hitler’s claims for world supremacy – their means of achieving this goal and
approaches to how the world would be organised after the war were different.
While examining the wartime archive documents of the intelligence service, it
cannot but come to mind that in those years the Soviet Union had to do more than
disover the plans of the German army; it also had to be watchful of the behaviour of its
allies – Britain and the USA – whose actual conduct diverged widely from the pledges
they made in agreements of alliance. This becomes clear from the intelligence
information collected over the war years.
On the night of June 22, 1941, speaking over the radio, Winston Churchill declared
that the German attack on the Soviet Union was a next act of aggression and perfidy of
the Nazis and a turning point in the world war. He spoke definitely in support of the
Soviet Union in the war against Nazi Germany.
The US leaders took a similar stand. The US Under-Secretary of State, Summer
Welles, made a statement and defined the German invasion of the Soviet Union as
Hitler’s treacherous act of aggression, which directly affected the interests of US
defence and security. President Roosevelt confirmed the judgement of Welles and
declared that the United States would assist the Soviet Union in every possible way.
Were the official statements made by British and American leaders truly frank? To
what extent could the Soviet Union rely on the military and economic aid of the Allies
and their joint participation in military operations against Nazi Germany and its
satellites?
It was very important for the Soviet leaders to have true information which would
give them answers to these complicated questions.
On July 18, 1941, the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a
resolution specifying that the task of the Intelligence service in the period of war was :
“to reveal the genuine plans and intentions of our allies, the USA and Britain in
particular, in respect to warfare matters, the attitude to the USSR, and problems of
post-war settlement”.
This general direction was detailed and concretised in instructions sent by the
Centre to its fixed-post Intelligence agents. The Centre’s directive letter to Soviet agents
in the United States of November 27, 1941 read: “The USA plays the leading role in the
22
O. Rzheshevsky, M. Mjakov
world policies of the capitalist countries today. Therefore, it is very important for us to
disclose timely the political and diplomatic plans and activities of the USA with respect
to the USSR, as well as to Britain, Japan, Germany, and other countries”. When Stalin
received the chief of Soviet intelligence, V.M. Zarubin, before his departure for the
United States, he stressed that the main task was to give close attention to the position
of the US ruling circles and check the chances of their agreement with Nazi Germany
with the purpose of ending the war with a separate peace.
As for Britain, the Centre asked the Soviet agents there, taking into account the
available net of knowledgeable and reliable informers, to gather information on
Germany and the countries it occupied, get themselves posted on the subversive plans
and schemes of the pro-German elements in Britain, disclose the British Government’s
plans regarding the USSR, and uncover subversive activities of British intelligence
against the Soviet Union. Soviet agents were to keep up with the development of British
relations with Polish, Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, and other governments-in-exile
and the British-American relations, and to reveal disagreements on major international
problems between Great Britain and the United States.
Even the earliest wartime intelligence information testified that the aims pursued by
political leaders of Britain and the USA in that war differed from those of the Soviets.
They thought more of weakening Germany as an imperialist rival than of defeating
Nazism as soon as possible. They would like to see both Germany and the Soviet Union
bled white as a result of war, and thereby achieve a post-war world order which would
make it possible for them to impose their will on other countries, the Soviet Union first
and foremost.
Already on July 15, 1941, the Intelligence service submitted the following statement
to the USSR State Defence Committee: “Although the British Government is fully aware
of the scale of danger to Britain in the event the USSR is defeated, and is willing to
render assistance to the Soviet Government in compliance with Churchill’s declaration,
all British calculations are nevertheless based on the inevitability of the Red Army’s
defeat in the nearest future. At the beginning of the war, the Joint Intelligence
Committee at the War Cabinet, comprising representatives of the army, navy, air, and
political intelligence offices, arrived at the conclusion that the Germans would capture
Moscow in three weeks; now they spread the term to five and a half weeks counting
from the first day of the campaign”.
Similar information came from intelligence sources in the United States. The Chief
of Soviet intelligence in Washington informed the Centre about the hostile tone of the
American press in respect to the USSR in his report of August 19, 1941. As soon as the
war began, Senator Truman pronounced: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought
to help Russia and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany and that way let
them kill as many as possible [...]” (See The New York Times, June 25, 1941).
Proceeding from information gathered in Britain and the USA, the Soviet
intelligence service concluded that there was internal strife concerning the attitude to
the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany in these countries.
THE END OF THE GRAND ALLIANCE
23
ANNEX 4
Soviet Intelligence Report of February 27, 1942
(Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi vneshnei razvedki,
vol. 4: 1941-1945, Moscow, 1999, pp. 557-558).
Top Secret.
Communication from London.
Text of Eden’s Secret Memorandum of January 28, 1942. Circulated among
Members of the Government for Consideration. Agent’s report.
The policy regarding Russia [...]
We must ensure the acknowledgement by the Soviet Government of the right of
Great Britain, reasoning from the foundations of security, to establish bases on
the European continent, on the grounds of what Stalin told me on December 16,
namely:
– “I think that if France is not restored as a Great Power in the nearest future, it
is in your interests to have naval bases on the French coast, for instance, in
Boulogne and Dunkirk. Belgium and Holland must be in an open military alliance
with Great Britain which must use the right to have naval bases in these countries,
as well as station troops if necessary.
– I think this is rather important for Great Britain and also for securing the
independence of Belgium and Holland. The Soviet Union will be ready to support
you in these plans, which it considers to be important from the point of view of
Great Britain”.
2.
We must demand that the Soviet Union should accede to paragraph 5 of the
British draft agreement of December 16, 1941, namely: “In respect to territorial
questions subject to discussion in the peace settlement, both Governments
undertake to build their policies on the principle laid down in the joint
declaration of the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the
United Kingdom which reads that they ‘seek no aggrandisement, territorial or
other’ as well as on the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of
other nations proclaimed by Stalin in his declaration of November 6, 1941”.
3.
We must also ask the Soviet Government to approve formally the principles of
federation in respect of the poor countries of Europe, particularly the Balkan
ones, as well as in respect of Poland and Czechoslovakia.
4.
We should ask the Soviet Government to collaborate with the US and British
Governments and with other European nations in preparing the reconstruction of
Europe on the basis of article 4 of the draft agreement proposed to Stalin by the
Foreign Secretary, which reads:
“The two Contracting Parties undertake to work together for the reconstruction
of Europe after the war with full regard to each other’s interests and adhering to
the principles of non-aggrandisement of their territories and non-interference in
the internal affairs of other nations. The objectives of reconstruction include:
1.
24
O. Rzheshevsky, M. Mjakov
(a) the safeguarding and strengthening of the economic and political
independence of all European countries either as unitary or federated States;
(b) the reconstruction of the industrial and economic life of those countries whose
territories have been overrun by the Germans or their allies”.
ANNEX 5
Excerpt from the Plan of a Military Operation
against the Soviet Union (See Public Record Office.
CAB 120/691/55911, pp. 1-29)
Top Secret
Final
22nd May, 1945
War Cabinet
Joint Planning Staff
Operation “UNTHINKABLE”
Report by the Joint Planning Staff
We have examined Operation UNTHINKABLE. As instructed, we have taken the
following assumptions on which to base our examination:
(a) the undertaking has the full support of public opinion in both the British Empire
and the United States and consequently, the morale of British and American troops
continues to be high;
(b) Great Britain and the United States have full assistance from the Polish armed
forces and can count upon the use of German manpower and what remains of German
industrial capacity;
(c) no credit is taken for assistance from the forces of other Western Powers,
although any bases in their territory, or other facilities which may be required, are
made available;
(d) Russia allies herself with Japan;
(e) the date for the opening of hostilities is 1st July, 1945;
(f) redeployment and release schemes continue till 1st July and then stop.
Owing to the special need for secrecy, the normal staffs in Service Ministries have
not been consulted.
OBJECT
2.
The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United
States and British Empire.
Even though “the will” of these two countries may be defined as no more than a
square deal for Poland, it does not necessarily limit the military commitment. A
THE END OF THE GRAND ALLIANCE
3.
25
quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time
being; but it might not. That is for the Russians to decide. If they want total war,
they are in a position to have it.
The only way in which we can achieve our object with certainty and lasting
results is by victory in a total war; but in view of what we have said in paragraph
2 above, on the possibility of quick success, we have thought it right to consider
the problem on two hypotheses:
(a) that a total war is necessary, and on this hypothesis we have examined our
chances of success;
(b) that the political appreciation is that a quick success would suffice to gain
our political object and that the continuing commitment need not concern us.
TOTAL WAR
4.
Apart from the chances of revolution in the USSR. and the political collapse of
the present regime – on which we are not competent to express an opinion – the
elimination of Russia could only be achieved as a result of:
(a) the occupation of such areas of metropolitan Russia that the war-making
capacity of the country would be reduced to a point at which further resistance
became impossible;
(d) such a decisive defeat of the Russian forces in the field, as to render it
impossible for the USSR to continue the war.
Occupation of vital areas of Russia
5.
6.
The situation might develop in such a way that the Russians succeeded in
withdrawing without suffering a decisive defeat. They would then presumably
adopt the tactics, which they employed so successfully against the Germans and
in previous wars, of making use of the immense distances which their territory
provides. In 1942, the Germans reached the Moscow area, the Volga and the
Caucasus, but the technique of factory evacuation, combined with the
development of new resources and Allied assistance, enabled the USSR to
continue fighting.
There is virtually no limit to the distance to which it would be necessary for the
Allies to penetrate into Russia in order to render further resistance impossible. It
is hardly conceivable that the Allies could penetrate even as far as, or as quickly
as the Germans in 1942, and this penetration produced no decisive result.
Decisive Defeat of the Russian Forces
7.
Details of the present strengths and dispositions of the Russian and Allied forces
are given in annexes II and III and illustrated on Maps A and B. The existing
balance of strength in Central Europe, where the Russians enjoy a superiority of
approximately three to one, makes it most unlikely that the Allies could achieve a
complete and decisive victory in that area in present circumstances. Although
26
8.
O. Rzheshevsky, M. Mjakov
Allied organisation is better, equipment slightly better and morale higher, the
Russians have proved formidable opponents of the Germans. They have
competent commanders, adequate equipment and an organisation which, though
possibly inferior by our standards, has stood the test. On the other hand, only
about one third of their divisions are of a high standard, the others being
considerably inferior and with overall mobility well below that of the Allies.
To achieve the decisive defeat of Russia in a total war would require, in
particular, the mobilisation of manpower to counteract their present enormous
manpower resources. This is a very long term project and would involve:
(a) the deployment in Europe of a large proportion of the vast resources of the
United States;
(b) the re-equipment and re-organisation of German manpower and of all the
Western European Allies.
Conclusions
9. We conclude that:
(a) if our political object is to be achieved with certainty and lasting results, the
defeat of Russia in a total war will be necessary;
(b) the result of a total war with Russia is not possible to forecast, but the one
thing certain is that to win would take us a very long time.
The Bitter Fruit of Victory:
Churchill and an Unthinkable Operation, 1945
David D ILKS
When the documents about Operation Unthinkable were released recently
at the Public Record Office in London, the newspaper which first gave
extensive coverage to them announced on its front page “Churchill’s plan for
Third World War against Stalin” and explained that he had in May 1945
ordered “his War Cabinet to draw up contingency plans for an offensive
against Stalin that would lead to the ‘elimination of Russia’ […]”.1
Echoes and reverberations were heard from every part of the world, often
in scandalised tones. Many took the very notion of such a war as proof of
Churchill’s entrenched hostility towards Russia. Some mistakenly imagined,
as The Daily Telegraph had done, that all this was part of the business of the
War Cabinet. It was widely assumed that nothing had previously been known
on this subject. However, we have only to turn to the diaries of the Chief of
the Imperial General Staff, published 40 years ago, to find the following
entry: “May 24th [1945] This evening I went carefully through the Planners’
Report on the possibility of taking on Russia should trouble arise in our future
discussions with her. We were instructed to carry out this investigation. The
idea is, of course, fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible. There
is no doubt that from now onwards Russia is all-powerful in Europe”.2
That the alliance with Russia had been a troubled one from the beginning
is well attested, and there is no need to recount the full saga here. It could
hardly have been otherwise, since Russia had been at least a friendly neutral
towards Germany until June, 1941, and had supplied the German war machine
with essential raw materials for the better part of two years. Once Barbarossa
began, and after Pearl Harbour a little less than six months later, the position
was transformed. Britain and the Commonwealth no longer stood alone
against Germany; the latent strength of the United States began to make itself
1. The Daily Telegraph, Thursday, October 1, 1998, pp. 1, 8-9.
2. A. Bryant, Triumph in the West (London, 1959), pp. 469-470. For the report by
the Joint Planning staff “Operation ‘Unthinkable’”, May 22, 1945 (signed by G.
Grantham, G. S. Thompson and W. L. Dawson), see CAB 120/691, Public Record
Office, London (hereafter PRO).
28
David N. Dilks
felt; the new theatres of war embraced South and South-East Asia, the Far
East, Australasia, the whole Pacific; and Russia bore on land, though not at
sea or in the air, a far heavier burden than any other partner in the coalition.
For roughly two years, from the summer of 1941 until the successful
conclusion of the North African campaign, frictions and misunderstandings
abounded, but were (as Churchill would have expressed it) drowned in the
cannonade. Once the tide of the war had begun to turn, the issue of Russia’s
post-war relations with the Allies attracted the attention of the planners in
London. The sensitivities were only too obvious and when the Chiefs of Staff
Committee in the autumn of 1943 accepted a proposal that a paper on this
subject should be prepared, it was laid down that the enquiry should be
conducted with the greatest secrecy and on the basis “that it remained the
policy of HMG to foster and maintain the friendliest possible relations with
the USSR”. More than seven months passed before the first version was
produced; it was submitted to the Chiefs of Staff, partly re-written during the
month of May, 1944, and returned in a revised version on June 6, the day
upon which Overlord was launched.3 At that time, no one knew how quickly
the war might end. Many good judges believed that it would be over before
Christmas. So it might have been, if the attempt on Hitler’s life had
succeeded, or if the Allies had been able to break out more swiftly and
decisively from their bridgehead in Normandy; in which event the political
situation in Europe after the war would have been utterly different, with the
Red Army far to the east of the line which it eventually reached.
Given the possibility that the war might be over within a few weeks, and
the near- certainty that it would be won within months, a tension developed in
the Post-Hostilities Planning Sub-Committee. The representatives of the
armed services believed that Britain must take account of the possibility,
however remote, of Russia as an eventual enemy; whereas the chairman of the
Sub-Committee, that rising star of the Foreign Office Mr. Gladwyn Jebb, felt
certain that his department would not accept such a hypothesis, on the grounds
that it would be politically dangerous and not in accordance with the facts.4 A
draft paper had pointed out that apart from a resurgent Germany or Japan,
only two nations could for the foreseeable future constitute a serious threat to
3. The papers are collected in CAB 121/64; see in particular extracts from the
minutes of the Chiefs of Staff, 224th meeting, September 23, 1943; the report of May 1,
1944, PHP (43) 1 (0); minutes of the Chiefs of Staff 172nd meeting, May 24, 1944; and
the revised version of the paper June 6, 1944, PHP (44) 132 (0) Final, PRO.
4. A. T. Cornwall-Jones to the Vice-Chiefs of Staff, June 13, 1944, CAB 121/64,
PRO.
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
29
the British Commonwealth: the USSR and the USA. “It is quite clear that it is
not within the power of the British Commonwealth to support a war against
the Soviet Union unaided by either the United States or Allies on the
Continent of Europe”. The next sentence of the same paper indicates the
balancing and theoretical nature of such studies, for it reads: “Neither is it
conceivable that the British Commonwealth could go to war against the
United States unless at least supported by the Soviet Union and assisted by the
other European States. It would therefore appear to be idle for us to plan on
the assumption that the British Commonwealth stands alone”.
The Post-Hostilities Staff argued that on balance relations with Russia
were rather more liable to deteriorate than relations with the United States,
and that a serious threat against Britain from Russia would amount also to one
against the USA. It was probable that in the long run America would fight to
maintain the existence of the United Kingdom, although that assumption
could not be absolutely relied upon. The policy of the British government at
that time assumed a tripartite alliance for the post-war period between the
Commonwealth, the United States and the Soviet Union and to plan on that
basis, or at any rate to assume a fairly close association between the three
great powers “would accordingly seem to be the most reasonable course”. As
the authors of the paper pointed out, Russia might at some stage break away
from this alliance and become a potential or even an actual enemy; but they
saw no evidence of a Russian desire to dominate the world. The Chiefs of
Staff in the middle of June, 1944, approved a version which stated that ‘The
British Commonwealth should maintain adequate naval and air strength to
secure our vital interests vis-à-vis Russia”.5
In these assessments, no attempt had been made to deal with the
possibility that Russia might try to extend her influence over Western Europe
and thus dominate that continent, or Asia through the development of Siberia.
The Vice-Chiefs of Staff mentioned as vital strategic interests, which might be
threatened by Russia, the supply of oil from the Middle East; Mediterranean
communications; sea communications (if Russia were to become after the war
a naval and air power of the first rank); and the concentrated industrial areas
of the British Isles (if Russia built up a large strategic bomber force). The
Vice-Chiefs concluded, with the authority of the Chiefs of Staff themselves,
5. Draft paper ‘Basic Assumptions for Staff Studies and Post-War Strategical
Problems’ attached to A. T. Cornwall-Jones to the Vice Chiefs of Staff, June 13, 1944
(see footnote 4); minutes of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, 195th meeting, June 15,
1944, CAB 121/46, circulated as C.O.S. (44) 527 (0) PHP, June 15, 1944, CAB
121/64, PRO.
30
David N. Dilks
that the best means of avoiding friction would be “a real endeavour to secure
the full and friendly participation of the USSR in any system of world
security”. It followed that Britain should not oppose any reasonable demands
of the USSR where these did not conflict with the crucial strategic interests of
the United Kingdom itself. Russia in exchange would be expected “not to
oppose our claims in areas vital to us”. It was rather uneasily acknowledged
that the weakness of Europe after the war would leave a vacuum which
Russia, if she wished, might fill and this was the context in which it was stated
that the Commonwealth should maintain adequate naval and air strength to
secure its interests. At the head of the document stood a note in capital letters:
THIS PAPER IS A STAFF STUDY . IT IS PURELY EXPLORATORY, HAS NO
MINISTERIAL AUTHORITY AND IS NOT INTENDED TO BE THE BASIS OF
ANY EXECUTIVE ACTION.6
By the end of July, with the allied armies strongly established in France,
we find the Chief of the Imperial General Staff discussing with the Secretary
of State for War the crucial question, should Germany be dismembered or
gradually converted into an ally to meet the Russian danger? The CIGS felt no
doubt on the point. Germany to his mind was no longer the dominating power
in Europe; Russia was, and with her vast resources could not fail to become
the main threat in 15 years’ time: “Therefore, foster Germany, gradually build
her up and bring her into a Federation of Western Europe. Unfortunately this
must all be done under the cloak of a holy alliance between England, Russia
and America. No easy policy, and one requiring a super Foreign Secretary”.7
In justice to Field-Marshal Brooke, it must be conceded that his
prescription was close to the policy followed by Labour and Conservative
governments alike after 1945; whereas in 1944, the view of the Foreign Office
remained that providing the British Commonwealth and the Unites States
gave reasonable consideration to Russian views and showed themselves
determined to prevent any menace to Russia from Germany or Japan, the
USSR would welcome a lengthy spell of peaceful relations. The grounds
given were convincing enough; that Russia would need at least five years of
rehabilitation and a prolonged further period for her internal development,
during which time she would not be likely to risk the interruption of a major
6. C.O.S. (44/527) (0) (PHP) June 15, 1944, circulated to the War Cabinet together
with an annex “The effect of Soviet Policy on British Strategic Interests”, and an
appendix summarising the treaty engagements of the Soviet Union with foreign
countries; the latter paper was prepared in the Foreign Office and dated March 28,
1944, all in CAB 121/64, PRO.
7.A. Bryant, op.cit., p. 242.
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
31
war. All this depended, however, upon Russia’s being satisfied with the
measures taken to render Germany and Japan innocuous; and if she were not
thus satisfied, she might well become an intensely disruptive force within
Europe and beyond its boundaries. The Foreign Office had predicted “with
some confidence” that for at least five years after the end of the war Russia
would constitute no menace to Britain’s strategic interests. “So far as can be
judged at present” one of the Foreign Office papers remarked, perhaps with a
certain grim humour, “she is most unlikely to be troubled by internal
disorders”. The Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, the purpose of which was
to gather intelligence from a wide range of sources and over which a senior
representative of the Foreign Office presided, had seen no occasion to
disagree with those views; nor did that Committee change its view when it
produced an assessment in late August, 1944. As it nevertheless pointed out,
Russia would possess the capacity to wage war against the British
Commonwealth. The area in which friction could most easily arise would be
the Middle East, particularly in Persia and Iraq. If Russia struck in those two
countries, she would be in a position seriously to threaten British
communications through the Mediterranean to India and the Far East.8
As Germany’s defeat drew near, the politicians and the military alike had
to reconsider their assumptions about Russia’s attitude. Certainly there was
nothing consoling in the Russian government’s behaviour during the Warsaw
uprising, though that was a matter which on their visit to Moscow that autumn
Churchill and Eden put firmly behind them for the sake of good relations. The
Prime Minister evidently believed that there was no point in pursuing such
disputes when greater issues – including Britain’s capacity to secure decent
treatment for Poland – were at stake. Stalin denied most earnestly that Russia
wished to convert the world to communism. “We could not, if we wanted” he
said to Churchill. “We Russians are not as clever as you think; we are simple,
rather stupid. No one in Europe can be persuaded that England is either simple
or stupid”.9 That was the visit during which Stalin and Churchill reached the
“percentages agreement”. In London, the Chiefs of Staff had considered the
threat to British security if Russia became aggressive; a meeting held in the
Foreign Office in October, 1944 had come only to the conclusion that until
directions were given by the War Cabinet, no firm assumptions could be made
8.Report by the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, “Russian capabilities in relation
to the strategic interests of the British Commonwealth”, August 22, 1944, J.I.C. (44)
366 (0) Final, CAB 121/64, PRO.
9.Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 (London,
1966), p. 202.
32
David N. Dilks
about Russia in documents dealing with the post-war period. The Chiefs of
Staff were told to restrict to the narrowest possible limits any papers in which
even the hypothesis of Russia as a possible enemy was mentioned.10
The British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, normally
at least fair and perhaps more than fair to the Russian government, remarked
that the latter had since 1941 shown no jealousy of Britain’s strength as a
great power. Indeed, Russian propaganda had abandoned almost all criticism
of Britain on the score of Imperialist designs. The Ambassador believed that
so long as Britain pursued an anti-German policy in collaboration with Russia,
that attitude would persist. The Russians would claim to organise an orbit of
power in the regions adjacent to their borders, and would leave the British at
liberty to claim the right to pursue a similar policy along the Atlantic and
Mediterranean seaboards.11
When the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee rendered another assessment
just before Christmas, 1944, it confessed that the British had little evidence to
show what view Russia took of her own strategic interests or what policy she
intended to pursue after the war. Russia would at that stage present a
phenomenon new in modern history: a land empire containing within its own
frontiers a large and rapidly growing population, possessing nearly all the raw
materials essential to a war economy and with an industry capable of
sustaining armies larger than those of any other power in Europe. The SubCommittee pointed to Russia’s immense advantages in depth of defence and
dispersal of economically important targets, issues which the war in Europe
since 1939 had thrown into sharp relief; and even the exceptions – the
oilfields of the Caucasus, the industry and minerals of the Ukraine, the
industrial areas of Moscow and Leningrad – were far less vulnerable to attack
than the corresponding areas of any other country in Europe.
The Sub-Committee felt confident that Russia would at least experiment
with a policy of collaboration after the war with America and Britain. She
would regard Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria
and to a lesser extent Yugoslavia as forming a protective screen, and would
wish to dominate the Black Sea and control Northern Persia. If the Great
10. Extract from the minutes of the meeting held on October 4, 1944, in the
Foreign Secretary’s room, “The study of post-war problems and the dismemberment of
Germany”, CAB 121/64, PRO.
11. Sir A. Clark Kerr to Eden, November 19, 1944, No. 772, enclosing a
“Memorandum respecting observations on the attitude of the Soviet Government
towards possible formation of a group of Western European Democracies”; this paper
was circulated by Eden to the Cabinet, PREM 3/396/14, PRO.
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
33
Powers were prepared to accept Russia’s dominance in those areas and follow
a policy designed to prevent a revival of German and Japanese military power,
Russia would have achieved “the greatest possible measure of security and
could not hope to increase it by further territorial expansion. Nor is it easy to
see what else Russia could under such conditions hope to gain from a policy
of aggression […] Russia’s relations with the British Empire and the United
States will depend very largely on the ability of each side to convince the
other of the sincerity of its desire for collaboration”.12
The Minister at the British Embassy in Moscow, Mr. Balfour, reminded
the Foreign Office in January, 1945, that Russia looked upon South-East
Europe, no less than upon Poland, as a zone in which it was to her peculiar
interest to see there was no renewal of the German drive towards the east;
self-confidence in the Soviet Union had been immeasurably increased by
victory; but he took Stalin to be a shrewd realist who had no wish to overreach
the limits within which he could prudently exercise autocratic power.13
Under the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of 1942, it had been agreed that the two
governments would furnish each other with information about weapons. The
agreement had never been entirely fulfilled by the British, chiefly because of
the difficulty of obtaining the assent of the USA to the disclosure of
information in which the United States was interested; but the British and
Americans had done far more than the Russians, who in most cases had failed
to reply to repeated requests for information. The situation at the time of the
Yalta Conference was that since the summer of 1941 the British had disclosed
about 300 major items, many of them of the first importance (such as radar),
whereas the Russians had given practically no information of value. Thus it
came about that British information about important items of Russian
equipment was based upon German publications.14 It would not be difficult to
multiply such instances, or to demonstrate the apprehensions of the Prime
Minister. Nevertheless, the British delegation came home from Yalta
convinced that they had secured the best terms obtainable for Poland and
more generally of Russia’s good faith. Churchill proclaimed that view not
12.Report of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee “Russia’s strategic interests and
intentions from the point of view of her security”, J.I.C. (44) 467 (0), December 18,
1944, CAB 119/129, PRO.
13. Extract from a letter dated January 16, 1945 from Mr. Balfour (Moscow) to
Mr. C. Warner, Head of the Northern Department of the Foreign Office, circulated to
the War Cabinet under cover of a note “Soviet foreign policy” by Eden, March 12,
1945, W.P. (45) 156, CAB 121/64, PRO.
14 . Foreign Office to Sir A. Cadogan at Yalta, Fleece no. 128, February 4, 1945,
PREM 3/396/14, PRO.
34
David N. Dilks
only to Parliament but to the War Cabinet. On the evidence presently
available to us, it was the events of late February and March, 1945, that
brought about a reversal in the opinions of the Prime Minister and Foreign
Secretary alike and, no doubt, of other ministers and officials. It rapidly
became apparent that Russia’s insistence upon a glacis or rampart of friendly
states all round her Western borders would preclude the free and unfettered
elections to which, especially in Poland, all parties had pledged themselves at
Yalta.
We can now read in the Public Record Office at least some of the
documents which passed daily to the Prime Minister from the Government
Code and Cypher School through the head of the Secret Intelligence Service.
On the face of it, these papers do not contain anything of sufficient
importance to warrant the instructions which Churchill was soon to give for
consideration of Operation Unthinkable. Most of the deciphered texts are
concerned with military matters (troop movements, reinforcements, lorry
traffic); there are also intercepted diplomatic messages. For example, the
Japanese Ambassador in Berlin summarised several conversations which he
held with the German Foreign Minister in the second half of March.
Ribbentrop remarked that it would be very difficult with things as they were
to separate Russia from Britain and America and to conclude a separate peace
with the USSR. Some military success on the Eastern front was essential
before this could be done and apparently Hitler was confident that he would
be able to secure such a change in the position. Ribbentrop said also that it
would be a long time before Britain and America again disposed of such
enormous forces and the idea of destroying the USSR might “quite well
spring from American desires for world domination or from British anxiety to
prevent the bolshevisation of the British Empire”.
Believing that even Russia had little hope of standing out against the
British and American navies and air forces, he clutched at the hope that Stalin
would welcome the idea of making friends with Germany and Japan in order
to stand up to Britain and America. Indeed, Ribbentrop apparently had in
mind a journey to Moscow for direct negotiation with Stalin, on the lines of
the visit which had produced the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August, 1939.
Most of this dwelt in the realms of fantasy; and as we shall see, the notion
that the British and Americans could destroy the USSR “now at one blow”
was utterly removed from the opinions which the British themselves
entertained.15
15. These reports are contained in a series of files HW1, PRO; the report from the
Japanese Ambassador in Berlin to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo,
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
35
The Western allies also knew that Ribbentrop had instructed the German
Minister in Dublin (and by implication German representatives in other major
capitals) to argue that since Germany was about to be overrun by the Red
Army, the West should ally with Germany, the only power able to stop the
communists’ conquest of Europe. If the allies should refuse this last chance,
Germany would find means of reaching an understanding, at their expense,
with Russia. (We should note in passing, though the point is incidental to the
main theme of this paper, that the British turned down an American proposal
to pass this information to the Russians. The head of the Secret Intelligence
Service had pointed out that the source could not be effectively disguised and
that any leakage would be disastrous “at a moment when I have every hope of
reconstructing the system used by the Germans for the bulk of their
diplomatic communications, to which we have never before had access”.
Churchill agreed wholeheartedly).16
Nor do we find anything in the minutes and papers of the War Cabinet
which would provide an immediate and clear occasion of instructions to
consider the possibility of war with Russia. In February and March, 1945, the
War Cabinet received lengthy papers about Yalta, with glowing reports about
Stalin and the Red Army. There followed documents on Poland; prisoners of
war; Rumania; Czechoslovakia; Bulgaria; and preparations for the conference
to be held at San Francisco, in all of which growing friction with the Russians
is discernible. Churchill’s alarm about Russian behaviour was manifest. In the
diary of the Foreign Secretary for March 23, we find remarks at once candid
and bleak, which give a measure of Britain’s previous reliance upon good
relations with Moscow:
“[...] I take the gloomiest view of Russia’s behaviour everywhere. [...] We
don’t yet know how Russians will react to our last Anglo-American message,
but if it is still negative a breakdown seems inevitable. Then there is
Molotov’s refusal to go to San Francisco and Russian behaviour to Turkey.
Altogether our foreign policy seems a sad wreck and we may have to cast
about afresh”.17
summarising talks with Ribbentrop between March 17 and March 28, 1945, is in file
HW1/3678.
16. ‘C’ to Churchill, C/8727, March 2, 1945; Churchill’s manuscript note,
addressed to the Foreign Secretary, on the same document, March 8 1945, HW 1/3562;
for Ribbentrop’s message to the German legation in Dublin, Feb. 16, 1945, see HW
1/3539; Foreign Office to British Embassy, Washington, March 10, 1945, no. 2310,
HW 1/3562, PRO.
17. Sir A. Eden (The Earl of Avon), The Reckoning (London, 1965), pp. 525-526.
36
David N. Dilks
Eden also wondered whether there were any means other than a public
statement which could force the Russians to chose between mending their
ways and the loss of Anglo-American friendship. He believed this was the
only method by which “we can hope to attain anything approaching a fair deal
for the Poles”.18 The events of the next week or two made it plain that “a fair
deal for the Poles”, at least as conceived by the British, could not be secured
thus. Early in April, Churchill learned from Roosevelt that Stalin had in effect
accused the Western powers of deliberate treachery, in the form of secret
negotiations with the Germans to make peace in the West while the fighting
went on in the East. Even Roosevelt, who had been consistently more
sanguine than Churchill about Russia, reacted furiously; or rather, someone
else reacted furiously in his name. It seems clear that the British did not
understand at the time how little work Roosevelt was doing, or that his
telegrams were written by others. The Prime Minister at once sent a powerful
blast in the direction of Moscow. The account of his Private Secretary
Mr. Colville wonders whether the Germans had persuaded the Russians that
something sinister was afoot.19 This is not implausible. As we have seen, the
intercepts show that Ribbentrop had thought of making contact with the
Russians if the West would not enter into an arrangement with Germany; and
from that to the planting of false information on Russia would not have been a
large step.
There followed the spiriting away of Polish leaders who had been invited
to Moscow. It was clear that in Yugoslavia, Tito was looking almost entirely
to Russia and the Western Powers therefore faced, admittedly on a smaller
scale, an issue in Southern Europe comparable with that which they were
facing in Central Europe; should they side with a recent enemy, Italy, in order
to oppose Tito over Trieste?20 Eden handed to Molotov at San Francisco a
memorandum which referred to the profound and disturbing cumulative effect
of Soviet actions, and gave examples. The Russian reply brushed aside most
of the complaints and refused to accept the “obviously one-sided and
disproportionate pretensions expressed in this memorandum ignoring as they
do the actual facts and responsibility of the British side for the majority of the
instances referred to, as well as the constant endeavour of the Soviet organs to
meet the legitimate wishes of the British side”.21
18. Ibid.
19. J. R. Colville, The Fringes of Power (London, 1985), p. 582.
20. Ibid., p. 591.
21. Eden (San Francisco) to the Foreign Office, May 4, 1945, No. 133; and May
14, 1945, No. 290, CAB 121/64, PRO.
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
37
Meanwhile, Molotov had at last admitted the “arrest” of the 16 Polish
leaders. In vain did Eden protest that the British knew these Poles to have
been good patriots all through the period of German occupation, who desired
close relations with Russia.22
What was the British government to make of such behaviour? The former
Russian Ambassador in London, M. Maisky, asserted that what was
happening was no more than a few ripples on the surface and spoke of the
need to treat Russians with circumspection, to which the Ambassador replied
robustly that “We have been at pains to be circumspect, frank and honest, and
all we had got was a series of affronts”. Was it a matter, as the Russian
Ambassador in Stockholm, Madame Kollontay, indiscreetly suggested to her
old friend Clark Kerr, of Russian immaturity? She remarked that the Russians
were as naïve, clumsy and blundering as the English had been in the age of
Cromwell; they were children and must be treated accordingly; their present
unruliness would pass; and meanwhile the British must practise patience and
more patience. Clark Kerr added by way of comment, “The truth is that the
Russians are in a hurry to be great, and that is uncomfortable”.23 Was Stalin
now obliged, as Sir Orme Sargent of the Foreign Office wondered in early
May, to handle the Russian Generals more cautiously than before and might
the hardening of the Soviet attitude towards the British derive from the
influence of these victorious warriors?24
But suppose such diagnoses were mistaken, or even deceptive? That was
the risk which the Prime Minister and others in London had to measure. Eden
rejoined, “We have shown great consideration and forbearance and have made
ample allowances for the peculiarities of Russian mentality [...]. We have
been shocked, recently, to have had evidence of the morbid suspicion with
which the Soviet Government attributes to us the most sinister and disgraceful
motives[...]. M. Maisky really must not ask us to extend our understanding
and tolerance to cover, e.g., Soviet Government’s attitude on Poland and
Rumania, which he knows as well as I do that the Prime Minister and I cannot
possibly commend to Parliament”.25 Ten days later, Churchill sent to
President Truman, whom he had never met, the celebrated telegram
expressing his deep forebodings about the Russian misinterpretation of the
22. Sir A. Eden, op. cit., p. 536.
23. Sir A. Clark Kerr to the Foreign Office, April 6, 1945, No. 1137, CAB 121/64,
PRO.
24. Eden to Sir A.Clark Kerr, April 8, 1945, No. 1721,CAB 121/64, PRO.
25. Sir O. Sargent to Churchill, May 2, 1945, PM/OS/45/60, PREM 3/396/14,
PRO.
38
David N. Dilks
Yalta decisions (as he politely termed what had happened since February),
and the effect of the melting away of the allied armies in the near future.
Unwittingly taking the phrase from Dr. Goebbels, of all people, Churchill
wrote that an Iron Curtain was drawn down upon the Russian front.
The papers relating to Operation Unthinkable do not show with the usual
clarity who was giving instructions to whom, or when. Even to contemplate
such a subject would clearly require an order from the Prime Minister, and we
must assume that he gave instructions at the very latest by the middle of May,
since the documents could scarcely have been prepared in less than a week; it
was probably in this interval that Churchill, exhausted in body but not in mind
and spirit, told the Russian Ambassador in London, M. Gousev, in no
uncertain terms about his anxieties and dissatisfaction. Churchill made a
conversational tour of those capitals of Eastern and Central Europe from
which Russia’s western allies were excluded; Berlin, Warsaw, Prague,
Vienna. When Poland was touched upon, M. Gousev (who took but a slight
part in the conversation, a fact which may not have been due entirely to his
limited command of English) said something about lines of communication
and the Red Army. The Prime Minister recognised the point but remarked that
the fighting was now over and a new situation had arisen. How were the
Russians facing it? By dropping an iron screen across Europe from Lübeck to
Trieste. “All we knew was that puppet governments were being set up about
which we were not consulted and at which we were not allowed to peep”. He
reminded Gousev that the Allied armies had checked their advance on Prague
out of deference to Russian susceptibilities, but had been rewarded only by
being refused admission to the town where Dr. Benes was trembling for the
future of his country, while M. Masaryk was making a moaning noise in San
Francisco. All this, Churchill went on, “was incomprehensible and intolerable.
The Prime Minister and His Majesty’s Government objected in the strongest
terms to being treated as if they were of no account in the after-war world.
They felt that they still counted for something and they refused to be pushed
about. Their determination not to see this happen had moved them to postpone
the demobilisation of the Royal Air Force. They were resolved to enter upon
discussions about the future of Europe with all the strength they had. They
were perfectly willing to meet the Russians and to talk in the friendliest way
but it must be on terms of equality, but the Russians seemed to wish to close
down upon every place they had occupied and to shut if off from the rest of
the world. This could not be allowed. Why could not the Russians content
themselves with the Curzon Line and let us have a look at what was
happening West of it?”.
Sir A. Clark Kerr noticed that M. Gousev listened “with a strained
expression on his large face”. This we may well believe. The Ambassador
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
39
could not judge how much Gousev had absorbed of the Prime Minister’s
discourse, but thought it must have been sufficient for him to inform his
government that Churchill was very irritated and concerned about what was
happening, and determined to resist.26 A few days later, Gousev told the
Foreign Secretary with some force that fears about Anglo-Russian relations
were groundless, and of his surprise at the terms in which the Prime Minister
had spoken to him; Eden thereupon made it plain that he entirely shared
Churchill’s sentiments.27
We must take it that the grievances rehearsed to M. Gousev constitute the
main reason for which the Joint Planning Staff had been asked to examine
what was termed from the start “Operation ‘Unthinkable’”. The Final version
of the report is dated May 22, 1945. It is not clear whether earlier drafts had
been produced. What is certain is that it had been prepared in deep secrecy
(“the normal staffs in the Service Ministries have not been consulted”);
perhaps inessential parts of the files were destroyed at the time or later. What
we have is a paper of six typed pages, to which were added some 20 pages by
way of four appendices (Appreciation of Campaign in Europe; Russian
Strengths and Dispositions; Allied Strengths and Dispositions; German
Reactions), and four maps (Russians Strengths and Dispositions; Allied
Strengths and Dispositions; the Campaign in North East Europe; Vulnerable
Points of Russian Lines of Communication).
The first paragraph of the report remarks that “as instructed”, presumably
by General Ismay on Churchill’s behalf, the Joint Planning Staff had been
guided by certain assumptions: the undertaking had the full support of public
opinion in the British Empire and that the United States and consequently the
morale of British and American troops continued to be high; Britain and the
USA would have full assistance from the Polish Armed Forces and could
count upon the use of German manpower and what remained of Germany
industrial capacity; no weight was given to assistance from the forces of other
Western powers, though bases and other facilities in their territories would be
made available; the hostilities would begin on July 1, 1945, until which date
redeployment and release schemes would continue.
We should pause to weigh these assumptions. On all we know of the state
of public opinion and war weariness in Britain and the United States alike, it
26. Record by Sir A. Clark Kerr of a discussion between the Prime Minister and
the Soviet Ambassador at 10, Downing Street on May 18, 1945, PREM 3/396/12,
PRO.
27. Memorandum by Sir A. Clark Kerr, May 25, 1945, recording a conversation of
May 23, PREM 3/396/14, PRO.
40
David N. Dilks
is most unlikely that short of flagrant Russian aggression, the operation would
carry “the full support of public opinion”. Beneath this assumption lay a still
more daring one, that whatever the state of public opinion, the United States
would be prepared to fight in such a cause. That would have been contrary to
everything Roosevelt had said, for he had always looked to the early
withdrawal of the American forces from Europe; and Truman had then done
nothing to contradict those assertions. To judge that the British and Americans
could “count upon the use of German manpower and what remains of German
industrial capacity” was also to make a considerable leap of imagination. But
there was a still more startling assumption, namely that “Russia allies herself
with Japan”. After all, Stalin had repeatedly promised, most recently at Yalta,
that Russia would enter the war against Japan promptly after Germany was
defeated. No one could fail to observe that Russia was making no haste to do
anything of the kind. In the event, Russia remained in her state of neutrality
with Japan until the last, and declared war only after the first of the atom
bombs had been dropped. For Stalin to have allied himself with the Emperor
of Japan would have required blatant and cynical reversals; but then, the same
had been true of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.
The object of the Operation would be to impose upon Russia the will of
the United States and the British Empire, which in this document and many
others was treated as if it were a single entity. As the Prime Minister and
others knew only too well, it was not. There lies another optimistic
assumption; for the notion that troops from Canada to South Africa, Australia
to New Zealand, Barbados to India would fight against Russia in Central
Europe contains at least much that is questionable. The paper went on to
remark that “Even though ‘the will’ of these two countries” (i.e. the USA and
the British Empire, where we notice again the assumption that the British
Empire was a unit) might be defined as “no more than a square deal for
Poland”, that would not necessarily limit the military commitment. The
Russians might or might not be induced to submit, at least for the time being,
by a quick military success on the part of the West; and if the Russians wanted
total war, they were in a position to have it. In other words, only by winning
such a war could the West achieve its stated object with certainty and lasting
results. The staff had considered that hypothesis, and the alternative that
because a quick success might suffice to gain the political object, a continuing
commitment need not be of concern. Leaving aside the chances of a
revolution in Russia and the collapse of the regime, the elimination of the
USSR in such a war could be achieved only by occupation of so much of the
country that it would not be able to sustain further resistance, or such a
decisive defeat as to render it impossible for Russia to continue the war; or,
presumably, by both events. The paper pointed out that although in 1942 the
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
41
Germans had reached the area of Moscow, the Volga and the Caucasus, the
USSR had nevertheless been able to continue fighting and it was scarcely
conceivable that the Allies could penetrate as far or as quickly as the Germans
in 1942, a penetration which had produced no decisive result.
The annexes to this report examined in detail the balance of strength in
Central Europe. There, Russia enjoyed a superiority on land of approximately
three to one. This fact made it most unlikely that the Allies could achieve
complete and decisive victory in that area. Allied organisation might be better,
equipment slightly better, and morale higher, but the Russians had proved
themselves formidable opponents of Germany; they had competent
commanders, adequate equipment and an organisation which had stood the
test. To achieve a decisive defeat of Russia in a total war would require the
massive mobilisation of manpower. That would involve:
“(a) The deployment in Europe of a large proportion of the vast resources
of the United States.
(b) The re-organisation of German manpower and of all the Western
European Allies”.
Not surprisingly, the authors concluded that while they could not forecast
the result of a total war with Russia, they could say with certainty that to win
it would take “a very long time”.
As for the possibility of a rapid victory, even an early success on the part
of the West might not cause Russia to submit; in other words, the West might
be committed to a total war. It would be impossible to limit hostilities to one
particular area and therefore necessary to think of a worldwide struggle. Even
if a quick success were achieved, that would not necessarily bring a lasting
result because the military power of Russia would not be broken and it would
be open to her to resume a war whenever she thought fit.
With this somewhat unpromising preamble, the paper remarked that there
would be no threat from Russian strategic bombers or submarines comparable
to the earlier German threat; but there would be the Red Army, the main
strength of which was concentrated in Central Europe. That Army might well
overrun Turkey in Europe; South East Europe, including Greece, “would
immediately become barred to our influence and commerce”. In Persia and
Iraq an extremely dangerous situation would arise. It appeared to the planners
almost certain that Russia would take the offensive there in view of the oil
resources to be gained and the extreme importance of those areas to the West.
Since there were some eleven Russian divisions available against an allied
force of three Indian brigade groups, it was difficult to see how the region
could be defended. If Russia and Japan allied, Japanese forces would be freed
to reinforce the home islands or resume the offensive in China. The principal
theatre would undoubtedly be Central Europe, however. Allied air superiority
42
David N. Dilks
would be offset to some extent by the fact that the strategic bomber force
would in the earlier stages have to be based in England. The only means of
obtaining a quick success would be a land campaign making full use of air
superiority both in tactical support and in attacks on the Russian lines of
communication. The main effort of the land offensive would have to lie in
North East Europe. A force of some 47 divisions, including 14 Armoured
Divisions, could be made available for offensive operations (on the
assumptions set out at the beginning of the paper). Against this the Russians
would be able to produce a force amounting to the equivalent of 170
divisions, of which 30 would be armoured. The allies would therefore face
odds of the order of two to one against them in armour, and nearly four to one
in infantry. As the report remarks, without exaggeration, “the above odds
would clearly render the launching of an offensive a hazardous undertaking”.
The main armoured fighting would probably develop east of the OderNeisse Line. On the outcome the campaign would probably depend. If the
result were favourable.
“We might reach the general line Danzig-Breslau. Any advance beyond
this, however, would increase the length of the front to be held during winter
and increase the danger resulting from the salient formed by Bohemia and
Moravia, from which the Russians would be under no necessity to withdraw.
Unless, therefore, we have won the victory we require west of the line
Danzig-Breslau it appears likely that we shall, in fact, be committed to a total
war”.
The success of a land campaign, therefore, would depend upon the result
of the fighting west of the above line before winter conditions set in. There is
no inherent strength in our strategic position and, in fact, we should be staking
everything upon one great battle, in which we should be facing very heavy
odds.
We conclude that:
(a) If we are to embark on war with Russia, we must be prepared to be
committed to a total war, which will be both long and costly.
(b) Our numerical inferiority on land renders it extremely doubtful
whether we could achieve a limited and quick success, even if the political
appreciation considered that this would suffice to gain our political object”.
One of the appendices dealt with the possibility of German assistance and
estimated that 10 German divisions might be re-formed and re-equipped in the
early stages. They could not, however, be available in any event by July 1st.
These possible allies had not been included in the calculations.
Even a summary as lengthy as this cannot do justice to all the material in
these papers. From a strictly British point of view, there were some hopeful
assertions; for example, that the British navy, even without the help of the
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
43
United States, was entirely adequate to deal with Russian naval strength, or
that when aluminium from allied sources was denied to Russia and the allies
inflicted heavy losses, Russian production of aircraft would be “totally
inadequate to meet the demands”. Against such assertions, there had to be
placed the overwhelming facts of Russia’s strength and proved record in the
war. As the report pointed out, the Red Army had developed a capable and
experienced high command; it was extremely tough, lived and moved on a
lighter scale of maintenance than any western army, and employed bold
tactics based largely on a disregard for losses.
The Chiefs of Staff, meeting on May 31, were convinced that the idea of
such a war against Russia was indeed unthinkable. In notes written years later,
Brooke recalled that Churchill had come to the Chiefs of Staff expressing
anxiety at seeing the Russian bear sprawled all over Europe, phraseology
which would again suggest that this enquiry had originated from a general
fear rather than a particular incident. According to Brooke, the Chiefs of Staff
had concluded that “the best we could hope for was to drive the Russians back
to about the same line the Germans had reached. And then what? Were we to
remain mobilised indefinitely to hold them there?”.28
The Chiefs of Staff put the bare facts to Churchill on June 8, by which
time the election campaign was well under way. They estimated that because
Russian divisions were not comparable in establishment with Allied divisions,
the enemy forces would amount to a total of 264 divisions (including 26
armoured divisions) as against the allies’ 103 divisions (including 23
armoured divisions). In short, there were significant differences in the
proportions as estimated by the Chiefs of Staff on the one hand, and the Joint
Planning Staff, on the other. In respect of air strength, the allies would have a
little over 6,000 tactical aircraft and some 2,500 strategic aircraft; the
comparable figures on the Russian side would be nearly 12,000 and 960. The
dominance in numbers of Russian aircraft would, the Chiefs of Staff stated,
for a time be offset by the vastly superior handling and efficiency of the allied
air forces, especially the strategic air forces. After some while, however, the
lack of replacement aircraft and air crews would seriously impair the West’s
strength in the air.
The situation on land made it clear that the allies would not be in a
position to take the offensive with the view to achieving a rapid success. Since
Russian and allied land forces were in contact on a long line stretching from
the Baltic to the Mediterranean, there was no chance of avoiding land
28. Letter from Dr. Julian Lewis, M.P., “Churchill’s Unthinkable War”, The Daily
Telegraph, October 5, 1998.
44
David N. Dilks
operations: “Our view is […] that once hostilities began, it would be beyond
our power to win a quick but limited success and we should be committed to a
protracted war against heavy odds. Those odds, moreover, would become
fanciful if the Americans grew weary and indifferent and began to be drawn
away by the magnet of the Pacific War”.29
Major-General Hollis, Ismay’s deputy, submitted a draft reply which the
Prime Minister on June 10 adopted in its entirety except for one important
change at the end. In effect, it abandoned the notion of an assault, and pointed
out that if the Americans withdrew to their zone in Germany and moved the
bulk of their forces back to the USA or to the Pacific, the Russians would
have the power to advance to the North Sea and the Atlantic. How then could
Britain be defended, assuming that France and the Low Countries were
powerless to resist a Russian advance to the sea? What naval, air and land
forces would be required? The retention of the code word “Unthinkable”
would cause the Staff to realise that “this remains a precautionary study of
what, I hope, is still a purely hypothetical contingency”. Instead of the last
four words, General Hollis’ draft had suggested “a highly improbable
event”.30
On the next day, the Prime Minister gave to the Chiefs of Staff what
Brooke’s diary describes as a long and very gloomy review of the situation in
Europe. The Russians were all-powerful there; they could march across the
rest of Europe and drive the British back into their island; and the Americans
were returning home. The quicker they went home, Churchill said, the sooner
they would be required back in Europe again. “He finished up by saying that
never in his life had he been more worried by the European situation than he
was at present”.31
The Joint Planners (again Grantham, Thompson, Dawson) examined on
behalf of the Chiefs of Staff the Prime Minister’s minute of June 10. They
concluded that the Russians would not be able to develop any immediate
threat to Britain’s sea communications comparable to that which had been
exerted by Germany; it would take Russia a period of years to develop a
submarine fleet or a maritime airforce capable of producing a decisive threat
to Britain’s sea communications; Russia would be greatly handicapped by
lack of experience in planning an invasion either by sea or by air and the
29. Memorandum by the Chiefs of Staff to Churchill, June 8, 1945, enclosed with
Ismay to Churchill, same date, CAB 120/691, PRO.
30. Churchill to General Ismay for the Chiefs of Staff Committee, June 10,
1945,CAB 120/691, PRO.
31. A. Bryant, op. cit., pp. 470-471.
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
45
assessment ruled out a decisive invasion by airborne operations alone. The
possession of bridgeheads on the continent would offer Russia a compact
target, their defence impose a continuous drain and their retention bring no
operational advantage. To defend the island and attack targets in Europe
would require the full support of the United States. That prospect, needless to
say, raised the question of the Japanese war. The planners concluded: “It is
only by the use of rockets and other new weapons that the Russians could
develop any serious threat to the security of this country in the initial stages.
Invasion or a serious attack upon our sea communications could only be
undertaken after a period of preparation which must last some years”.32
By the time those words were written, the Prime Minister was painting in
the south of France, whence he travelled directly to the Conference at
Potsdam. It is noticeable that the texts of this report of July 11, and the still
more important initial paper about Operation Unthinkable of May 22, are both
marked “No.15”. We cannot exclude the possibility that a copy or a summary
reached Stalin. Had any such suggestion have been put to Churchill or Ismay,
it would doubtless have been dismissed out of hand, for elaborate precautions
had been taken to ensure the secrecy of the whole project. As one of Ismay’s
notes to Churchill remarked, the Chiefs of Staff felt “that the less was put on
paper on this subject, the better”.33
All the same, we now know what was not apparent to the Prime Minister,
that a great deal of most secret information reached Russia because of
penetration of the British public service by communist agents and
sympathisers. Churchill’s celebrated description of the way in which Stalin
received from Truman the news about the first successful testing of the atomic
bomb does not suggest that the Prime Minister, writing long after the war, was
aware even of a possibility that Stalin might have known the essential facts in
advance.34 No less an authority than Professor John Erickson has suggested
that the assessments connected with Operation Unthinkable may account for
the decisive change in Russia’s military dispositions which occurred at the
end of June, 1945.35 In other words, it is at least possible that there was at
work a self-fulfilling, indeed self-reinforcing, process: because Russia was so
32. Report by the Joint Planning Staff “Operation Unthinkable”, July 11, 1945,
CAB 120/691, PRO.
33. Ismay to Churchill, June 8, 1945, CAB 120/691, PRO.
34. M. Gilbert, “Never Despair”: Winston S. Churchill 1945-1965 (London,
1988), pp. 99-100.
35. “Churchill’s plan for Third World War against Stalin”, The Daily Telegraph,
October 1, 1998, p. 1.
46
David N. Dilks
powerful and her attitude so menacing, the Prime Minister felt bound to
discover whether the British and Americans had any serious chance of
opposing her by military force; and if Stalin knew that such an enquiry had
been undertaken, his own convictions of western hostility would certainly
have been strengthened.
At Potsdam, Churchill remarked to Eden that Russian policy was now one
of aggrandisement.36 All the same, the Prime Minister did not adopt an
attitude of hostility to all Russian demands. According to Eden, whose
impression is supported from other sources, Churchill had again fallen under
the spell of Stalin, of whom he said repeatedly “I like that man”. The Prime
Minister supported Russia’s claim to a substantial portion of the captured
German fleet, and to at least one warm-water port. Stalin denied any intention
that Russia would roll on westwards.
As the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Planning Staff had shown, Russia’s
strength in conventional forces outstripped anything which the British and
Americans could bring to bear. When the planners wrote their memoranda,
they did not know about the atomic enterprise, any more than Truman or
Churchill knew whether the first trial would succeed. The American and
British governments had assumed that a massive and bloody campaign in the
Far East, perhaps lasting as much as 18 months, would follow the defeat of
Germany. But as that pregnant conversation between Truman and Stalin had
indicated, and as the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed within a
few days, the new weapon had upset all those careful calculations about the
numbers of divisions and submarines and aircraft. Here was something which
might well transform the nature of warfare and of relations between the great
powers, for a weapon of unimaginable power could now be delivered from
bases lying at a great distance from the target and practically invulnerable;
moreover, delivered with devastating effect, if necessary without declaration
of war. Whereas it had taken years of relentless pounding to devastate the
cities and industry of Germany, destruction over a vast area could now be
achieved at a stroke. The point was immediately apparent to Churchill. He
told the Chiefs of Staff on July 23 that “We now had something in our hands
which would redress the balance with the Russians. The secret of this
explosive and the power to use it would completely alter the diplomatic
equilibrium which was adrift since the defeat of Germany […] now we could
36. Eden to Churchill, P.M./45/2/P, July 17, 1945, PREM 3/396/14, PRO; cf. Eden,
op. cit., p. 545.
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
47
say, ‘If you insist on doing this or that, well...’. And then where are the
Russians!”.37
Two days after that conversation, Churchill left Potsdam for London. 24
hours later, he resigned as Prime Minister on learning of the Labour Party’s
overwhelming victory in the General Election. Attlee and Bevin, the new
Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, found themselves possessed of no more
cards in negotiation than Churchill and Eden. They were perhaps, though not
for long, more hopeful about Russia and the post-war situation. When
Churchill uttered at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, truths which could
hardly be denied by any serious observer, and accompanied by expressions of
admiration for Stalin and the valiant Russian people, the British and American
governments alike refused to support his speech.
But there is a twist to this tale, for the file relating to Operation
Unthinkable is not concerned only with the period from late May to mid-July,
1945. Rather, it resumes in August, 1946, by which time the Chiefs of Staff in
the United States judged that matters in Europe had reached a critical stage. If
a war began with Russia, they believed that the British and American forces
should withdraw from their zones of occupation into a bridgehead, the course
which the planners had not recommended in the summer of 1945. Air cover
and air striking forces would be available from bases in the United Kingdom;
from the bridgehead in the Low Countries there would be short lines of
communication with Britain. Messages were exchanged in deep secrecy
during the autumn of 1946. Field-Marshal Montgomery, by then Chief of the
Imperial General Staff, held conversations with Mackenzie King, Prime
Minister of Canada, President Truman and General Eisenhower. By the end of
1946, the British and American planners had agreed, as had the Chiefs of Staff
in London, that in the event of Russian aggression, the best course would be
to withdraw the British and American forces into the area of Zeebrugge and
Dunkirk.38
These exchanges remind us that Operation Unthinkable was not merely the
result of Churchill’s hostility to Russia, or of fevered imagination as the
coalition crumbled into disarray in 1945 with the disappearance of the only
factor which had held it together. Given the scale of American and British
37. A. Bryant, op. cit., pp. 477-478.
38. The papers are in CAB 120/691, PRO; see for example Joint Staff Mission,
Washington, to Cabinet Office, embodying a message from Field-Marshal Wilson to
General Ismay, August 30, 1946, FMW 271; and Ministry of Defence to Joint Staff
Mission, Washington, DEF. 96, embodying a message from General Hollis to FieldMarshal Wilson, January 16, 1947, CAB 120/691, PRO.
48
David N. Dilks
demobilisation by the end of 1946, the disparity between them and the
Russians in respect of conventional forces was no doubt greater than when the
planners had reported in the early summer of 1945; but with the difference
that the Americans now possessed the atomic bomb (the secrets of which they
refused after the war to share with the British), and the Russians did not. Even
two generations later, we do not know whether Russia was deterred from
westward expansion by the knowledge that the other side had the bomb. What
is clear is that within a few years, a vast reversal of British, American and
European opinion was brought about by Russian policy and above all by
Stalin. Churchill made this point with force in November, 1954, near the end
of his last spell as Prime Minister, in the context of the policy – which would
have seemed unthinkable even a few years before – of rearming Germany
within NATO. The speech created an uproar at the time, because Churchill
added that when the Germans were surrendering by hundreds of thousands in
1945, he had told Field-Marshal Montgomery to collect German arms so that
they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers with whom the
British would have to work if the Soviet advance continued.
There followed an embarrassed search for the text of this message. There
is a probability, but even now not a certainty, that it was never sent. On the
other hand, as Churchill’s published history of the war had already shown, he
telegraphed to Eisenhower on May 9, 1945, that he hoped the policy of
destroying German weapons and other equipment would not be adopted.
Normally, Churchill’s memory was Napoleonic in its range and accuracy and
the Prime Minister apologised to Parliament for his failure to observe the rule
he had so often inculcated in others, “Always verify your quotations”. No
trouble would have arisen with the Soviets in the summer of 1945, Churchill
observed, unless they had continued their advance to a point at which they
caused the outbreak of a new war between Russia and the Western Allies; and
to prevent such a disaster it might have been helpful to warn the Russians that
“we should certainly in that case rearm the German prisoners in our hands
who all together, including those in Italy, numbered 2.5 million”.
Enquiry was naturally made of Montgomery; he in his turn consulted the
two colleagues who had in 1945 been the heads of his Operations and
Intelligence staffs. Montgomery informed Churchill that the message had
come and “on a very secret link: which you sometimes used, to me. I
remember that too. Messages sent on that link had to be destroyed at once,
when read. You can therefore take it that the message was destroyed”.39
39. Numerous papers are preserved on this subject in PREM 11/915, PRO,
including extracts from The Times, of November 24 & 25, 1954, from Hansard Nov.
CHURCHILL AND AN UNTHINKABLE OPERATION, 1945
49
Whether Montgomery and his colleagues were accurate in every
particular, almost ten years after the event, is beside the point. It is plain that
ultra-secret messages went to Montgomery, and doubtless to others, of which
the text was immediately destroyed by the recipient. In respect of Operation
Unthinkable, we probably have a good deal to learn from Russian sources;
and we do well to remind ourselves that even files apparently complete are not
necessarily so.
25; note to Churchill from DK (Denis Kelly), November 27, 1954; Churchill’s
statement in Parliament on December 1st, 1954; Montgomery to Churchill, December
6, 1954, enclosing a copy of Montgomery to C.I.G.S., June 14, 1945. A memorandum
to Churchill from Denis Kelly, December 6, 1954, shows that between March 30 and
July 26, 1945, Churchill sent or received 883 telegrams.
50
David N. Dilks
Between Self-Determination and Subordination:
the Smaller Powers of East-Central Europe
in the Policy of the Big Three
Magdalena HULAS
“No one wishes to impose some Great Power dictatorship on the rest of
the world [...]. It is not by riding roughshod over the smaller Powers that the
vital interests of the larger can in the long run best be protected”.1
Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary of State at the
Foreign Office, was quite right in predicting the long-term effects of the
“Great Power dictatorship” policy. But was he equally right (and sincere) in
declaring the wishes of the Great Powers? By the time the above-quoted
words were spoken some of the most important decisions affecting the future
of the smaller powers of Eastern Europe had been already taken. The nature of
these decisions contradicted the very essence of Cadogan’s statement. Thus, it
is difficult to consider it represented a declaration of true intentions. It is also
difficult to assume that the under-secretary of State was misinformed. The
explanation has to be sought elsewhere. The discrepancy between the verbal
declarations and the policy actually adopted resulted from a clash of
incompatibilities: on the one hand, the compulsion to conform (at least in
public announcements) to the moral standards considered binding in politics
of that time, and on the other, the conviction that the policy of following these
standards was both ineffective and unprofitable.
The need for principles in politics seemed, paradoxically, to be
strengthened during the Second World War, because of the special character
of this conflict. It was considered by the Allied 2 countries to be a war for
1. A. Cadogan’s speech, Dumbarton Oaks, August 21, 1944 see: “Calendar of
authoritative statements on Peace Aims made by representatives of HMG (September
1939-July 1945)”, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), FO 371/50946,
U.10245/7171/70; cf. David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan. 19381945 (London, 1971), p. 656.
2. The word “Allied” we use only in descriptive manner since not all the countries
fighting against the Axis powers and their satellites were sensu stricto Allies. For
interesting remarks on the subject see the correspondence between Ministry of
Information, BBC and the Foreign Office, January, February 1942 – PRO, FO
371/30867, C. 680/680/62, FO 371/30870, C. 1205/1205/62.
52
Magdalena Hulas
democracy, “a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to
subjugate the world”.3 Democracy (contrasted with nazism, or totalitarianism)
was not only a basis on which the allied war aims were defined, it was also a
criterion of being a friend or a foe.4 Thus complying with the democratic rules
served the Allied cause while any departure from them weakened the Allied
war effort, alienated democratic public opinion and served Nazi propaganda.
And since Great Power Dictatorship is by its nature inconsistent with
democracy, therefore it could not be publicly acknowledged that such a policy
was implemented by the Allied Powers.
But on the other hand the idealistic principles (self-determination, open
diplomacy, equal rights for great and small nations) – established inter alia by
Woodrow Wilson, his Fourteen Points, Four Principles, Four Ends, and Five
Particulars – and the expectations based on them, proved to be delusive.
Attempts to build, after the Great War, European order on the concept of
nation-state were futile, particularly in Eastern Europe, where the concept of
the ethnic nation prevailed, and where, even by means of plebiscites, it was
impossible to attain the identity of the political and ethnic borders.5
The term “Eastern Europe” was never precisely defined 6, and all the
countries, from Finland to Greece, as well as the European part of the Soviet
Union, could be identified with this region. But this is not a very precise and
3. “United Nations Declaration”, January 1, 1942; E. J. Osmanczyk, The
Encyclopedia
of the United Nations and International Agreements
(Philadelphia/London, 1985), p. 841.
4. At an initial stage of war the British were more reluctant than the Americans to
use the term “democracy”. In November 1940, during the preparations for the first
meeting of the Allied Governments in St. James’s Palace in London, the Polish Prime
Minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, proposed to make some amendments in the
draft resolution which was to be adopted at the meeting. One of the amendments was
to add word “democratic” to the phrase “free peoples”. A. Cadogan decided that it was
“an impossible amendment” and explained: “we number amongst our actual and
potential Allies certain countries which do not even desire to be designated as
democratic”. A. Cadogan, November 18, 1940 – PRO, CAB 21/1379.
5. This is why the idea of self-determination was sometimes perceived in a
distorted way, for example when Hitler’s “peaceful conquests” of territories populated
by Germans (the Rhineland, Austria, “Sudetenland”) were thought to be the fulfillment
of German right and need for self-determination, and only the occupation of Prague
revealed that not “self-determination” but “domination” was the issue. Henry
Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1994), p. 317.
6. Attempts to clarify the problem, see Oscar Halecki, Borderlands of Western
Civilization. A History of East-Central Europe (New York, 1952), pp. 3-7.
THE SMALLER POWERS OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE BIG THREE
53
certainly not a very useful classification. It is more helpful to subdivide
Eastern Europe into East-Central and South-Eastern Europe. In this paper the
countries of East-Central Europe will be under discussion, i.e. the countries
lying between Germany and the Soviet Union. The factors which determined
their distinctiveness were, inter alia, historical experience, the stage of
civilisation and economic development, the authoritarian and semiauthoritarian political systems (only Czechoslovakia was considered to be a
country which adhered to western democratic criteria), and the fact that they
were small countries (which was considered a destabilising factor) and at the
same time new countries (which called their permanence in question).
The East-Central European policy of three big powers, who only in 1941
became the Big Three, could not be and was not uniform. In the period 19391941, the gap between them seemed impossible to bridge. After 1941 there
was a certain community of interests created by Nazi aggression; after 1943
the decisions concerning the smaller powers taken by the Big Three were likeminded although, even then, their prerequisites differed. The decisions taken
and their consequences for the future of East-Central European countries have
been the subject of extensive historical research and analysis, and it seems
there is no need to discuss them here in detail. What is, however, worth
stressing is the fact that these decisions affected all three qualifications of the
state: population, territory, and government (power). All the countries under
discussion, both victorious and defeated, suffered from transfers of population
on unprecedented scale. All the countries, both victorious and defeated,
suffered the loss of territory. All the countries, both victorious and defeated,
underwent not only changes of government, but changes of political and
economic systems.
These were the immediate effects. The long-term consequences of those
changes for the smaller powers, the well-being of their citizens, their national
consciousness, political process, legal systems, etc. are and will be an intricate
subject of historical research. But it is also important to look for the sources of
the Great Powers’ policy. They have to be searched for in the period of time
hitherto neglected, i.e. in the initial stages of war and the years 1939-1941.
The most important decisions were being taken after 1943, but it is striking
that these decisions were very much the reflection of earlier events. Their
most important result – the division of Europe between East and West – ran
more or less along the lines demarcating the German and Soviet spheres of
influence. It looks as if the agreements between the Big Three practically
replaced the no longer operative secret clauses of the Ribbentrop-Molotov
Pact, and the foundations for the after-war division of Europe were laid in the
very first years of the war.
54
Magdalena Hulas
The United Kingdom had no interests in East-Central Europe. As Stanley
Baldwin put it in 1934: “when you think of the defence of England […] you
think of the Rhine”.7 The fact that in March 1939 Great Britain “ moved her
Baldwinian frontier of security from the Rhine to the Vistula ”8 altered the
chain of events but did not alter the traditional understanding of Britain’s role
in Europe. During the period of 1939-1941, the American attitude towards the
whole continent was – to say the least – non-committal, and Eastern Europe
was beyond any interest (some interest was manifested during the Presidential
elections, when the candidates tried to win the votes of the Americans of EastEuropean origin). The only power immediately interested in this region was
the Soviet Union, and it assumed that great power status entailed the right to
expand. By the end of 1940, six countries had fallen victim to this policy:
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, and Finland. The door for such a
policy was opened by the German-Soviet treaties9, according to which the
eastern part of Poland, Finland and the Baltic States fell into the “sphere of
influence” of the USSR, and “the Soviet side emphasise[d] its interest in
Bessarabia”. Both the German and the Soviet interpretations of the words
“sphere of interests” exceeded the generally accepted meaning.
The Soviet Union claimed that “l’État polonais et son Gouvernement ont
[…] cessé d’exister”10. This statement (and also the German one, to the same
effect) was inconsistent with international law. There was no interruption of
the continuity of the Polish state, because Poland did not undergo debellatio
(the result of which is the loss of sovereignty). Debellatio is possible only in
case of conquest and annexation of the conquered territory – in the case of
Poland there was no conquest because there was no capitulation, and there
was no annexation because annexation is not permissible durante bello, and
the war – being the coalition’s war – was still being fought.11 Nevertheless,
7. Quoted from: Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy. British Intelligence and
Nazi Germany. 1933-1939 (Oxford, 1986), p. 40.
8. Pawel Starzenski, Trzy lata z Beckiem [Three Years with Beck] (Warsaw, 1991),
p. 109.
9. Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the USSR of August 23, 1939,
its secret additional protocol, and also the secret additional protocol to the GermanSoviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939, Documents on PolishSoviet Relations. 1939-1945, vol. 1: 1939-1943 (hereafter: DPSR) (London, 1961), pp.
40, 53.
10. Note of the Soviet Government to the Polish Embassy in Moscow, September
17, 1939, ibid, p. 46.
11. Krystyna Marek, Identity and Continuity of States in Public International Law
(Geneva, 1954), p. 103. It is interesting to note here that despite the utterly different
THE SMALLER POWERS OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE BIG THREE
55
despite the illegality of this act, the eastern provinces of the Polish state were
annexed to the USSR.12 To cover up the fact that it was an unlawful move,
elections to the so-called National Assemblies were organised in occupied
territories (called by the occupant Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia).
The National Assemblies asked the Supreme Soviet that their regions be
incorporated into the respective Soviet republics. The Supreme Soviet agreed
to accede to these requests and incorporated the territories into the Ukrainian
SSR and Byelorussian SSR.13
The same procedure was adopted in 1940 in the cases of Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania, but this time the Soviet Union did not claim the liquidation of
these countries. Their “independence” within the Soviet Union was fictitious
but they were not declared “non-existent”. Rumania had to surrender
Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. The Soviet claims to these territories
went even beyond what had been agreed with the Germans in the RibbentropMolotov Pact. Bukovina was never mentioned there, nor had it even been part
of the Russian Empire.14 After the Winter War, Finland lost about 9% of her
territory to the benefit of the Soviet Union.
official attitude of His Majesty’s Government some of the British politicians shared the
Soviet conviction that the Polish state had ceased to exist. HM’s Ambassador to
Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, in the memorandum handed to Andrei Vyshinski on
October 22, 1940 used the term “former Polish State” (S. Cripps to FO, Telegram n°
913, October 22, 1940 – PRO, FO 371/24845, N.6875/30/38). When he was reminded
by the Foreign Office that “in view of our relations and agreements with Poland, we
cannot in an international agreement speak of ‘former Polish State’” (FO to S. Cripps,
Tel. n° 720, October 30, 1940, ibid.), he answered: “I was not aware that His Majesty’s
Government desired to maintain fiction that former Polish state (as distinct from the
Government) still exists de facto. […] I appreciate however that it is undesirable
psychologically to use the term ‘former Polish state’” (S. Cripps to FO, Tel. n° 944,
October 31, 1940 – PRO, FO 371/24845, N.7046/30/38). His explanation was never
approved by the Foreign Office (cf. the comments of Sir William Malkin, legal adviser
to FO, November 4, 1940, ibid.).
12. Part of the Polish state territory – Wilno (Vilnius) and the Wilno region – was
transferred by the Soviet Union to Lithuania (the Soviet-Lithuanian Agreement of
October 10, 1939, DPSR, vol. 1, pp. 62-63). In July-August 1940 it was together with
the whole Lithuanian Republic incorporated into the USSR.
13. Decree of the Supreme Council of the USSR on the annexation of Western
Ukraine (November 1st, 1939) and Western Byelorussia (November 2, 1939), DPSR,
vol. 1, pp. 69-70.
14. See: V. I. Vinogradov et al. (ed.), Bessarabiya na perekrestke Yevropieyskoi
diplomatii. Dokumenty i materialy [Bessarabia at the crossroads of European
diplomacy. Documents and materials] (Moscow, 1996), p. 343 ff.
56
Magdalena Hulas
Soviet policy affected not only the states and their territories but also their
population. Firstly, all the inhabitants of the territories annexed by the Soviets
were regarded by them as having acquired Soviet citizenship (according to the
decree issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on November 29,
1939). Secondly, the policy of extermination and deportation was applied to
large groups and classes of inhabitants of the newly acquired territories.15
The policy towards the population of the annexed provinces and countries
of Eastern Europe was kept secret and was presented by the Soviets as a
policy being carried out in conformity with the democratic procedures.
According to the Soviet official statements, the purpose of this policy was to
ensure the security of the Soviet state, or to defend the population of the
annexed territories, or to set to right the ethnic problems, or to make up for
social injustice.16
The reactions of the Western Powers to the actions taken by the cobelligerent to-be are interesting. There was a strong opposition in the sole case
of Finland, resulting in expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of
Nations and in plans for a military expedition to Finland. In the case of
Poland, the only reaction of His Majesty’s Government was the statement
issued by the Ministry of Information (The Times, September 19, 1939)17, and
the note of September 18, handed by Ambassador William Seeds to
15. Historical research on the subject has intensified in recent years and here are
just few examples of the books dealing with the problem: Keith Sword, Deportation
and Exile. Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939-48 (London, 1996); S. Ciesielski, G.
Hryciuk, A. Srebrakowski, Masowe deportacje radzieckie w okresie II wojny
swiatowej [Soviet mass deportations during the Second World War] (Wroclaw, 1993);
L. C. Jeremin.(ed.), Repressii protiv polakov i polskikh grazhdan [Repression against
the Poles and the Polish citizens] (Moskow, 1997); Ewa Kowalska, Przezyc, aby
wrócic! Polscy zeslancy lat 1940-1941 w ZSRR i ich losy do roku 1946 [Survive and
you’ll return! Polish deportees of the years 1940-1941 in the USSR and their fortunes
until 1946] (Warsaw, 1998); Daniel Bockowski, Czas nadziei. Obywatele
Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w ZSRR i opieka nad nimi placówek polskich w latach 19401943 [Time of hope. The citizens of the Polish Republic in the USRR and their
protection by Polish diplomatic posts. 1940-1943] (Warsaw, 1999); and most recently
numerous articles in K. Jasiewicz (ed.), Non-Provincial Europe. Changes on the
Eastern Territories of the former Polish Republic (Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine,
eastern borderland of the III Republic) in 1772-1999 (Warsaw, London, 1999), pp.
949-1184.
16. See the Soviet note of September 17, 1939 where almost all those arguments
were used (cf. footnote 10).
17. See: DPSR, vol. 1, p. 49.
THE SMALLER POWERS OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE BIG THREE
57
V. Molotov on September 19, in which it was stated: “[…] HM’s Government
wish to formulate the most express reserves as to the statement that ‘the Polish
State and its Government have in fact ceased to exist’, and as to the reasons
the Soviet Government adduce for holding this view. […]”.18
In the case of the Baltic States there were no reserves of any kind. The
attitude of the British towards Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania can be, to some
extent, illustrated by what A. V. Alexander wrote to A. Cadogan in his report
of the conversation he had had with Ambassador Ivan Maisky on September
17, 1940: “I had no feelings either way about the Baltic States – frankly I did
not know enough about them, except that we bought butter and bacon from
them”.19
The British policy towards the smaller powers of East-Central Europe was
generally marked by the equivocal way in which they were treated: they were
welcome comrades in the fight against Nazi Germany, but in relation to the
Soviet Union, their position was less privileged. The first aspect manifested
itself in the way the governments of these countries were dealt with. Great
Britain, in 1940 facing alone the Nazi menace, welcomed all potential allies.
London became the provisional home of the exiled governments which, at
least formally, were treated as equals. Their sojourn in the United Kingdom
was regulated by the Diplomatic Privileges (Extension) Act of March 6,
1941.20 Initially, the only government of East-Central Europe that was
recognised as a constitutional, legal government was the Polish one.21 Later
on, the Czechoslovak Government was also granted full recognition.22
18. Quoted from Leopold Jerzewski (Jerzy Lojek), Agresja 17 wrzesnia
[Aggression of September 17], Warsaw, 1982, p. XXIII. The fact is that the secret
protocol to the British-Polish Agreement of Mutual Assistance of August 25, 1939
limited British obligations only to the case of German (not Soviet) aggression.
19. A. V. Alexander’s report, September 17, 1940 – PRO, FO 371/24845, N.
6630/30/38.
20. Diplomatic Privileges (Extension) Act, 1941 – PRO, FO 371/26428,
C.2575/84/62. The presence of the military forces of these countries in the British Isles
was regulated by the Allied Forces Act of August 22, 1940.
21. Later it was joined for a short period of time (1941-1943) by the Yugoslavian
and Greek Governments from South-Eastern Europe.
22. It started as the Czechoslovak National Committee formed in November 1939
in Paris. It was not recognised then as an organisation representing the Czechoslovak
state (since the continuity of the state was broken in March 1939) but it was considered
to be “qualifié pour représenter le peuple tchécoslovaque” (Maurice Flory, Le statut
international des gouvernements réfugiés et le cas de la France Libre. 1939-1945,
Paris 1952, p. 40). Following the French defeat it moved to London where it assumed
58
Magdalena Hulas
Other East-Central European countries were not represented in the United
Kingdom by their Governments. The pre-war governments of Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia did not flee their countries, nor did any representatives of
these countries form any émigré government. After the annexation of the
Baltic States by the USSR their diplomatic representatives in London sent
notes to Lord Halifax, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, protesting
against the Soviet actions.23 The Foreign Office decided that: “Baltic
Ministers [are to be] informed orally and privately that no official answer will
be returned to their notes (though their names will remain on the diplomatic
list)”.24 The Baltic States never received the status of an occupied country.
Austria did, and in December 1941, a Free Austrian Movement,
representing numerous émigré organisations, was formed in London. It was
decided that “while the Foreign Office [would] maintain with it such informal
contact as may be appropriate, no measure of recognition [would], in present
circumstances, be accorded to it”25, but on the other hand, “His Majesty’s
Government […] sympathise with Austrians who aim at freeing their country
the title of the Provisional Czechoslovak Government (not: Government of
Czechoslovakia). Its status still did not equal the status of the constitutional
governments-in-exile functioning on the British soil, although it fell into the domain of
the Diplomatic Privileges (Extension) Act. Also the position of President Eduard
Benes did not equal the position of other heads of state residing in London, although in
practice he enjoyed the same privileges and immunities (“Immunities and Privileges
for the Heads of the Allied States in the United Kingdom and Their Personal Retinues.
Annex I: Personal Status of President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia, February
1941” – PRO, FO 371/26428, C. 2062/84/62). Between the British and the Provisional
Czechoslovak Government there was no exchange of regular diplomatic agents, the
former merely appointing a “British Representative with the Czecho-Slovak
Provisional Government” (Minute by William Strang, August 1, 1940 – PRO, FO
371/24289, C. 8267/2/12). Finally, when on July 18, 1941 the Soviet Government –
freshly brought into the war on the side of the Allies – concluded a treaty with the
Czechoslovak Government, recognising it without limitations, the British Government
decided to grant it full recognition.
23. For the text of the Lithuanian note of July 23, 1940 see: La Lituanie et la
Seconde Guerre mondiale. Recueil des documents par Bronis Kaslas (Paris, 1981), pp.
135-136.
24. Halifax to Stafford Cripps, August 13, 1940 – PRO, FO 371/24847,
N.6105/40/38. See also: The Foreign Office List and Diplomatic and Consular Year
Book; Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War
(London, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 475-482.
25. FO telegram to Washington n° 1675, March 14, 1942 – ibid..
THE SMALLER POWERS OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE BIG THREE
59
from Nazi domination” and “are anxious to encourage the spirit of Austrian
resistance to German domination”.26
Even the countries which could not claim that they were victims of
German aggression tried to establish some sort of representation in London.
Strong initiative was shown by some Hungarian politicians, but they were
warned that the British attitude towards Hungary “would be influenced by the
degree and manner in which the Hungarian Government had endeavoured to
withstand Axis pressure and maintain a genuinely neutral attitude”.27 After
British-Hungarian diplomatic relations were broken off (April 1941), attempts
to form an émigré government in London aborted but a Hungarian Council
was formed, led by Mihály Károlyi, which did not play any significant role.
Rumanians in London were also divided into various factions but two
main groups could be singled out: the “Free Rumanian Committee” led by
Viorel Virgil Tilea, former Minister in London, and the “Rumanian
Democratic Committee” led by Victor Cornea. According to the Foreign
Office instructions “His Majesty’s Government have been unwilling to
recognise any Free Rumanian movement because none of the personnel
available in this country appeared to be of sufficient calibre to appeal to
Rumanians at home”.28
Although the free movements did not find any form of recognition from
HMG, their presence in London was accepted, sometimes even supported.
The presence of legal governments-in-exile was used by the British to
strengthen their own position, to stress their leading role, and to underline the
community of aims and interests of European countries fighting against the
Nazis and their accomplices. This is the reason why the British did not want
the exiled governments to leave Britain and look for asylum or support
elsewhere – even when they became more of a burden than a blessing. What
the British found particularly disquieting was the tendency of the smaller
allies to turn for assistance to the United States, after the USA entered the
war. For example, when the Polish Government planned in 1942 to settle the
so-called Eight-Powers Declaration of Solidarity – a declaration of the exiled
governments – and to issue it during Sikorski’s visit to the USA, it was agreed
at the Foreign Office that “the Polish proposal was embarrassing, and it would
26. A. Eden’s confidential circular to His Majesty’s Representatives, June 18, 1941
– PRO, FO 371/30866, C. 2280/669/62.
27. Quoted from: Gyula Juhász, Hungarian Foreign Policy. 1919-1945 (Budapest,
1972), p. 182.
28. Foreign Office telegram to Washington N° 1677, March 14, 1942 – PRO, FO
371/30866, C. 2280/669/62.
60
Magdalena Hulas
be particularly undesirable for Governments who were established in London
to launch a declaration from Washington. This might even encourage some of
them in the idea […] that they might transfer themselves to Washington”.29
A similar attitude was adopted in financial arrangements. When the
renewal of the credit for the Polish Government was negotiated, the Treasury
suggested “the possibility of the US Government sharing the expenditure with
us”.30 The Foreign Office, taking into account not only the financial but also
the political considerations, thought that it was a rather unfortunate idea. As
Frank K. Roberts put it bluntly: “We naturally do not want Poles or our other
Allies to look to the United States rather than to us as their patrons. This
would be particularly undesirable in the case of the Poles, who regard the
Americans as being more sympathetic than we are to their views on future
arrangements in Eastern Europe. In our opinion, therefore, it would not be
worth while for the comparatively small amounts involved to surrender the
political control, which we automatically obtain by the provision of finance
for the Allied Governments without resources of their own”.31
While the small allies played quite a significant role in the British policy
of the time, it was evident that they were not a sufficient counterbalance to
Nazi Germany. Great Britain – in need of a much stronger partner – tried on
the one hand to strengthen the position of the small powers (e.g. by supporting
the idea of East-Central European confederation), and on the other hand, to
convince both the United States and the Soviet Union to join the Allies.32
All the attempts at drawing the USSR out of its collusion with the Third
Reich entailed great expense, and it was to be met by the small powers. The
first manifestations of this British policy were to be found in Winston
Churchill’s letter to Stalin of June 24, 194033 and in subsequent conversations
of Ambassador Stafford Cripps with Stalin (July 1st) and Molotov (August
7).34 The more specific proposals were embodied in a memorandum handed
29. Record of the meeting at the FO, February 26, 1942 – PRO, FO 371/30871, C.
2230/1543/62.
30. W. L. Fraser (Treasury) to R. M. Makins (FO), March 24, 1942 – PRO, FO
371/31107, C. 3145/3145/55.
31. F. K. Roberts (FO) to W. L. Fraser, March 29, 1942, ibid..
32. It was impossible to reconcile those two objectives. The Soviet Union rejected
any idea of the confederation in Eastern Europe, seeing in it the revival of the cordon
sanitaire.
33. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, The Fall of France
(London, 1968), pp. 120-121.
34. Dokumienty vnieshniey politiki.1940 – 22 iyunia 1941 [Documents on Foreign
Policy. 1940 – 22 June 1941], vol. 23/1 (Moscow, 1995), pp. 394-399, 485-488.
THE SMALLER POWERS OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE BIG THREE
61
by Cripps to A. Vyshinsky on October 22, 1940. The British were ready “to
recognise […] de facto sovereignty of the USSR in Estonia, Latvia{ XE
"Latvia" }, Lithuania, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and those parts of
the former Polish State now under Soviet control”.35 Although the British
proposal was rejected by the Soviet Government it was an important factor in
ensuing British-Soviet negotiations. Stalin returned to this proposal, without
naming it, in December 1941, in his conversations with Anthony Eden.36
The British attempts to create the Anglo-American Alliance resulted in
August 1941 in a joint declaration soon to be named “Atlantic Charter”.
Despite initial reservations, the governments of the smaller powers decided to
support the Atlantic Charter. During the second meeting of the Allied
representatives in St. James’s Palace, on September 24, 1941, they adopted
the resolution by which they “[made] known their adherence to the common
principles of policy set forth in that Declaration [Atlantic Charter] and their
intention to co-operate to the best of their ability in giving effect to them”.37
The Soviet Union also associated itself with the Atlantic Charter and
Ambassador Maisky made a statement on the policy of the Soviet
Government in which the following passages were included: “The Soviet
Union has applied, and will apply in its foreign policy, the high principle of
respect for the sovereign rights of peoples. The Soviet Union was, and is,
guided in its foreign policy by the principle of self-determination of nations.
[…] Accordingly, the Soviet Union defends the right of every nation to the
independence and territorial integrity of its country, and its right to establish
such a social order and to choose such a form of government as it deems
opportune and necessary for the better promotion of its economic and cultural
prosperity”.38 The text of this declaration had been known to the British before
Maisky presented it in St. James’s Palace and it caused the following
comment from Roger Makins at the Foreign Office: “There is nothing in this
declaration to which we need raise objection, though I must observe that many
of the statements in it, coming from a representative of the Soviet Union, will
35. Cf. footnote 11.
36. See: O. A. Rzheshevsky, Vizit A. Idena v Moskvu v diekabrie 1941 g.
Preregovori s I.V.Stalinym i V.M.Molotovym [A. Eden’s Visit to Moscow in December
1941. Conversations with I. V. Stalin and V. M. Molotov], Novaya i Noveyshaya
Istoriya, 1994, n° 2, 3.
37. Inter-Allied Meeting held in London at St. James’s Palace on September 24,
1941. Report of Proceedings, PRO, CAB 21/1379.
38. I. Maisky’s statement, September 24, 1941, PRO, FO 3371/26425, C.
11645/14/62.
62
Magdalena Hulas
reduce the proceedings to something perilously near a farce & will no doubt
be most welcome to German propaganda”.39 But officially, nobody objected.
Beside the above-quoted words, Maisky added something else, something
which was used later to justify the violation of the Atlantic Charter principles:
“[…] the practical application of these principles would necessarily adapt
itself to the circumstances, needs and historical peculiarities of particular
countries […]”. This adaptation began very soon. In March 1942 Churchill
was writing to Roosevelt: “The increasing gravity of the war has led me to
feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as
to deny Russia the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her. This
was the basis on which Russia acceded to the Charter”.40 Such an
interpretation was not so much a reaction to “the increasing gravity of the
war” but above all a reaction to the growing Soviet territorial claims which
intensified during the negotiations of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty (eventually
signed on May 26, 1942).
The territorial claims of the Great Powers, namely the Soviet Union, were
treated in a very special way. In his memorandum of March 15, 1943,
circulated in the Foreign Office, Orme Sargent declared: “When we
enunciated the principle that frontier questions must be reserved for the
general peace settlement, we had in mind the frontier questions of the various
lesser Allies. The position of the three Great Allies in this respect constitutes a
very different problem”.41 He was referring to the recent visit of Anthony
Eden to Washington. Before leaving, the Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs had met Ambassador Maisky on March 10, 1943, who had again
presented the Soviet point of view on the future western frontiers of the Soviet
Union (a frontier with Poland approximately along the Curzon Line, and the
Baltic States to be included in the USSR). He had also mentioned that the
“future Polish government” should be “democratic and friendly” towards the
Soviet Union, because only then could the relations between the two countries
be good.42 Those opinions were repeated by Eden in his conversation with the
39. R. Makins, September 17, 1941, PRO, FO 371/26424, C. 10410/14/62.
40. W. S. Churchill to F. D. Roosevelt, March 7, 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt.
The Complete Correspondence, vol. 1: Alliance Emerging. October 1933-November
1942, ed. by Warren F. Kimball (Princeton, 1987), p. 394.
41. Orme Sargent’s memorandum, April 15, 1943, PRO, FO 371/34568, C.
4133/258/55.
42.A. Eden’s report of the conversation with Ivan Maisky, March 10, 1943, PRO,
PREM 3/355/4, N. 1605/315/G. Maisky’s report is in: Sovetsko-angliyskiye
otnosheniya vo vremiya vielikoy oteczestvennoy voiny. 1941-1945, [the Soviet-English
THE SMALLER POWERS OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE BIG THREE
63
American President on March 15, 1943.43 Roosevelt said that “United
Kingdom, United States and USSR would have to decide at appropriate time
what was the just and reasonable solution [to the problem of frontiers] and, if
they agreed, Poland would have to accept”. The Soviets were informed about
this attitude of President Roosevelt.44
After Soviet-Polish diplomatic relations were broken in April 26, 1943
over the Katyn Massacre, the Western Powers decided that it was not an
“appropriate time” for such a solution; and nevertheless, the idea of such a
solution paved the way for further demands. And the territorial claims were
just the beginning. Questions concerning future governments of the smaller
powers of East-Central Europe, just mentioned by Maisky in his conversation
with Eden, later came back repeatedly in the negotiations between the Great
Powers. They marked the road from self-determination to subordination, on
which the smaller powers of East-Central Europe found themselves.
Relationship during the Great Patriotic War. 1941-1945], vol. 1: 1941-1943 (Moscow,
1983), p. 350 ff.
43. A. Eden’s report of this conversation in telegram (n° 1273) to W. S. Churchill,
March 16, 1943, PRO, PREM 3/355/4.
44. FO to A. Clark Kerr, Telegram n° 310, March 27, 1943, PRO, FO
371/36954,N. 1847/66.
64
Magdalena Hulas
New Conditions for the Development of Hungarian
Society Before and During the Second World War (19381945) in Comparison with Central and Eastern Europe
Péter SIPOS
The development of Hungarian society in the period of 1938-1945 was
influenced by the following new circumstances, shaped by changes in
domestic and foreign policy:
1. the significant growth of the territory and population of the country
between 1938-1945;
2.1938-1939 anti-Jewish laws in Hungary , and the Hungarian holocaust in
1944, after the German occupation;
3. the emerging economic boom as of 1938, especially industrial
development;
4. the fact that the country became a seat of war between the fall of 1944
and the spring of 1945, the Soviet occupation, and the mass exodus;
5. the reforms and other measures of the new democratic government in
1945 and in the years immediately after the war.
All these events and developments were only partly influential during the
war, but they significantly and permanently changed the living conditions of
some classes of society, and modified the structure of society afterwards.
The European political situation, especially the support of the Axis
powers, led to the reannexation of the major share of the territories that were
lost as a consequence of the 1920 Peace Treaty of Trianon. By the return of
South Upper Hungary (today South Slovakia) in November 1938 following
the First Vienna Award, the occupation of Sub-Carpathia (today Carpathian
Ukraine) in March 1939, the reannexation of Northern Transylvania following
the Second Vienna Award in August 1940, and as a result of the participation
in the armed attack against Yugoslavia in April 1941, the occupation of the
“South” (essentially Voivodina and the Baranya triangle), in two and a half
years, the territory of Hungary increased from the 93,073 km2 subsequent to
the Trianon Treaty to 171,640 km2 (84.4%), and the population grew from
8,688,319 to 13,732,352, (58.05%).1
1.Hungarian Statistical Annual 1942 (Budapest, 1944), p. 2.
66
Péter Sipos
The territorial growth resulted in important nationality changes. More than
50% of the population of the reannexed territories was not Hungarian, thus the
percentage of other nationalities within the population more than doubled
(from about 10% to 22.5%). Considering only nationalities with significant
populations, there were 1,100,532 (7.5%) Rumanians, 719,762 (4.9%)
Germans, 564,092 (3.8%) Ruthenians, 438,934 (3%) South Slavs, and
268,913 (1.8%) Slovaks living in the enlarged Hungary. The religious
composition also changed; the number of Greek Catholics and Greek
orthodox increased. The percentage of Jews did not change significantly, it
remained around 5%, but their number grew from about 400,000 to 725,000,
an increase of about 80%.2
The motherland proved to be unable to deal with these changes. This was
not only because of the fairly short time involved; as a matter of fact, these
territories were returned to the neighbouring countries in 1944-1945, and the
return was confirmed in international law by the 1947 Peace Treaty of Paris.
Although from its birth the most important aim of the counter-revolutionary
regime was revision, the years of the Hungarian regime were full of incidents
primarily due to the lack of a general project for the reintegration of the
territories that had belonged to other states for two decades, and lived under
different social, economic and political conditions.
As a result of that, not only did the nationalities suffer serious injustices,
but soon the Hungarians' undoubted and natural happiness about returning to
their home country turned into disappointment. The Hungarian state treated
the reannexed territories with suspicion and distrust; it extended the
applicability of the anti-Jewish laws and the method of dealing with the left
wing opposition to these territories as well. Additionally, the change of power
was accompanied by brutal atrocities, especially in Transylvania, on the part
of Hungary and Rumania. 100,000 Rumanians fled from North Transylvania
to South Transylvania, and 100-150,000 Hungarians moved from South
Transylvania to the reannexed territories.
Hungarian rule started everywhere with the introduction of military
administration, and even later, the influence of military leadership remained
strong on the civil administration. Civil administration was carried out in such
a way that the different positions were occupied by the members of the fastgrowing middle class of the motherland (nicknamed “parachutists” in the
returned territories), who brought with them the gentry mentality and the
antidemocratic spirit, which not only offended the nationalities, but the
Hungarians as well. The employees of the public and state administration
2. Hungarian Statistical Almanach 1942 (Budapest, 1943), p. 66.
HUNGARIAN SOCIETY (1938-1945) AND CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
67
(postmen, railway employees, civil servants, teachers, professors) were
summoned before certifying committees to determine their loyalty to the
Hungarian nation, and the licences of the craftsmen and the merchants were
revised.
The 1939 Decree (N° 2550) of the Prime Minister, providing for the
revision of the land reform carried out under the Czechoslovak Republic
which in reality meant the restoration of ownership to Hungarian landowners,
caused years of confusion and insecurity. Because of the economic interests of
the motherland, agricultural production and sales decreased in South Upper
Hungary: after all, these landowners did not profit from the economic
possibilities of the reannexed South Upper Hungary. The living conditions of
the Hungarians in this area had deteriorated to such an extent that according to
the Prime Minister, Mr. Pál Teleki, they endangered the chance of obtaining
other territories.
Military administration operated in Northern Transylvania and Székely
land (Eastern Transylvania, now Rumania) from the marching in of the
Hungarian army until November 1940. Teleki – who resigned after the
Second Vienna Award (August 1940) because, in his opinion, the military
leadership influenced politics excessively, and its activity in the reannexed
territories had been detrimental even from the Hungarian point of view –
could only mitigate the abuses slightly. He did however secure that in
Transylvania there were no loyalty certifying proceedings, and that the
revision of the Rumanian land reform be started a little more carefully, even
though it also brought about arbitrariness and confusion.
The military administration operated in the South until August 15, 1941.
Even after that date, measures against the nationalities were not rescinded.
Pursuant to a government decree, 150,000 Serbs were expelled from Bácska,
because they had settled there after December 31, 1918; this had not happened
in any other reannexed territory. After a horrible peregrination, 13,000
Székelys (csángós) whose ancestors had gone to Bukovina in the 18th
century, settled in their place. Ten villages were created for them south of
Subotica (Szabadka), mostly in the place from which the Serbs had been
expelled. Their tragic fate did not end there; in the fall of 1944, they were
forced to flee from the war, but after the Second World War, finally found a
home in South Transdanubia, mainly in the place from which the
German/Swabian population had been expelled. The Hungarian authorities
persecuted people of “bunyevác” nationality, who claimed Croat national
identity.
It was not only the nationalities, but also the Hungarians belonging to the
civil left wing and the socialist movements who suffered from the change of
power in the territories that had been returned to the Hungarian crown. The
68
Péter Sipos
free masonic lodges were banned, and in 1942 a large show trial was
organized against their members in Transylvania. Further hundreds of leftists
and communists were arrested. In the South, razzias and trials ending in
capital sentence became commonplace.
In 1942 already, part of the non-Hungarians nationalities leftists resisted
more strongly there (in the South) than anywhere else. The most flagrant of all
was the January 1942 massacre in Voivodina and in its surroundings.
The balance of the reannexation was disadvantageous and not only as
regards political power. The territorial disputes were decisive factors in the
competition of the interested countries for the patronage of the great powers –
Germany and later the Soviet Union – that dominated the region in turn.
Neither did the changes leave the society there with good memories. The
lesson of these events was that being a majority group gives many chances to
abuse minorities. And this, which is still prevalent, counters the only possible
durable solution, i.e. the idea of coexistence.
An especially tragic fate awaited the Jews both in the motherland and in
the reannexed territories in spite of the fact that their majority was devoted to
the Hungarian nationalist ideology and the revisionist aims, and supported the
Horthy regime. For historical reasons that I need not expound upon now, Jews
played a very significant role in the different sectors of the economy and in
the independent intellectual professions.
According to the 1930 census, the percentage of Jews among the selfemployed industrial population was 10% (29.7% in Budapest), among civil
servants 33.4% (40.6% in Budapest). In the commercial field, the percentage
of self-employed was 45.5% (57.1% in Budapest), among the civil servants it
was 52% (59.8% in Budapest). Among the wage earners 5.3% were Jews
(19.1% in Budapest) while among the intellectuals the percentage was 22.1%
(33.3% in Budapest), including the lawyers where the percentage was 49.2%
(55.8% in Budapest) and among engineers 30% (36.1% in Budapest). In 1935,
50.9% of the owners and managers of the big industrial companies, 41.6% of
the directors, 22.1% of the technical officers, and 38,3% of the commercial
functionaries declared themselves Jewish 3.
Act N° XV of 1938, the so-called first Anti-Jewish Act, was accepted in
May 1938. It provided that the proportion of Jews (at that time they were
defined as members of the Israelite denomination) had to be reduced to 20%
in the independent intellectual professions, as well as in bank and in industrial
and commercial companies with more than 10 employees. Act No. IV of
1939, the so-called second Anti-Jewish Act, used a race-based approach
3.Hungarian Statistical Annual 1935 (Budapest, 1936), p. 136.
HUNGARIAN SOCIETY (1938-1945) AND CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
69
(taking into account the religion of parents and grandparents) to define to
whom the regulations applied. According to this law, the proportion of Jews
had to be decreased to 6% in all areas, and the “numerus clausus” was
introduced in many sectors and professions. These Acts and other laws
opened the way to the “changing of the guards” in favour of the Christian
middle-class intellectuals and employees.
According to certain data, 26,000 jobs were opened up for Christian
applicants in the fields of industry, commerce, the credit business and
independent intellectual professions. In addition to this measure, the
regulations on state licences may have brought up the total number of
transferred jobs around 40,000 and the transferred income around 90-100
millions pengo.4 The reannexation and the growth of the military offered
favourable job possibilities for intellectuals, civil servants and military
officers of the “gentry middle-class”.
The major means for implementing the Anti-Jewish Acts was to have
Christians associated with state bureaucracy monopolize public shipping,
foreign trade and marketing of agricultural sales. In September-October 1939,
under the “extraordinary powers”, decrees were passed on the application of
the Anti-Jewish Acts to retail sales of wines and spirits, sugar manufacturing
and more generally in areas requiring state licences. Special progress was
made in agricultural trade. This completed the general process of “the
changing of the guards” in agriculture, and strengthened the position of state
bureaucracy in this field as well. The controlled economy that was introduced
gradually, after the war had broken out, exerted a similar influence.
The major beneficiaries of the Anti-Jewish Acts were the higher ranking
state bureaucrats, who penetrated the most deeply into the Jewish bourgeois
positions. The new leading capitalist group consisted mainly of high ranking
state officials, and maybe officials of Budapest, or professional politicians and
public figures who were “most closely connected with the leading
bureaucracy, the government party and the statesmen”.5
The above-mentioned measures mainly struck the lower and middle-class
Jews.
The traditional positions of the great capitalists remained essentially
untouched, but in the new sectors that emerged from war prosperity –
precision engineering, electronics and heavy chemical industry –, the
Christian upper middle-class occupied the key positions. More and more ex-
4.Hegedûs István, Az õrségváltás mérlege [The balance of the changing of the
guards] (Budapest, 1943), p. 297.
5. Új Hang, February 1948, p. 1000.
70
Péter Sipos
military officials, state officials and politicians, who did not come within the
scope of the discriminatory regulations, got on the boards of directors or the
supervisory boards of banks and industrial companies.
The final phase of driving out the Jews was deportation. In May and June
of 1944 more than 400,000 Jews from the countryside were taken mostly to
Auschwitz or to other extermination camps. In the capital, during the fall and
winter of 1944, when the Hungarian “Arrow-cross” nazis ruled, an additional
150,000 people died who had to comply to the compulsory work service. In
industry, commerce and independent intellectual professions, the annihilation
of the Jews meant a grave loss for the bourgeois middle-class. Dynasties of
shopkeepers, buyers of agricultural products, highly respected physicians’
families, as well as financiers and lawyers – who were not much liked but
indispensable in the economy – disappeared for good from the provincial
cities and villages. It was not only detrimental for the Jews; the Hungarian
economic and commercial culture also suffered a great loss.
The final social result of the above-mentioned industrial development was
an increase and structural change of the working class. Since most of this
increase came from the landless agrarian proletariat, the process resulted in a
regrouping of village and urban populations, and urbanization accelerated
perceptibly.
Between 1930 and 1943, the average annual number of industrial workers
increased from 288,000 to 391,000 (35%), and the number of workers in
mining and metallurgy increased from 41,000 to 59,000 (42%), so the
increase altogether was close to 37%. The fact that between 1929 and 1938
the increase was only 20% indicates the importance of these changes.6
The unemployed formed one of the fundamental bases for the increase.
Unemployment almost ceased to exist during the Second World War. The
employment agencies of the workers unions recorded 27,000 unemployed in
1933, and only 12,000 at the end of 1941. The state employment agencies
recorded 37,000 unemployed in 1933 and 14,000 at the end of 1941.
However, in 1941 the reason why people were unemployed was not lack of
employment, but rather that they “picked and chose” among job opportunities,
constantly looking for better wages and working conditions.7
6.Berend Iván T., Ránki György: Magyarország gyáripara a második világháború
elott és a háború idoszakában (1933-1944) [The Hungarian Manufacturing Industry
Before and During the Second World War (1933-1944)] (Budapest, 1943), p. 297.
7.Sipos Péter, Legális és illegális munkásmozgalom (Legal and Illegal Workers
Movement), Gondolat Kiadó (Budapest, 1988), p. 206.
HUNGARIAN SOCIETY (1938-1945) AND CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
71
The other important source of the increase that was also significant in
number was the jobseekers flowing from the villages to the cities, and
primarily to the capital. In 1941, the number of agricultural workers went
down to 266,000 (23%). The population of Budapest grew from 1,006,184 to
1,164,963 between 1930 and 1941.The population of other cities, with
independent self-government, increased from 774,945 to 855,349, and the
population of the Pest county including the industrial suburbs grew from
1,360,283 to 1,537,884.8
Workers who moved to the cities may have lived on worse food in their
new environment, but they had access to better health care, electricity, water
supply, and in some cases even sewerage. They could read the newspapers, go
the movies or listen to the radio regularly. In other words, the worker who
moved to the city or to the suburbs received more intellectual information,
heard news from wider sources, thus becoming altogether more informed
about the world. Because of the rapid industrial development, the new
working class settled into the outskirts of Budapest, and in many ways
preserved their links with the rural lifestyle. However the new way of life, so
different from that of peasants and village people, was decisive. It was a
change of lifestyle which started with working in the industrial community
and living together in working class districts.
Nevertheless, the gulf between the most skilled workers devoted to the
socialist traditions and the most unskilled newcomers in respect of classconsciousness, political culture and the related organization, grew wider. The
percentage of the former got smaller, although their number still exceeded
100,000. Between the second half of the 1930’s and the beginning of the
1940’s, the strength of the organization substantially decreased. In 1938,
about 9% (14% in Budapest) of the industrial supporting staff belonged to a
trade union, in 1941 this number increased to 17%, (55% in Budapest).
In the final phase of the Second World War and immediately afterwards,
the war events, the Soviet occupation, the land reform of the new democratic
system (the Temporary Government issued regulations to this effect in March
1945), and other socio-economic measures, influenced the situation of all
classes of society.
The class of big landowners, whose estates covered more than 1000
cadastral holds9, ceased to exist in 1945 after being wholly expropriated (land
and equipment). Companies and bank ownership by the tycoons remained
8.Hungarian Statistical Annual 1948 (Budapest, 1948), pp. 42-43.
9. A cadastral hold is a Hungarian square measure. 1 hold=1600 square fathom (1
square fathom=38,32 square feet).
72
Péter Sipos
substantially untouched until the end of 1947, but in fact their control over the
factories, mines and financial institutions was very limited or non-existent. At
the beginning of 1945, production went mostly to supply the Soviet army and
afterwards, reconstruction started without the owners and managers. The
majority of Jewish origin people had been sent to concentration camps in
early 1944, and the most important family – the Chorin-Weiss-Mautner – had
left the country after making a deal with the SS. Many people had fled to the
West.
The liberty of action of the owners and production managers who came
back and officially took over the management of their company was restricted
by the controlled state economy and the control institutionalized by the
workers in the factory committees.
During the inflation the political propaganda of the Party made the
“defaulters of currency regulations and the black-marketers” as well as the
“hoarders of commodities” the scapegoats. In public opinion, speculation was
considered part of commercial profit-making.
After the 1946 stabilization, the economic policy that made the
accumulation of private capital impossible became permanent.
Ownership of big capital gradually crumbled away. At the end of 1945 the
coal mines, and at the end of 1946 the six major heavy industrial companies
(Weiss Manfréd, Rimamurányi-Salgótarján, Ganz Villamosság, Ganz Gép-,
Vagon-és Hajógyár, Gyori Magyar Vagon-és Gépgyár) were appropriated by
the state. In principle it had not affected the ownership, but in fact it meant
nationalization.
The capitalist property was legally eliminated in more steps taken in a
short period of time at the end of 1947 and in the beginning of 1948. By July
1948, 91% of the coal mines, 88% of the industry and 95% of the banks were
under state ownership. In the 1944-1945 upheaval, almost the whole middleclass was ruined. Certain groups of the middle class were decimated or
disappeared as a result of the war, legal and political persecution, and the
turmoil of radical social change. Gyula Szekfû, the most prominent historian
of the period, summarized the substance of the changes as follows, in his 1947
book entitled Forradalom után [After the Revolution] : “No other rational
choice for the middle class remained but to recognize that the old times, when
the middle class was really in the middle with a leading class above and a
lower class below, had disappeared for good and could never be brought
back.”
The 1945 land reform eliminated the means of living of the medium
landowners who were the most distinguished and the wealthiest among the
traditional middle class gentry, because they had influence in the national
offices and institutions through their ruling positions in the provinces as well
HUNGARIAN SOCIETY (1938-1945) AND CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
73
as their diverse acquaintances and contacts. 99.5% of the lands covering more
than 200 cadastral holds had been divided up or became community property
with all their assets: livestock, equipment and buildings (including about
1,500 castles and mansions) as well as agricultural and industrial plants. As a
consequence of the land reform, the proportion of wealthy peasantry and
remaining landowning gentry (former big and medium landowners) within the
agrarian population decreased from 7% to 2.8%.
The state and municipal functionaries constituted the most significant part
of the middle class. For them, the events of the war caused the first big shock.
By the middle of December 1944, about 60% of the country – 35 cities out of
54 (not including Budapest), 15 county seats out of 25, 90 districts out of
150 – fell under Soviet control. As indicated previously, the territories that
had been reannexed between 1938 and 1941 were lost again. These
developments triggered two waves of flight: 70-80% of the functionaries fled
with their families from the eastern part of the country to settle in the capital
or in Transdanubia. From the reannexed territories the deluge of refugees
headed to the middle part of the country. In virtue of a government decree of
July 1945, the state and self-government civil servants' jobs did not cease to
exist, and the civil servants still received their salaries even though they were
not working anymore because their position and place no longer existed.
The number of civil servants exceeded 400,000 in 1943, 150,000 of them
might have been functionaries. The apparatus had not decreased substantially
by 1945, and its size was far bigger than in the 1937-1938 budgetary year.
There had been two politically motivated attempts at downsizing. In 1945,
during the certifying process 3.1% of the civil servants were dismissed.
During the “B list” campaign in 1946, about 40-50,000 people lost their jobs,
including 20-25,000 civil servants.
The 1949 census reflected the diminished social importance of the middle
class. In 1941, it was composed of 636,700 wage-earners and their families,
that is 10.1% of the total population; however in 1949, 627,300 wage-earners
and their families, that is 6.8% of the population, joined the share of the
population who were not wage-earners or small producers (people with a land
covering more than 25 holds, craftsmen with employees, other people living
independently off their property, etc.).10 The structure of Hungarian society
had changed substantially in the 1940’s. The former groups, who were at the
top of the hierarchy with respect to property and income, disappeared, the
10.Petõ Iván, Szakács Sándor, A hazai gazdaság négy évtizedének a története
1945-1985 [History of the Four Decades of the Hungarian Economy 1945-1985], t. 1.
1945-1968, p. 206. Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó (Budapest, 1985), pp. 144-145.
74
Péter Sipos
middle classes became weaker, and the number of destitute village people
decreased significantly.
The Second World War caused significant social changes not only in
Hungary, but in other Central Eastern European countries as well. Just as in
Hungary, land reform was the most important development in Poland and
Czechoslovakia. Similarly to Hungary, the agricultural situation changed
radically in Poland where additionally the land reform was accompanied by
changes of territorial boundaries and population. The resettled population
from the territories that had become part of the Soviet Union was established
in the areas that had been annexed to Poland from Germany. As a result of the
Polish land reform, all lands in German ownership and all estates covering
more than 100 hectares, regardless of their owner's nationality, had been
expropriated. The change in property concerned 20% of the country’s
territory, and 788,000 new farms were created on 13.8 million hectares of
expropriated property.
In Czechoslovakia the lands of the German and Hungarian populations
who had been declared the “collective enemy” were expropriated in 1945. In
1947 an estate could not cover more than 150 hectares, in 1948 the maximum
acreage was reduced to 50 hectares.
There had also been politically motivated land reforms in the Balkan
countries where peasant farms dominated as a result of a land reform after the
First World War, but it was not significant since it concerned less than 10% of
the territory.
Expropriation had been carried out everywhere in the industrial and bank
sectors between 1944-1948. It was fastest and most massive in Yugoslavia,
but the other countries had been just as radical.
The radical changes in the most important sectors of the economy had
fundamentally changed the structure of the society in every country in the
region.
Judicial Crimes as an Instrument of Internal Warfare and
Subject of Post-War Justice in Austria:
a Comparison of WWI and II
Hans HAUTMANN
Claudia KURETSIDIS-HAIDER
The history of Austria in the twentieth century demonstrates a line of
continuity that has hardly been considered by historians of the subject
hitherto, and is, to all intents and purposes, also absent from the consciousness
of the general public. The fact is that there was not only a dictatorship in
Austria in the years 1939-1945 under the NS-Regime, but also as early as
1914-1917 under the Habsburg Monarchy, and this latter was a dictatorship
that was far more distinctive than the war regulations of its ally, the German
Empire. Additionally, during the First World War in the Austrian half of the
empire (Österreichische Reichshälfte), the military judiciary formed the main
instrument of repression of the “enemies of the state”, a practice which in
many ways anticipated the judicial terror of the NS-Regime. This was the case
because the Germans in power in Austria-Hungary saw themselves confronted
with a cardinal problem such as had been unknown in Wilhelminian
Germany, but which resembled Hitler’s Germany in WWII in one
fundamental way. This involved the problem of politically controlling and
oppressing the national tendencies of millions of people, especially Slavs,
who were seen to be disloyal and, moreover, inferior. Under the conditions of
an imperialist war and imperialist rule, with imperialist ideology involving a
racist and Darwinian world view, the only possible way to do this was with
the use of naked violence.
One of the instruments of “internal warfare” was the judiciary, and it is to
this that we now devote our attention. In both wars, even nationals were not
free from judicial threat if they were not prepared to submit to the
requirements of the “national community”.
There was hardly any difference between the intention behind the
emergency and exceptional law apparatus of the Habsburg Empire and the
NS-Regime, and that of other states. Every state had regulations that allowed
the government to declare a state of emergency and to suspend the
constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens in the case of unrest or war.
There was, however, a new aspect to this in the NS-State, because the internal
dictatorship was established in peacetime, as soon as Hitler came to power,
and the state of emergency was retained until the very last day of the Third
76
Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
Reich. But Austria-Hungary also stood out during the First World War due to
a number of distinctive features: nowhere else was such a vast range of state
of emergency regulations available to those in power. Nowhere else was this
apparatus put to such extensive use before 1914. And nowhere else were such
wide discretionary powers conferred on the regime and the judiciary to enable
them to enjoy an effectively arbitrary authority with an outwardly legal
appearance, but which left hardly anything of the express statutory limits.
I
The instruments were:
1) Paragraph 14 of the Constitution of 1867.1 The Basic Law of State of 21
December 1867 conferred the right to issue emergency decrees, as per
paragraph14. With the countersignature of the emperor, the government could
enact regulations with provisional legal power. Emergency measures of this
type were only permissible when “the urgent necessity for such arrangements,
for which, according to the Constitution, the consent of the National Council
is required, arises at a time when this council is not in session”.2 In the last
decades of the Habsburg Empire, paragraph14 turned into more and more of a
“dictatorship paragraph”3, which was aggressively employed in order to get
rid of the inconvenience of the parliamentary legislative procedures. It was
also a way of avoiding the opposition, delays and aggravations of Parliament.
It was abused in such a way that it became the crucial turning point for the
Austrian government and, at the outbreak of war in 1914, it was the most
important device in the formation of the internal dictatorship.
2) The Suspension Law (Suspensionsgesetz) of 5 May 1869. It provided
that: a) in the case of war, b) when armed conflict is imminent and c) if there
is internal unrest or d) “when acts of high treason or other examples of
subversive behaviour which threaten the Constitution or personal safety are
revealed” then the regulations of article 8 (freedom of the individual); article 9
(inviolable right of a householder to forbid entrance or demand that someone
leaves); article 10 (privacy of post); article 12 (right to hold meetings and
form clubs); and article 13 (right to free speech, and freedom of the press) of
1.“Reichsgesetzblatt für die im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder”
(hereafter, RGBl.), 1867, n° 141.
2.Ibid.
3.Joseph Redlich, Österreichische Regierung und Verwaltung im Weltkriege
(Vienna, 1925), p. 113.
POST-WAR JUSTICE IN AUSTRIA : WW1 & WW2, A COMPARISON
77
the Basic Law of State concerning the general rights of citizens, could be
temporarily and locally, completely or in part suspended.4
3) The law of 23 May 1873 concerning the suspension of the right to jury
trial. According to this, the effect of a jury’s decision could be overruled in a
particular part of the national territory “when facts have emerged which make
this appear necessary in order to safeguard the impartial and independent
administration of justice”.5 In cases where the crime could carry a sentence of
death or more than five years imprisonment, groups of six judges had to
decide upon the verdict (Ausnahmegericht [exception court]). No other
country in the world recognised such a measure that made it a simple exercise
for the government to remove the jury as soon as their verdict was or
threatened to become unsuitable.
4) The provision of the Military Criminal Code whereby, in the event of
war, if there is “a crime against the state army” (inducing violation of the
military service obligation; encouraging desertion, espionage or enemy
activity), all persons, including civilians, were subject to military
jurisdiction.6
5) The War Performance Law (Kriegsleistungsgesetz) of 26 December
1912. This concerned primarily the workers in the weapons and munitions
factories, the coal-mining and metal-processing industries, and generally all
businesses that produced any form of article needed by the army and the navy.
Any of these businesses could be appropriated by the army administration and
placed under its control. In the case of war, these firms’ staff, numbered in
their hundreds of thousands, became subject to military disciplinary authority
and, for grave offences, military criminal proceedings.
II
On 25 July 1914, the day Serbia’s 48 hour ultimatum ran out, nineteen
paragraph 14 regulations came into force, which established a state of
dictatorship in the Austrian half of the empire. Of these the ones that are
particularly relevant to this essay comprise:
1) The promulgation of the Suspension Law. This saw the revocation of
the articles of the constitution mentioned above. They could now be revoked
not only “locally”, as is stated in the legal text, but in all kingdoms and
4.RGBl. 1869, n° 66.
5.RGBl. 1873, n° 120.
6.Ferdinand Schmid, Das Heeresrecht der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie
(Vienna/Leipzig, 1903), pp. 569f.
78
Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
provinces in the Austrian half of the empire represented in the National
Council.7
2) Paragraph 14 of the imperial decree concerning the subordination of
civilians to military jurisdiction in the entire Austrian half of the empire.
Criminal proceedings against all civilians were transferred to the military
court (Landwehrgericht) in the case of the following crimes: high treason,
offence against the sovereign or one of his attendants, disturbing the peace,
rebellion and revolution, amongst others. The military court still had to
operate within the bounds of the general criminal law, but the procedure was
that of the military criminal law.8
3) Paragraph 14 regulation in relation to the military criminal procedure of
1912. This subordinates all civilians in the entire Austrian half of the empire
to military jurisdiction for the punishment of actions such as inducing or
aiding violation of sworn military service obligation, espionage, or other
enemy activities.9
4) The regulation of 25 July 1914 which suspended jury trial in the
kingdom of Dalmatia for the period of one year.10 This was extended to
Galicia, Bukowina, Cracow and the local administrative district of Teschen in
Silesia and Neutitschein in North Moravia on 31 July 1914.11 On 29 August
1914, this decree came into force for the whole Austrian half of the empire.12
This suspension formed one of the premises for the transfer of all quasipolitical offences from civilian to military jurisdiction. It was extended for a
year in 1915 and 1916 according to paragraph14, an act which was nothing
less than a flagrant and open breach of the law.
5) Paragraph 14 of the imperial decree. This granted the high commanders
of the armed forces in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Dalmatia the authority “to
preserve the military interests in the area of political administration [...] by
issuing decrees, giving orders and enforcing observance of these”.13 This
authority was extended to Galicia, Bukovina, Cracow, Silesia and North
Moravia on 31 July 191414, and after Italy entered the war on 8 May 1915, it
was also enforced in Tyrol, Vorarlberg, Salzburg, Carinthia, Styria, Krain,
7.RGBl. 1914, n° 158.
8.RGBl. 1914, n° 156.
9.RGBl. 1914, n° 164.
10.RGBl. 1914, n° 163.
11.RGBl. 1914, n° 189.
12.RGBl. 1914, n° 228.
13.RGBl. 1914, n° 153.
14.RGBl. 1914, n° 186.
POST-WAR JUSTICE IN AUSTRIA : WW1 & WW2, A COMPARISON
79
Istrien, Trieste, Görz and Gradisca.15 Thus, for most of the territories in the
Austrian half of the empire “the legal existence of a civil government and civil
administration was as good as abolished” and the civil administration was
converted into a military one.16 Henceforth, the governors, district chief
officers, police authorities and local councils were obliged “to follow exactly
the regulations and execute the orders from the high commanders”.17 One of
the consequences of this was that in the districts named, the authority to
declare a martial law was transferred to the army commanders.
6) The decree of 25 July 1914. According to this the war performance law
of 1912 was put into effect. From then on, members of staff, in industries
which were deemed important for the war effort, had to follow all the military
manager’s orders; they were obliged to remain in their employment (giving
notice or changing jobs was not possible); contract terms concerning working
hours, breaks, Sundays as a day of rest, etc., ceased to be enforced; salary
levels were regulated by decree; strikes were forbidden; and most importantly,
the workers were henceforth subject to military criminal and disciplinary
authority.18
III
Two principles are apparent from the various regulations of 25 July 1914.
The first was the transfer of all political offences from civil to military
jurisdiction, so that they could be more strictly punished than previously.19
The other was the transfer of a civil public authority to an all encompassing
military one. Thus, July 25 1914 marked the onset of a new quality of rule in
Austria. On that date the dictatorship of the army supreme command started to
be truly effective. The military caste was the most reliable agent of loyalty to
the Habsburg state. By this measure it was able to give the state outward
strength and internal stability by gagging rigorously the political and social
rights of citizens. The severity and brutality with which the emergency war
decrees were enforced, led to the most dreadful excesses by the military
against the civilian population, and represented more than a temporary
aberration. They were rather the logical consequence of the internal insecurity
15.RGBl. 1915, n° 133.
16.J. Redlich, op. cit., p. 118.
17.RGBl. 1914, n° 153.
18.Richard Riedl, Die Industrie Österreichs während des Krieges (Vienna, 1932),
pp. 10f.
19.Franz Exner, Krieg und Kriminalität in Österreich (Vienna, 1927), p. 9.
80
Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
and the repressive character of the Habsburg monarchy. The monarchy could
only imagine one method of guaranteeing the continuance of the empire i.e.
by giving dictatorial power to the military. It also preferred a system of rules
willing to use war as an instrument of revenge against the opposition or
potentially disloyal movements.
Let us look again into this and sum up the regulations of the legal wartime
apparatus which were put into effect and where.
In the entire Austrian half of the empire, all newspapers and pamphlets
were subject to military censorship and could be completely forbidden;
undesirable clubs could be dissolved; no-one had the right of assembly any
longer; letters could be opened and confiscated; houses could be searched and
individuals could be arrested without the permission of a judge; suspects
could be expelled from their district or forced to remain there unless they
received official permission to leave.
In the entire Austrian half of the empire, all political offences could be
judged by the military court according to the military criminal procedure.
In the entire Austrian half of the empire, jury trial was suspended and
replaced by “exceptional courts”, which punished only the more “general”
serious civil crimes (murder, robbery, manslaughter, etc.) – in so far as they
were not committed against members of the military.
In the entire Austrian half of the empire, staffs of factories, deemed
important for the wartime economy by the wartime performance law, were
subject to military criminal and disciplinary authority.
Moreover, for part of the Austrian half of the empire (the larger share of
the state territories since May 1915), the army commander in charge could
impose regulations, issue orders and ensure that the civil authorities
implement them “so as to preserve military interests”. The civil government
and civil authorities in the named areas had absolutely no authority or control
rights in respect of criminal jurisdiction. The army commander was the
highest judicial authority and could promulgate special martial law
(Standrecht) for all crimes which brought the civilian before the military
court. Under this martial law, the sole alternative was either the death
sentence or acquittal. This meant for example that one could be executed for
“disturbing the peace” (paragraph 65 of criminal code) – a crime for which the
military courts, in the so-called Hinterland, could only pronounce a maximum
sentence of five years imprisonment
POST-WAR JUSTICE IN AUSTRIA : WW1 & WW2, A COMPARISON
81
IV
In the 1914-1917 period, the practices of the Austro-Hungarian military
already amounted to the criteria of “war crimes” and “crimes against
humanity”. This hypothesis is not only supported by the fact that 30 000
Ruthenes and 300 000 Serbs were shot or hanged in the summer and autumn
of 1914; that tens of thousands of “political suspects” (Ruthenes, Serbs and
Italians) were deported to detention camps; that hostages were taken and
killed in the areas of Serbia, Montenegro and Albania occupied by the
imperial army; and that hundreds of thousands of imperial army soldiers were
subject to court martial for self injury, cowardice in the face of the enemy,
refusal to obey and mutiny, but also that:
Ten members of the Austrian National Council (six Czechs, two Ruthenes,
a Slovenian and an Italian), whose immunity was lifted at the beginning of the
war, were put on military trial for high treason and sentenced to death. (None
of the sentences was carried out because after Emperor Karl’s accession to the
throne, a different course was adopted for domestic policies and in 1917 all
political offenders were granted amnesty).
Many thousand Czechs, Ruthenes, Serbs, Slovenes, Italians and German
Austrians were condemned to death by military tribunals for being enemies of
the state and executed. Most of these proceedings were highly questionable
and can be considered as “judicial murders”.
Thousands were also given long imprisonment sentences; hundreds of
these offenders died in prisons, after suffering the frightful conditions of the
military penal institutions of Theresienstadt and Möllersdorf.
V
These war crimes and crimes against humanity were never really reviewed
after 1918 – a fact that remains true to this day. After 1918 (as was the case
after 1945), there was a process of collective suppression in Austria in respect
of its misdeeds. It went unnoticed (and is still today) that the young Republic,
under the ægis of social democracy – the ruling power at the time – did try to
resist this tendency and take action against those guilty. On 19 December
1918, the provisional German-Austrian National Assembly passed a law “to
establish and prosecute the military’s violation of duty during the war”.20 A
commission was appointed “to ascertain military violations of duty in the
war”, and the people were called upon to make such cases known so that the
20.“Staatsgesetzblatt für den Staat Deutschösterreich” (hereafter, StGBl.) 1918, n°
172.
82
Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
culprits could be put on trial. The results of the commission are in files in the
Austrian State Archive, and detailed reports exist in the enclosures of the
stenographic protocols of the National Assembly, all of which offer historical
scholarship extensive research material.
The
success
of
the
“Violation
of
Duty
Commission”
(Pflichtverletzungskommission) was rather modest. Only 484 cases were
registered; of these, 325 were deemed “unsuitable” and the rest were
transferred to the public prosecutor’s office. Two of these were subject to
prosecution, and both led to acquittal.
There were two causes of this situation: on the one hand, it was a major
error to construct only one investigative commission which had no authority
to arraign the perpetrator and carry out the trial. The public prosecutor’s office
and the courts, where the personnel’s mentality had not changed since the
time of the monarchy, showed no interest in such proceedings. Indeed, they
openly sabotaged them out of political and ideological sympathy for the
culprits. On the other hand, it was an illusion to try to deal with this from
“below”. The State should have taken the matter vigorously in hand and been
active with special laws and tribunals.
A further fact, which renders the whole matter completely farcical: articles
173 to 176 of the Saint-Germain Peace Treaty lay down the demand that
Austria should surrender to the victorious powers people who “acted against
the laws and customs of the war” so that they could be tried before a military
court. Although Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Italy addressed Austria with
such a list of war criminals (which included the army high commander,
Archduke Friedrich; the generals, Archduke Eugen, Archduke Joseph,
Kövesz, Potiorek, Lütgendorf and Krauß; Colonel Kerchnawe, as staff leader
for the military governor in occupied Serbia, and the commanders of
Thalerhof, Theresienstadt and Möllersdorf, etc.), there was not a single
extradition.
VI
The situation after the end of World War II was different. According to
article 6, paragraph c, of the statute of the International Military Court in
Nuremberg, any crime against “a civilian population” was a crime against
humanity. Without a doubt, this included the involvement of the NS-State
judicial apparatus in the intimidation and terrorisation in Germany, Austria
and other occupied territories. Whoever opposed outright war or the outright
claim to power of the NS-State, whether by active resistance, unconsciously
by thoughtless remarks or by listening to foreign radio broadcasts etc., was
subject to ruthless retribution – using methods cloaked by the supposed “rule
POST-WAR JUSTICE IN AUSTRIA : WW1 & WW2, A COMPARISON
83
of law”. In this way outright war was also waged internally. The “legal
foundation” of the NS-State was the “national racial idea” and the national
community which was organised according to the so-called “Führerprinciple”. Only those who were of “aryan” or at least “related blood” could
belong to the national community; they and only they were entitled to legal
equality.21
As the fight against the “internal enemy of the state and the people” was
declared a purely political question, the state of emergency could be
indiscriminately used against all real and supposed opponents of National
Socialism. Law was suspended in this political sphere. There were no general
norms. Instead, measures were geared towards each individual case.22
VII
The fight on the “internal front” began immediately after the National
Socialists seized power in 1933 pursuant to the “president of the Reich’s
decree to fend off malicious attacks on the national government” of 21 March
1933.23 This was superseded by the “law to combat malicious attacks on the
State and Party of 20 December 1934 (Heimtückegesetz).24 These proved to
be, in the words of Bernward Dörner, “all purpose weapons” against criticism
in everyday situations, and they became the most important criminal law
norms used to suppress the daily exchange of information and opinions.25
The judicial apparatus contributed considerably to the fight against the
“internal enemy”, as the Reichstag’s decree (Reichstagsbrandverordnung)26,
which was originally to be used only to “ward off communist acts of violence
endangering the state”, was gradually expanded to include non-communist
groups and individuals. In this way, genuine and supposed opponents of the
21.It is not the aim of this essay to consider the gradual loss of rights and
dehumanisation of the Jewish community, which anticipated their total eradication and
destruction.
22.See: Ernst Fraenkel, Der Doppelstaat, Recht und Justiz im ‘Dritten Reich’
(Frankfurt /Main), 1984, pp. 21 and 26-87.
23.RGBl. 1933, p. 135.
24.RGBl. 1934, p. 1269.
25.Bernward Dörner, “Heimtück”’. Das Gesetz als Waffe. Kontrolle,
Abschreckung und Verfolgung in Deutschland 1933-1945 (Paderborn/Munich/ Zurich,
1998), p. 10.
26.“Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat” (28. 2.
1933), RGBl. 1933, p. 83.
84
Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
NS-Regime were automatically labelled communists, and all “enemies” of
National Socialism faced unrestrained prosecution.
“The mechanisms for carrying out” the restrictive measures against the
internal enemy were the “People’s Court” (Volksgerichtshof or VGH), which
was set up specifically for this purpose; “Special Courts” (Sondergerichte);
and the “Court of Appeal” (Oberlandesgerichte), which were part of the
regular legal jurisdiction.
The “Special Courts” exhibited a line of tradition going back to the
Weimar Republic, although they were “only” established on the “basis of
emergency regulations”27, the need for which became obvious as the tensions
and class conflicts within the German population erupted in the form of
political street fighting. At first, the “Special Courts” were only responsible
for passing judgement on political offences concerning the “Reichstag’s Fire
Decree” and the “malicious attacks decree” (for example, high treason, arson
or attacking a member of the Reich’s government). Apart from that, they only
had jurisdiction in areas not covered by the “Court of Appeal» or the Supreme
Court. At this stage, the Nazi “Special Courts” did not really differ from those
of the Weimar Republic in respect of their composition and methods of
procedure. What was new were the criteria for the choice of judges; the most
important factors here were Party membership and political reliability. There
is also the fact that the “Special Courts” remained in existence throughout
National Socialist rule, even though they had initially been set up as a
temporary measure. The reason for this was that the jurisdiction of the
“Special Courts”, which had originally only encompassed a few political
offences, was constantly being extended, especially after the outbreak of war.
Due to the swiftness with which trials reached their conclusion and the brutal
and heavy punishments, the official term “internal front court martial” was
soon being used. Thus, the “Special Court” procedures moved to the centre of
criminal justice in the war. They were exclusively called upon to act as the
“tank force of the administration of justice” and were decisive in the “certain
destruction of the known enemy”.28
27.See: Wilhelm Crohne, Bedeutung und Aufgaben der Sondergerichte, in:
Deutsche Justiz 95, 1933, p. 384, quoted in: Dörner, op. cit., p. 36.
28.According to Roland Freisler, then Secretary of state in the Reich’s Ministry of
Justice, on the occasion of a conference on 24 October 1939. Quoted in: Christian
Pippan, Justiz ohne Ethik. Die Rolle der Justiz im nationalsozialistischen
Herrschaftssystem und die frühen Deutungen Ernst Fraenkels in “Der Doppelstaat”
(Dipl. Graz, 1993), p. 83.
POST-WAR JUSTICE IN AUSTRIA : WW1 & WW2, A COMPARISON
85
The NSDAP regarded the verdicts delivered at the so-called “Reichstag’s
Fire Trial” (Reichstagsbrandprozeß) as being rather too mild, and thus used
this as an opportunity to establish a “People’s Court”. This was to adjudicate
in cases of high treason offences, as well as several other political offences.
Like the “Special Courts”, the jurisdiction of the VGH was extended, on the
grounds of “war need”, as the procedures against the “internal” enemy
became stricter: besides the cases of high treason, it was now also responsible
for the prosecution of “remarks undermining military strength” and “military
service evasion”.29
Ralph Angermund proved that regular legal procedures also operated in a
substantial share of prosecutions against opponents of the regime, as well as
the “Special Courts” and the VGH. This was because the VGH transferred a
lot of trials to the “Court of Appeal”, a not insignificant reason for this being
overwork.30
VIII
Unlike what happened in Germany, there was no direct transition from a
democratic state and form of government to dictatorship in Austria. Instead,
the National Socialist seizure of power succeeded an authoritarian led
Corporative State in which justice acted as the instrument of repression of
political opponents. The reason why the judges, in both the Austrian fascist
Corporative State (Ständestaat) and the NS-State, functioned as the lackeys of
an unjust and class biased legal system, originated from their political and
social orientation. Most of them were from middle class backgrounds and
adhered to the model of the ruling classes. These judges collected
“experiences”, particularly from the judicial disagreements with the socialist
and communist opponents of the Corporative State. Thus, it is possible to
trace the line of tradition from the Austrian fascist Corporative State to the
National Socialist State, above all with regard to the police apparatus, the ties
to substantive laws and the severity of punishments imposed. However, there
were considerable differences of a qualitative nature and in respect of the
number of prosecutions.
The National Socialist dictatorship did not instantaneously abolish the
criminal code in force in Germany, but undermined and “amended” it with
29.For recent figures see: Klaus Marxen, Das Volk und sein Gerichtshof. Eine
Studie zum nationalsozialistischen Gerichtshof (Frankfurt/Main, 1994).
30.Ralph Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft 1919-1945. Krisenerfahrung,
Illusion, politische Rechtssprechung (Frankfurt/Main, 1990), p. 134.
86
Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
special regulations. This process had not been concluded by the time of
Austria’s annexation. The National Socialist rulers were similarly careful with
their reorganisation of the Austrian legal system, which they did at the same
time as cleansing the Austrian judicial authorities of “foreign races and
politically unreliable elements”. One of the reasons they proceeded so
hesitantly with the adjustment of Austrian to German law was that Austrian
law was seen to be in some ways “more modern” than the German criminal
code in force. Above all, Austrian Nazi jurists insisted that the “valuable
parts” of Austrian law must be retained in the legal code for the whole “Third
Reich”. The aforementioned experiences gained from the Austrian fascist
Corporative State were one of the causes of argument during the
implementation of justice in the fight against “Marxism”. A “Complete
Reform” was to be developed for the whole German Reich with the assistance
of Count Wenzeslaus Gleispach 31, a Viennese penologist who had been called
to Berlin in 1933. However, this could not go ahead due to the outbreak of
war, and it is for this reason that parts of Austrian criminal law remained in
effect until 1945, although it became subject to political fragmentation as
“National Socialist reforms” were introduced.32
Amongst those reforms instigated before the outbreak of war, were33:
* Decree of 20 June 1938 concerning high treason 34;
* Decree of 23 January 1939 concerning the provisions of the “Law to
Combat Malicious Attacks on the State and Party” (Heimtückegesetz) 35, and
simultaneously, the German Reich’s provisions relating to punishment of
clergymen for defeatist remarks; maliciously reviling or disparaging the
Reich, the armed forces, or national flags; maliciously reviling or disparaging
the NSDAP, its structures and national emblem.
And amongst those instigated after the outbreak of war:
31.See: Eduard Rabofsky, Gerhard Oberkofler, Verborgene Wurzeln der NS-Justiz.
Strafrechtliche Rüstung für zwei Weltkriege (Vienna/Munich/Zurich, 1985).
32.See: Oliver Rathkolb, “ ‘Transformation’ der Strafprozeßordnung und das
nationalsozialistische Regime in Österreich 1938-1940”, in: Erika Weinzierl, Oliver
Rathkolb, Rudolf G. Ardelt, Siegfried Mattl (ed.) Justiz und Zeitgeschichte.
Symposiumsbeiträge von 1976-1993, vol. 2 (Vienna, 1995), pp. 425-439.
33.See:
Herbert
Loebenstein,
“Strafrecht
und
Strafenpraxis
im
nationalsozialistischen Staat”, in: U. Davy, H. Fuchs, H. Hofmeister, J. Marte,
I. Reiter (ed.), Nationalsozialismus und Recht. Rechtssetzung und Rechtswissenschaft
in Österreich unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus, Vienna, 1990, pp. 202205.
34.RGBl. 1938, p. 640.
35.RGBl. 1939, p. 80.
POST-WAR JUSTICE IN AUSTRIA : WW1 & WW2, A COMPARISON
87
* Decree of 5 September 1939 against “Harming the People”
(Volksschädlingsverordnung)36;
* Decree of 1 September 1939 concerning “the Broadcasting law”
(Rundfunkgesetz).37
With the decree of 20 June 1938, the jurisdiction of the VGH was extended
to include Austria. Its duties predominantly involved high treason and treason
trials, and later serious cases of the undermining of military strength.
Henceforth, German Reich regulations also applied to Austrian defendants.
They were either transferred to the seat of the VGH in Berlin, or else an
“itinerant senate” was sent from Berlin to Vienna. In order to relieve the seat
in Berlin, certain political offences could be transferred to the “Court of
Appeal” in Vienna. In this way, a “Special Senate” was established at the
“Court of Appeal” in Vienna from 1 April 1939 to the end of the Nazi-regime
in 1945, and its jurisdiction was temporarily limited to issues of high treason.
However, in a regulation of 18 January 194338, its authority was expanded to
include espionage, undermining military strength and military service evasion.
The Senate consisted of professional judges who served on the committee of
the “Court of Appeal” in Vienna.39
The “Special Courts”40 were introduced in Austria by the decree of
1 September 193941. They administered justice in senates with three
professional judges, met at the district court of first instance and were
responsible for all “less serious” offences, such as violation of the “law to
combat malicious attacks on the State and Party”, “broadcasting offences”,
“offences that could harm the people” and so-called “violent crimes”42.
In this way, the “internal” front was also established in Austria – with the
help of Austrian jurists – and this was supposed to help gain victory in the
outright war on the external front. Thorough research into the activities of the
“special senate” at the “Courts of Appeal” and the VGH is still lacking in
36.RGBl. 1939, p. 1679.
37.RGBl. 1939, p. 1683.
38.RGBl. 1943, p. 72.
39.See: Oliver Rathkolb, “Anmerkungen zur EntNazifizierungsdebatte über
Richter und Staatsanwälte in Wien 1945-1946 vor dem Hintergrund politischer
Obsessionen und Pressionen während des Nationalsozialismus”, in: Justiz und
Zeitgeschichte, op. cit., pp. 83f.
40.See: Roland Staudinger, Politische Justiz. Die Tiroler Sondergerichtsbarkeit im
Dritten Reich am Beispiel des Gesetzes gegen heimtückische Angriffe auf Partei und
Staat (Schwaz, 1994).
41.RGBl. 1939, p. 1658.
42.See: Loebenstein, op. cit., p. 206.
88
Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
Austrian historical scholarship. These gaps are going to be filled by a joint
German/Austrian research project called “Political Criminal Justice in Austria
and Hessen”, by the University of Marburg/Lahn (Germany) and the Austrian
Resistance Archive in Vienna.
IX
On the 31 July 1945 the provisional government in Vienna re-established
43
Austrian criminal law and law of criminal procedures. Special courts – the
so-called “People’s Courts” (Volksgerichte) – were created on the basis of the
“Nazi banning law” (Verbotsgesetz or VG) of 8 May 194544 and the War
Criminals Law of 26 June 1945 (Kriegsverbrechergesetz or KVG) 45 to punish
Nazi crimes.46 Those responsible for the development and execution of Nazi
atrocities were expected to answer to these People’s Courts – which should
not be mistaken for the Nazi “People’s Court” (VGH). However, the number
of Austrian judges and public prosecutors brought to account before Austrian
courts was low, and in no way did the sentences delivered correspond to the
crimes of which the judicial apparatus in the unlawful National Socialist state
was guilty. This is illustrated by the following case studies, although it is still
not known how many proceedings against members of the Austrian judicial
apparatus really took place.
Case 1: of the “People’s Court” in Vienna against Dr. Viktor Reindl,
47
Dr. Johann Karl Stich, et al. [LG Vienna Vg 12 Vr 1181/45].
. Dr. Victor Reindl became judge in the Vienna district “Court of Appeal”
in 1930. In June 1935 he became public prosecutor in Vienna. In March 1940
43. StGBl. n° 105/45
44 .StGBl., n° 13/1945.
45.StGBl., n° 32/1945.
46.The Austrian “People’s Court” was a special form of jurisdiction, and only put
into practice by specially appointed senators of the district court. They were set up in
Vienna and, from 1946, in Graz, Linz and Innsbruck. They were composed of two
professional judges and three lay assessors. The “People’s Court” was abolished not
long after the conclusion of the state treaty concerning the restoration of full Austrian
sovereignty on 15 May 1955. During the ten years of its existence, proceedings were
initiated against 136,829 people who were suspected of crimes according to the KVG
and the VG. Charges were brought against 28,148 people, sentence was passed on 13
607 of them, 30 of the 43 death sentences were carried out. See: Karl Marschall,
Volksgerichtsbarkeit und Verfolgung von nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen in
Österreich. Published by the Ministery of Justice (Vienna, 1987, 2nd edition).
47. LG is the short form of the District Court – Landesgericht).
POST-WAR JUSTICE IN AUSTRIA : WW1 & WW2, A COMPARISON
89
he was named president of the Regional Courts in the district of Vienna. In
1941 he was appointed to the “Court of Appeal” in Vienna in a senate for
matters of high treason. On 13 April 1945, Reindl was chairman at a special
court martial (Standgericht) in St. Pölten (Lower Austria). Twelve of the 13
accused were sentenced to death and immediately executed – for which he
was put to trial on 23 February 1948. His activities in the “Court of Appeal”
were not the subject of this trial.
. Dr. Johann Karl Stich was public prosecutor in Krems (Lower Austria) in
the 1930s. Disciplinary law inquiries pertaining to his National Socialist
activities were instigated in 1934, as a result of which he was sentenced to
three weeks imprisonment and relieved of his official duties. Shortly after the
annexation of Austria in 1938, Stich was entrusted with the management of
the public prosecutor’s office in Vienna and on 1 April 1939 he was appointed
head of public prosecutions at the “Court of Appeal” in Vienna as AttorneyGeneral.
He was also a member of the above mentioned “Standgericht” for which
he was charged in the same way as Reindl, whereas his activity as AttorneyGeneral was not the subject of this trial.
The main hearing of the accused took place from 10 May to 18 June 1948.
Reindl was given a prison sentence of five years. Stich was sentenced to eight
years imprisonment. He was only found guilty of having been a member of
the illegal NSDAP before 1938. It was decided that both should forfeit their
assets.
Case 2: of the “People’s Court” in Vienna against Dr. Friedrich Russegger
[LG Vienna Vg 1f Vr 2731/48]:
. In the thirties Dr. Friedrich Russegger was a member of a district court
of Steyr (Upper Austria) and later on at the district court in Vienna. He
became chairman of a senate of the “Court of Appeal” in Vienna upon its
establishment. He also had this function at the trial of eight men who were
accused of illegal activities in the Austrian Communist Party. Five of the
defendants were sentenced to death by Russegger. On 4 June 1947 he was
sentenced to 18 months imprisonment because he had been chairman of this
trial. He had to forfeit his assets as well. The Supreme Court revoked the
sentence on 13 March 1948 and sent the case back to the same “People’s
Court” for re-trial. In the second main hearing, Russegger was acquitted on 21
May 1948.
Case 3: of the “People’s Court” in Vienna against Dr. Alois Bernwieser
[LG Vienna Vg 12d Vr 2360/45]:
. Dr. Alois Bernwieser was a solicitor. In 1932-1933 he was regional
manager of the “German Association of Jurists”. In 1933-1934 he was
imprisoned in the internment camp in Wöllerdorf for illegal Nazi activities.
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Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
He fled to Germany immediately after the Austrian Nazi putsch in July 1934.
He acquired German citizenship and worked at the police headquarters in
Berlin. In 1937 he became a senior-official in the Reich’s Ministry of the
Interior. After the Anschluß he returned to Austria and re-opened his legal
practice in Vienna. Bernwieser became permanent defence council at the
“VGH”. Amongst others, he defended Father Karl Roman Scholz, leader of
the Austrian Freedom Movement, who was sentenced to death by the “VGH”
and executed. On 12 November 1948. Bernwieser was sentenced to two years
and three months only because of having been a member of the illegal
NSDAP.
Case 4: of the “People’s Court” in Vienna against Dr. Alois Wotawa [LG
Vienna Vg 8a Vr 3058/46]:
. Dr. Alois Wotawa was appointed chairman of a senate for the “Special
Court” in Vienna in 1940. Although he confessed to having sentenced a priest
to death, he was freed from remand in 1947 and the proceedings against him
were discontinued on 27 October 1948 as adequate grounds for prosecution
could not be established by the court.
Case 5: of the “People’s Court” in Vienna against Dr. Gustav Tamele [LG
Vienna Vg 11 Vr 1183/45]:
. Dr. Gustav Tamele was president of the District Court in Leoben (Styria)
and was called to the Reich’s Court as Senate President in July 1942. In 1943
he was transferred to Vienna to become President of the “Court of Appeal”.
At the end of the war, he received orders from the Reich’s Ministry of Justice
to destroy the Viennese Court of Appeal’s administrative and personal files,
and files containing information on political criminal cases and general
political files. Dr. Gustav Tamele was only charged with membership of the
illegal NSDAP and was acquitted on 17 November 1948.
Case 6: of the “People’s Court” of Vienna against Dr. Franz Hueber [LG
Vienna Vg 11 Vr 409/46; resumed: LG Vienna Vg 1a Vr 460/50]:
. Dr. Franz Hueber was Minister of Justice for the Seyß-Inquart Nazi
government in Austria. After the Anschluß, he became a member of the
“Austrian Department” in the Reich’s Ministry of Justice. In December 1942
he was made President of the Reich’s Administrative Court.48 Hueber’s main
hearing took place between 27 and 30 December 1948 in Vienna. Dr.
Wilhelm Miklas, the last Austrian President before the Anschluß, was
amongst those who gave evidence. Hueber was sentenced to 18 years’
imprisonment for high treason. It is not known how the 1950 re-trial ended, as
the file has been missing from the archives of the District Court in Vienna for
48.See: Rathkolb, Transformation, op. cit., p. 428.
POST-WAR JUSTICE IN AUSTRIA : WW1 & WW2, A COMPARISON
91
some time. The length of his sentence is all the more astonishing as one of his
jurist colleagues, Johann Suchomel, who played an important role in the legal
adjustment between Germany and Austria, was able to continue his career in
the Austrian Ministry of Justice in 1945 and later on.49
Case 7: of the “People’s Court” in Graz against Dr. Fritz Meldt [LG Graz
Vr 13/45]50:
. Dr. Fritz Meldt became President of the “Court of Appeal” in Graz in
1938. On 17 November 1948, Meldt was sentenced to six years imprisonment
for having been a member of the illegal NSDAP, and for drawing up a list of
people in February 1938, who professed their faith in National Socialism as
part of the “Patriotic Front” (Vaterländische Front).
It is only this latter case that has been considered by Austrian historical
scholarship. Every other record is still awaiting analysis. In a stark contrast to
the wealth of German literature, the involvement of members of the NSjudiciary in Austria has only been investigated in a few articles51 , and
publications on the subject are scant.52 That there were legal proceedings
against members of the judicial apparatus after 1945 is a fact that – despite the
scandalous results – has fallen into oblivion. This applies generally to
proceedings of the “People’s Court”. The “Austrian Research Centre for Postwar Justice” established in 1998, of which Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider is codirector, has taken on the task of systematically opening up these files and
thereby making them accessible to a wider public. One can only hope that the
subject of prosecution of the NS-judicial crimes in Austria will be researched
in the future.
X
When the judicial crimes in Austria in the First and the Second World War
are compared, it becomes apparent that there are both similarities and
differences. As we have seen, the common feature lies in the intention to use
49.Ibid., p. 434.
50.Excerpt of verdict published in: Martin F. Polaschek, Im Namen der Republik
Österreich! Die Volksgerichte in der Steiermark 1945 bis 1955 (Graz, 1998), pp. 235241.
51.I.e.: Rathkolb, EntNazifizierungsdebatte, op. cit., pp. 75-99.
52.Eva Handschur’s excellent dissertation “Kontinuität und Diskontinuität der
Rechtsentwicklung in Bezug auf die Stellung der Richter und die Gerichtsverfassung
vor bzw. nach der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung, Diss. Salzburg 1997”
should be especially mentioned in this connection. Likewise the commendable diploma
dissertation of Christian Pippan (see note 28).
92
Hans Hautmann, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider
the judicial apparatus to suppress all opposition or potentially disloyal factors,
and to punish by criminal law every activity the regime found unpleasant.
The difference was that the Habsburg Monarchy still had to utilise military
justice as the main instrument of repression, whilst the NS-Regime strove
from the beginning to assert the premise that the judiciary was a suitable
instrument of “internal warfare”. This happened to such an extent that even
regular legal proceedings could be used to support them.
The fundamental difference lay above all in the dimensions of the
injustice. This reached earth-shattering proportions in the NS-Regime with
regard to the number of victims. This happened because the system of rule in
the Habsburg Monarchy was, in contrast to Hitler’s Germany, still capable of
correcting itself and moderating the practice of repression. Its most brutal
blows were struck at the beginning of the war. The NS-Regime, on the other
hand, successively increased, indeed had to increase, the terror with intrinsic
logic, until this reached insanely monstrous proportions in the years 1944 and
1945. The imperial war dictatorship lacked the all encompassing, cast-iron,
totalitarian character, the cold, systematic nature and bureaucratic perfection
of the repression apparatus and the oppressive methods which characterised
the NS-Regime.
The Bomb, the People and the Media
Tomoyoshi H IRAI
On August 6, 1945 one atomic bomb destroyed the city of Hiroshima and
killed tens of thousands of its people in an instant. After a half century the city
has been marvelously reconstructed and has become a symbol of peace. An
opinion poll conducted in this city in 1970 showed that 48% of respondents
believed it an imperative to transmit the horrible experiences of the bombing
from generation to generation forever. The percentage increased to 65% in
1985 (67% in the case of Nagasaki). In the same survey, almost half of
Hiroshima citizens considered their city deserved more privileged treatment
than other war-damaged cities in Japan. This is another expression of the same
conviction.
Of factors affecting such widespread attitudes toward the bombing and
peace, the role of the media, especially newspapers, is undoubtedly large. The
Chugoku, the top Hiroshima newspaper which has the biggest circulation in
the city (67% of all households subscribed to it in 1999) has played such a
role.
The Chugoku has long been openly committed to nuclear abolition and
world peace. As early as 1953, one of its editorials firmly asserted that
Hiroshima had the natural right to denounce the world’s deplorable condition
as well as the Japanese government’s timid policy concerning nuclear
disarmament.1
Here arises a question: have the people of Hiroshima and the Chugoku
consistently been observing the above mentioned position since the end of the
Second World War? The answer is not always positive.
Immediately after the War, almost all Japanese people were preoccupied
with daily subsistence. And between September 1945 and mid-1949, media
such as broadcasting, newspapers, periodicals, books and films were put under
harsh censorship by the occupation army. The Chugoku was forced to publish
only materials about the bombing which were likely to pass the censors. No
doubt such a task was really a torment.
1.Chugoku, August 6, 1953.
94
Tomoyoshi Hirai
At the same time, it should be noted that the Chugoku not only seems to
have meekly obeyed the restrictions forced by censors but also to have
censored itself. Of course, it was simply not this paper’s fault. Other Japanese
newspapers took a similar stance. As a result, the wall of silence was not
destroyed until the so-called Bikini incident in March 1954, when a Japanese
fishing boat was tragically damaged by radioactive waste emitted from a
hydrogen bomb which the United States was testing on a coral island in the
South Pacific. The incident occurred six years after the removal of the
censorship.
This study explains how a local newspaper struggled with censorship
resulting from the occupation and contributed to the creation of a myth about
Hiroshima as the city of peace.
I
The occupation of Japan got underway officially on September 2, 1945.
On the same day the “Press, Pictorial and Broadcast Division” (PPB),
subordinate to the “Civil Censorship Detachment” (CCD), started its
activities. CCD belonged to the Civil Intelligence Section, headed by General
C. Willoughby who was also the chief of G-2, one of the General Staff
Sections aiding General D. MacArthur, Supreme Commander for Allied
Power (SCAP).
The PPB took charge of censorship of mass media. Because of its limited
number of censors, it initially could only publish the Nippon Times, an
English language paper, and the Domei, an official news agency, under prepublication censorship. The rest of the Japanese language papers were
supervised through post-publication censorship.
On September 10, however, the first guidelines for the Japanese press
were issued to the Japanese government. SCAP did not permit any
information that could disturb public tranquillity to be published in the press.
Among other bans: discussion of Allied troops’ covert movements, exposing
the Allied Powers to “false or destructive” criticism, spreading rumors.2
The first paper to be condemned for violating these rules was the Domei.
On September 14, SCAP directed the Domei to cease all its functions for 24
hours. Following the Domei, the Asahi, one of most prestigious papers in
2.Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in
Occupied Japan (N.Y. & London, 1991), p. 36. Eto Jun, Tozasareta Gengo Kukan:
Sennryougun no Kenetsu to Sengo Nippon (A Closed Linguistic Space: Occupation
Censorship and Postwar Japan) (Tokyo, 1994), pp. 169-170.
THE BOMB, THE PEOPLE AND THE MEDIA
95
Japan, and the Nippon Times underwent similar punishments, respectively.on
September 18 for 48 hours and on September 19 for 24 hours.
The October 1, 1945 issue of the Toyo Keizai Shinpou, an economic
review, was confiscated. The reason for each of these suppressions was the
same, in that SCAP considered a certain article in these news media critical of
or even insulting to the Allied Powers in general and the United States in
particular. The Asahi, for instance, published an interview with Mr.
Hatoyama, the future prime minister, in which he condemned use of the
atomic bomb as “a war crime and violation of international law more vicious
than an attack on a hospital ship or use of poison gas.” The New York Times of
September 19, 1945 reported from Tokyo that SCAP had decided to take
measures against the Asahi for its deliberately ignoring gruesome wartime
atrocities committed by the Japanese army and instead, accusing the United
States for using the atomic bomb.
Taking seriously the Japanese media’s “efforts to discredit the
occupation”3, SCAP issued a directive on September 18, 1945 and gave
explanations at a meeting of representatives of the press on September 21,
1945.
This directive known as the Press Code stated that:
1. News must adhere strictly to the truth.
2. Nothing shall be printed which might directly, or by inference, disturb
public tranquillity.
3. There shall be no false or destructive criticism of the Allied Powers.
4. There shall be no destructive criticism of the Allied Forces of
Occupation and nothing which might invite mistrust or resentment of these
troops.
5. There shall be no mention or discussion of Allied troops movements
unless such movements have been officially released.
6. News stories must be factually written and completely devoid of
editorial opinion.
7. News stories shall not be colored to conform with any propaganda line.
8. Minor details of any news story must not be overemphasized to stress or
develop any propaganda line.
9. No news story shall be distorted by the omission of pertinent facts or
details.
3.General Headquaters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (ed.), History
of the Nonmilitary Activities of the Occupation of Japan, vol. 5 : Civil Liberties-Part
4: Freedom of the Press (1945 to January 1951), p. 12.
96
Tomoyoshi Hirai
10. In the makeup of the newspaper, no news story shall be given undue
prominence for the purpose of establishing or developing propaganda line.4
At the same time, CCD distributed instructions concerning the censorship
procedure. It was pointed out that there should be no mention of censorship in
the publications, nor any traces implying censorship.5
Evidently the Press Code was so comprehensive that whatever news story
any censor disliked might not be allowed publication. Such arbitrariness
inevitably increased because guidelines on applying the Code were also quite
ambiguous. One guideline dated end of November 1946 listed 30 subjects to
be deleted before publication or deemed unfit for publication. This list
included criticism of SCAP, Tokyo Military Tribunal, the Allied Powers, the
pre-war policies of the Allied Powers and the like.
In addition to application of censorship, from the beginning of January,
1946, SCAP headquarters organized special countermeasures against ultranationalistic propaganda and hostility to the atomic bombing among the
Japanese people. Eto cited an interesting paper sent from the Civil
Information and Education Section (CI & E) to G2 (the Civil Intelligence
Section) of SCAP headquarters on February 6,1948, in which CI & E
surveyed its own efforts to convince the Japanese people of their guilt in
starting the war and recommended some effective ways to counterbalance
hostile attitudes to the atomic bombing and ultra-nationalistic propaganda
stimulated by the process of Tokyo Military Tribunal among the Japanese
people.6
John Dower expounded the reasons for SCAP’s nervousness about news
of the bombing as follows: first, to spread these news could incite “public
unrest” against American occupying authorities; secondly, the brutality of the
atomic bombing could be manipulated in the media to neutralize the war
criminality of the Japanese army.7
Consequently, after September 18, 1945, when the Press Code was issued,
the number of news articles on the atomic bombing dropped sharply. For
instance, while 115 related items had been published in the Asahi between
4.M. Braw, op. cit., p. 41. Eto Jun, op. cit., pp. 193-94. General Headquarters,
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (ed.), op. cit., p. 12.
5.M. Braw, ibid., pp. 41-42.
6.Eto Jun, op. cit., pp. 261-264.
7.John W. Dower, “The Bombed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese Memory”,
in: Michael J. Hogan (ed.), Hiroshima in History and Memory (N.Y., 1996), pp. 116117.
THE BOMB, THE PEOPLE AND THE MEDIA
97
September 10 and 20, 1945, only 74 appeared between September 20 and 30
1945. The number for the whole year of 1946 was only 89!
Japan was divided into three censorship districts. The Hiroshima area
belonged to District III with its head office in Fukuoka. Until July 1947, only
69 out of nearly 2000 newspapers were censored before publication, but this
small category included all but two of the big dailies. Fortunately, only postpublication censorship was applied to the Chugoku. The official censorship
over the media was not abolished until October, 1949. One copy of the
Chugoku was sent daily to the PPB office in Fukuoka.
According to the evidence of one of its former editors, though the
occupational censorship was more generous than the Japanese war-time one,
the provisions in the Press Code were loose enough to permit different
interpretations, so that he was obliged to adopt a rather severe self-regulation
for fear of overstepping any imagined limits.8 As any news stories on the
atomic bomb could not help implying American responsibility, verging on
violation of the Press Code, such stories were often suppressed in advance by
the editors themselves. This practice seems to have been applied by other
newspapers as well. It is important to note that this practice of self-censorship
was conducted subconsciously, since the Japanese press, at that time, was
apparently dizzied by its great new post-war freedom. It was not until 1951
that the first editorial dealing with the nuclear problem was printed in a major
newspaper in Japan (the Asahi, August 6, 1951).
However, the rigidity of the censorship depended to some extent upon
individual inspectors. The Yukan Hiroshima, an evening paper affiliated with
the Chugoku, first published in its issue of July 6, 1946, several photos of
Hiroshima taken immediately after the bombing. As a matter of course, the
cameraman who had taken these shots telephoned the American detachment
in Hiroshima shortly afterwards, but he was only lightly reprimanded for his
failure to get advance permission. On the other hand, several months before, a
Mainichi cameraman who had taken similar shots was blamed for preparing
the publication of his works and the occupational authorities threatened to
suspend the paper for three days. The reason why the censor berated him was
that his shots showing ruins after the bombing against the background of Torii
(a gateway at the entrance of a Shinto shrine) were deliberately taken to send
a secret message that Shintoism was much sturdier than the atomic bomb after
all.9
8.Chugoku Shinbun Hatijunenshi [Eighty Years of the Chugoku] (Hiroshima,
1972), p. 320.
9.Imahori Seiji, Gensuibaku Jidai (The Age of Nuclear Bombs), vol. 1, pp. 79-80.
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Tomoyoshi Hirai
It should be noted that such inconsistency in the censorship was also
influenced by the change in American occupation policy resulting from
upheavals in international politics such as the first explosion of the Soviet
atomic bomb and the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. One
symptom of the changed occupation policy can be observed in the tone of
General MacArthur’s message sent to the city of Hiroshima in
commemoration of August 6 — the day of the bombing. While his first
message in 1947 had sent a clear warning of the danger of annihilation of the
human race by atomic bomb, the 1948 messages just wished the city a speedy
reconstruction without referring to the devastating power of the bomb. In
1949, his message was even more laconic and formal.
II
Then how did people in Hiroshima live under a kind of blackout
concerning the atomic bombing and how did the Chugoku report it? In
principle, they gave precedence to reconstruction as against adherence to their
own terrible experiences. It was natural, because people prefer dreaming
about greater comfort rather than facing distress.
What is more important is how local newspapers would report how people
led their lives. After recovering from serious damage caused by a big typhoon
in September, 1945, the Chugoku published an editorial on November 11,
1945, declaring that Hiroshima should be rebuilt not as “a military metropolis
as it was prior to the atomic destruction” but as “a peaceful center of
education and science”.
In June, 1946, the Hiroshima municipal office planned a big ceremony, a
variation of the traditional summer festival, in memory of the bombing. A
committee was formed of representatives from the municipal office and the
chamber of commerce and industry who had a heated discussion on the best
path towards rapid economic reconstruction. Even the relics of the bombing
like ceramics, roof-slates, bricks, burned and deformed by the enormously
high temperature emitted during the bombing, were listed as exportable
currency earners.
On August 6, the day of “Restoration Festival”, the newspaper asserted:
“the war ended with the sacrifice of lives of citizens of Hiroshima.
Innumerable lives must have been saved by this sacrifice”. In this way people
tried to pray for the dead. Similar prayers were repeated by other papers. The
Asahi, on August 15, confirmed that the explosion of the atomic bomb was
undeniable evidence of “the power of people struggling for freedom in the
world”, as stated in the Declaration at Potsdam.
THE BOMB, THE PEOPLE AND THE MEDIA
99
The reconstruction strategy of Hiroshima aimed first of all at transforming
the city into a world famous tourist center. In the summer of 1947 for
instance, the then mayor pointed out in his reconstruction program that
Hiroshima’s unimaginable sufferings had contributed to the ending of the war,
and that Hiroshima thus deserved to be called “the city in commemoration of
restoration of peace”. He added that such fame together with its beautiful
environment would be precious assets for prosperous tourism. With that
purpose in mind, he pressed the Parliament to adopt a specific bill. In his
petition to the Parliament he argued that the complete destruction of the city
provided a unique chance to rebuild it completely and to develop it as a the
cradle of peace which would be significant not only nationally but also
internationally.10 Thus, the Act of the Hiroshima Peace Commemorating City
Construction was born.
At any rate, “reconstruction” was a catchword in Hiroshima in the earlier
years of the occupation. In 1947, a three days festival called “Peace Festival”
was held in the city from 5 to 7 August. The ceremony shifted its emphasis to
festivity rather than to mourning. Even the word “Restoration” did not remain
any longer. People enjoyed pageants and floats. The Chugoku commented
that a visible answer to “the task imposed by the atomic bomb on all human
beings” had been embodied in Hiroshima citizens, and an expectation of the
world had been now fulfilled (August 7, 1947). However, the festival proved
to be so festive that it was soon criticized as a mere merrymaking, which
outraged the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors). An American magazine,
Life, joined in the criticism by comparing it to “a carnival in a certain
uncivilized land in South Africa” (the issue of August 15, 1947).
Such a repugnant reaction toward “reconstruction” or “peace “ festivals
played a part in bringing the motive of the memorial function closer to prayers
for peace. Nevertheless, as late as 1950, a clergyman, in a letter to the
Chugoku, insisted that “though every year a vigorous peace ceremony is held,
the most important thing seems to be the least respected” (the Chugoku, June
18, 1950). The present form of the peace memorial ceremony, with its stress
on mourning and the peace movement, was not established until 1952.
Popular attitudes toward the atomic bomb were still ambivalent. On one
hand, eager pleas continued to be raised for making Hiroshima a Mecca for
the peace movement; on the other hand, occasionally, there were even voices
favouring thorough demolition of the Genbaku Domu (a ruined building
preserved as a memorial of the bombing) to improve the view of the city.
10.Hiroshima City, Hiroshima Shinshi [New History of Hiroshima], Section of
Materials, vol. 2, 1982, pp. 236-238.
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Tomoyoshi Hirai
Surely these voices expressed a clear wish to develop the tourism as a
potential industry. The Hiroshima Tourist Society was reported to have
selected thirteen sites which were badly damaged by the bombing (the
Chugoku, July 13, August 1, 1948). It might have been a straw in the wind,
because in the autumn of 1948, a drastic transformation occurred in the
occupation: the thrust was shifted from the reform to the recovery of Japan.
This was embodied in a NSC document, “Recommendation with respect to
US policy toward Japan”.11
However, as an opinion poll conducted in the summer of 1948 showed, a
great majority of the citizens were in favor of conserving the Domu. In 1953,
the city office finally decided unenthusiastically to follow the public opinion.
The city officers still adhered to the value of the Domu as a tourist resource
(the Chugoku, February 15, 1953, May 21, 1954).
III
In July 1951 the peace treaty was concluded between the Allied Powers
and Japan. In April 1952 the occupation of Japan formally ended, and the
occupation censorship had been abolished before. It was approximately at that
time that people in Hiroshima began earnestly to consider their city’s identity.
The Chugoku wrote on the occasion of the first peace memorial ceremony
after Japan’s recovery of independence (August 6, 1952):
“Hiroshima is facing a big turning point now. What is needed is to develop
an idea of peace in Hiroshima and promote a just peace rather than to
remember the A-bomb and memorialize that day, August 6,1945”.
A participant at a meeting said that considering the weakness of the peace
movement in Hiroshima, the people had to ponder the cause of this weakness.
Another participant, a medical doctor, stated that since seventy percent of
Hiroshima residents were not hibakusha, they were not very serious about
either peace or the bomb. 0n the other hand, the hibakusha had been so
overwhelmed by their own tragedies that they had become fatalistic, void of
any will to organize a strong peace movement (the Chugoku, August 4, 1953).
At about the same time, the Japanese media began to compete with each
other to publish news stories and pictures on the living conditions of the
hibakusha. As a matter of course, the Chugoku took the initiative. This change
in position encouraged some papers to blame the United States for using the
11.Yui, Daisaburo, Nakamura, Masanori et. al. (ed.), Sennryo Kaikaku no Kokusai
Hikaku [International Comparative Studies of Reforms under the Occupation] (Tokyo,
1994), pp. 94-96.
THE BOMB, THE PEOPLE AND THE MEDIA
101
atomic bomb. On August 6,1953, the Chugoku wrote the following appeal:
“Atomic weapons should be condemned in the name of humanity as the war
criminals have been. Hiroshima is entitled to call the world’s attention to the
danger of the development of nuclear weapons, the need of prompt medical
care and the right to a decent life for those who suffered from the aftereffects
of the bombing”.
An annual gathering called the Hiroshima National Peace Conference
grew bigger and bigger, attracting a large number of representatives from
every corner of Japan and from abroad. Many movies were made on the
bombing and its victims. An English paper, the Daily Sketch, commented on
one of them that: “eight years after the end of the war, the Japanese were still
trying to instigate old hatred”. Ironically enough, such opinions on the socalled “atomic movies” were felt not only in a former enemy country but also
in Japan. One film company did not allow an atomic movie to be shown at its
affiliated theatres because it could have seemed to be too anti-American.
As time passed, people blamed the United States more loudly for the
bombing. In 1954, some efforts were even made to start a movement to claim
compensation for the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Chugoku
protested on January 15, 1954: “What has the United States done for
Hiroshima, the atomic city? While the problem of the justice of the bombing
remains to be solved, it is a fact that the horrible scars of the bombing have
not been eradicated yet, eight years after the death of more than two hundred
thousand (sic) people.”
In 1954 the “Bikini incident” occurred. On March 1, a Japanese fishing
boat suffered gravely from the radioactive waste emitted from American Hbomb experiments in the South Pacific. After the boat returned home, one
member of the crew died from the after-effects. This incident brought about a
huge anti-nuclear movement. After that, the number of editorials concerning
nuclear bombs and nuclear energy increased rapidly in big newspapers. While
two editorials appeared in the Mainichi and one in the Asahi in 1953, there
were respectively nine and ten in the next year. This incident also helped to
lift a kind of taboo on the atomic sufferings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.12
Throughout the Hiroshima prefecture, a petition campaign urging
prohibition of nuclear weapons was organized by women’s associations. It
spread like a storm and collected the signatures of about half of the population
in this area. Two different peace memorial ceremonies were held in
Hiroshima on August 6, 1954: one being sponsored by the municipality and
12.Ide Magoroku, Reportage Sengoshi [Postwar History Based on Reportage]
(Tokyo, 1991), pp. 279-280.
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Tomoyoshi Hirai
the other by the Center in charge of the Hiroshima prefectural campaign to
abolish atomic and hydrogen bombs. Afterwards, the latter consolidated into
annual conferences on the prohibition of all nuclear weapons, attended by
representatives from many social and political organizations in Japan and
abroad.
Generally speaking, the more the social movements grow, the more
diffusive they will become in terms of internal integrity. Nuclear disarmament
movements were no exception, especially at the height of the cold war. In its
August 6, 1954 editorial, the Cugoku claimed that it depended upon people
and politics whether scientific achievements would be utilized for the
happiness of human beings, and urgently demanded the United States and
Soviet Russia to cooperate in prohibiting all nuclear weapons.
The Hibakusha also began to express their views. A hibakusha
complained that as the city had been outwardly rebuilt mainly by newcomers
who had flowed in after the war, the original citizens, including the
hibakusha, had been left behind. Here the reconstruction of the city was
contrasted with the predicament of the victims of the bomb (the Chugoku,
August 24, 1954).
A long process to sublimate Hiroshima into a peace city was approaching
its end, the very existence of which meant an accusation against nuclear
weapons. But this process was surely hindered by difficulties such as the
occupation censorship, self-censorship by the press itself and human
weakness in facing miserable realities. When we write and speak about this
city, we must remember the zigzag path it followed.
The Sino-American Relationships in World War II:
September 1940-May 1943
SHI PING
The 20th century saw a breakthrough in Sino-US relations, and in this
century, WW II and the time after the 70’s are two epoch-making periods.
During the Second World War a powerful western power forged an alliance
with a weak, semi-colonial, oriental country in order to fight the Japanese
invasion. After the 70’s, the two countries walked out of the confrontation of
the Cold War and modified their respective policies. With many obstacles still
remaining to be overcome, the two countries established normal relations in
the main on the basis of equality.
In this century, China has gradually grown out of a backward and poor
country to become an important member of the international community. The
hard work of the Chinese people is the main reason for such development. But
it has also a lot to do with America’s policy to China and the modification of
Sino-US relations. This paper will mainly discuss America’s policy to China
and Sino-US military cooperation, between September 1940 and May 1943.
During the Second World War, China’s policy aimed at forging an alliance
with America, winning her aid and making her a belligerent country. Between
September 1940 and May 1943, America’s policy to China underwent critical
modification, which influenced directly the Asia-Pacific structure and SinoUS military cooperation, and also had a strong impact on war in the Pacific
and the Chinese anti-Japanese War.
September 1940 – December 1941
In order to avoid direct confrontation with Japan during this period,
America treated China as a means to contain Japanese expansion. This was
the beachhead of Sino-US military co-operation.
America’s policy to China was influenced by both internal and external
factors. The internal factors included US interests in the Far East, domestic
isolationism, Roosevelt’s “Europe-first and Asia-second Strategy”, and how
well the country had been prepared for the war. The external factors were
Japanese strategic intentions concerning the war, the situation of the Chinese
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anti-Japanese war, the Soviet Union’s attitude to China and Japan, and the
interests of England and other countries.
In June 1940, France surrendered. In September, Germany, Italy and Japan
signed their Tripartite Pact, which greatly threatened America’s strategic
intention and position. America could no longer withdraw within the
protection of the two bordering oceans, since it believed it might have to go to
war with Japan in the East, and with Germany and Italy in Europe, at any
time. Considering the whole situation of the world and the security of
America, President Roosevelt put forth the general strategy as “Europe-first
and Asia-Second” on September 28, hoping to control Japan’s expansion in
the Far East and avoid direct confrontation with Japan at the same time.
The anti-Japanese War in China was important in restricting Japan and
enjoyed a very high status in the general American strategy (“Europe-first and
Asia-second Strategy”). So the United States changed its former attitude and
Sino-US cooperation was put on the agenda. In November 1940, the United
States began to discuss whether they should support China as a means of
checking Japan. In December, “US Far Eastern Policy”, passed by Congress,
said that the most important means to stop Japanese invasion of the south was
to aid China in all possible ways and cause Japan to become trapped in China.
It was clear that the US now considered that aiding China was an important
strategic means to fight against Japan.
Both sides began to draw up plans for military cooperation at the end of
1940, but the main strategic aim for America at that time was only to seek
ways to avoid the war, so American military cooperation with China was
rather limited and military cooperation developed slowly. Sino-US military
cooperation began with military aid. After China became a recipient country
of the “Lend-lease Act” in May 1941, a semi-open, non-comprehensive
military cooperation was established.
America’s military strategy towards China and especially the possibility of
direct confrontation with Japan eased the task of China in seeking military
cooperation. After October 1940, the Chinese government took many active
diplomatic steps. Chiang Kai-shek met the American ambassador Nelson
Trusler Johnson and military attachés; and Mr. Song Zhiwen carried on active
propaganda in America; a military delegation was also sent to visit the United
States. China made the proposal to set up a cooperative alliance between
China, America and Great Britain. Military aid was also requested.
In the initial phase of military cooperation, the strategic interests of China
and America were the same in some aspects and different in others. The
United States tried to force Japan to give up the southern invasion by
strengthening its aid to China and applying economic sanctions against Japan.
But America’s purpose was to avoid war with Japan. Therefore, the United
THE SINO-AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP DURING WORLD WAR II
105
States refused the proposal to become an ally of China. It did not wish to see
the Civil War in China influence and harm the anti-Japanese war efforts.
In order to obtain military aid from America, China reiterated that the
situation of the anti-Japanese war was very serious, and it was hard to fight on
alone. On the other hand, the Chinese government emphasized that if it
obtained the aid, then Mainland China could be used as a strategic base for
America so as to contain the Japanese invasion of the south. And in the future,
Chinese naval bases could also be used by American naval forces to stop the
expansion of communism. The purpose of Chiang Kai-shek in striving for
military cooperation was not only to fight the Japanese but also to strengthen
himself, which was not in harmony with America’s strategy to China at that
time. This disparity existed from the very beginning of military cooperation.
But in order to achieve cooperation, both sides turned a blind eye to this
difference.
Though military cooperation was put on the agenda, it was still a long way
from actual execution. The Civil War in China and the “Wan Nan Incident”
influenced the progress of military cooperation. Since the American
government was worried that the Civil War in China would devalue the antiJapanese war, it passed the “Lend-lease Act” in January 1941. This Act meant
that America regarded China as a partner against fascism. President Roosevelt
ratified the Act, which made Sino-US military cooperation lawful.
From January to March of 1941, the execution of the “Lend-lease Act”
was being discussed in America, while China tried diplomatically to obtain
military aid. In the negotiation with the Americans, China demanded a
broader and far-reaching military aid.
In April 1941, the signing of the “Japan and Russia Neutrality Treaty”
pushed ahead the Sino-US military cooperation. By late April and May 1941,
Sino-US military cooperation made a dramatic turn. Some demands to help
China were passed and executed. On May 6, the American Government
declared that China was a recipient country of the “Lend-lease Act”, which
meant the establishment of Sino-US military cooperation. Aiding China to
contain Japan was America’s indirect confrontation with Japan. Direct
confrontation with Japan might occur at any time. In May and June of 1941,
the ambition of the Japanese and the effort of China pushed America further
forward to becoming a belligerent country. This situation made it necessary
for America to adapt its policy to China and led to the normalization of SinoUS military cooperation.
The establishment of Sino-US military cooperation did not mean that
America’s strategy to China had undergone radical changes. It only showed
that America’s former strategy should be strengthened. After the
establishment of military cooperation, both countries set up official
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cooperative institutions, which sometimes did not work well because of poor
organization. In order to solve the problem of transportation of military
supplies, a “Dian Mian Road Transportation Observation Committee”
managed the development of military cooperation, and the transportation of
military supplies. An expert subcommittee participated in this adaptation. An
American military delegation was sent to China to examine how the military
cooperation was getting on. From that time on, Sino-US military cooperation
was strengthened. The focus of the cooperation was still the management,
control and use of the military supplies. Cooperation was rather limited.
Before the Pearl Harbor Attack, the negotiations between America and Japan
were not designed to make peace but to postpone the time of war. And
Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek knew this well.
From September 1940 to December 1941, Sino-US military cooperation
was transitional in WW II. America’s strategy towards China was continuous.
In May 1941, America realized that war with Japan was inevitable, so its
former strategy of avoiding direct confrontation with Japan was replaced by a
strategy of delay which led to the further establishment and rapid development
of Sino-US military cooperation, and which confined the Sino-US military
cooperation to military aid. America used China only as a means to contain
and wear down Japan, while China wanted to make America declare war. This
disparity was assuaged, and both sides tried to benefit from the military
cooperation. America considered military aid to China something like an
investment. The profits of the investment were to make the anti-Japanese war
continue in China. This mutual interest was the basis of Sino-US military
cooperation. Disparities in cooperation were not shown openly at this time
because of limited cooperation.
Japan finally challenged America’s China strategy. The strategic aim of
China, to make America a belligerent country, was achieved; and America’s
strategy, to avoid war with Japan, failed. This was a turning point for Sino-US
military cooperation.
December 1941 – May 1943
From December 1941 to May 1943, America’s attitude to China aimed to
carry out the military cooperation, and to make China more effective in the
oriental battlefield in the hope of checking and wearing out Japan. So Sino-US
military cooperation developed very rapidly, and the scope of cooperation was
widened.
When the war in the Pacific broke out, America could not get into war
both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. America’s strategy in the Pacific could
THE SINO-AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP DURING WORLD WAR II
107
only be defensive. So America altered its policy towards China: military
cooperation was replaced by military alliance. Then America’s strategy
towards China was 1) effective military alliance, to make China the strategic
base in fighting against Japan and a support on the Pacific Front; 2) faithful
political alliance, to edge out the influence of other countries and to enlarge
America’s privilege by making use of the war.
America’s adaptation of its policy towards China did not mean that its
strategy was dramatically changed: its former strategy “Europe-first and Asiasecond” never altered. China was not supposed to play the main role in the
Pacific War, and the Chinese battlefield was subsidiary in the American’s
eyes.
The publication of the “Declaration of the United Nations” in January
1942 signalled the formation of a Sino-US military alliance. In order to carry
out its strategy towards China and to make China work strategically as a
military ally, both sides began to seek ways of further cooperation.
Both sides welcomed Sino-US military cooperation. The harsh situation in
China called for the support of a powerful ally. The outbreak of the Pacific
War was a hidden blessing for China. And the Japanese would be defeated
sooner or later.
China suggested the establishment of an “anti-Axis States military
alliance” and the drawing up of a strategic plan to defeat Japan. Faced with
the powerful Japanese invasion, America granted China’s demand to set up a
comprehensive military alliance. In the meantime, there were some signs of
accelerated Sino-US cooperation, and the nature of military cooperation –
which comprised mainly military aid before the Pacific war broke up – began
to change. Military cooperation included 1) direct cooperation in strategy; 2)
open military aid on a certain scale; and 3) joint fighting in a certain region.
At the very beginning of the war, in April 1942, China took advantage of
America’s passive defense situation and urged the US government to
strengthen Sino-US military cooperation. Before the Battle of Midway, the
existence of the China theatre pinned the Japanese forces down and held back
Japanese attacks. The improvement of China’s operational capabilities was to
be spectacularly helpful to America’s defense dispositions in the early period
of the Pacific War, and also to the shift in its active defense. For this reason,
America was quite willing to see China continue its war against Japan at any
expense and considered China’s military issues from the political and
economic point of view. With the actual formation of the Chinese War zone,
the scope of military cooperation between the two countries grew gradually.
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Cooperation in the military command system
In November 1941 a delegation composed of American military experts
arrived in China. In February of the same year, General Stilwell was
appointed as the chief of staff of Chiang Kai-shek, commander-in-chief of the
Chinese army in the hope of strengthening cooperation in the command area.
General Stilwell had plenipotentiary powers in China since he supervised and
controlled all the defense affairs concerning American aid to China, and
enjoyed the power to command the Chinese army allocated by President
Chiang Kai-shek. But unfortunately, Stilwell’s role in China became quite
controversial since Chiang Kai-shek’s initial wish had been to obtain a
military liaison officer from the US who would be under his control. But in
fact America had sent him a general with double status, i.e. responsible to
him, yet under the direct command of Washington headquarters. Although it
was true that both China and the US were against Japan, their intentions
regarding military cooperation were totally different. After the outbreak of the
Pacific War, President Chiang Kai-shek thought America had already taken
over the burden to defeat Japan. Fully dependent on his ally, and through such
bilateral military cooperation, he hoped to free his own forces to deal with his
domestic threat while America hoped China would play a full role in the Far
East. Therefore, the dispute actually reflected continuous differences in SinoUS military cooperation, although they did not grow worse in the early period
because both sides gave top priority to maintaining military cooperation.
Cooperation in military equipment
Military aid had always been the main content of Sino-US military
cooperation. The fight for command was the main obstacle in military
cooperation and also affected cooperation in other aspects. This cooperation
was of prime importance to China. Facing the Japanese invasion, the two
sides agreed that effective military cooperation was the most important matter.
The US began to send a certain amount of military equipment by sea and
along the Burma Road to China. In March 1942, the Burma Road was lost. In
order to aid China to continue its operation, the US opened in April a Hump
Route from India to Kunming. The US assisted China as much as possible by
supplying military equipment and transportation, but its attitude towards the
command and distribution was still very tough. First, the US government was
war materials so that the US could restrict Sino-US military cooperation and
yet guarantee Chinese the positive role for the Chinese on the battlefield.
Second, in April the US refused the Chinese proposal to join MBA
subordinate to US-British joint chiefs of staff. Third, the US emphasized that
THE SINO-AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP DURING WORLD WAR II
109
military aid should be applied on the Chinese war front and hoped to see
Chiang Kai-shek reform the Chinese Army. By July-August 1942, the dispute
between Chiang kai-shek and Stilwell concerning war materials and military
equipment became more and more serious, so President Roosevelt sent
Laughlin Currie to China to mediate. At this time, the attitude of the US
towards Sino-US military cooperation began to change. Currie said: “I don’t
think it is necessary for us to add additional conditions to our aid”. And
President Roosevelt adopted Currie’s suggestion.
In the fight for holding the power to “release”, Stilwell and Chiang kaishek had equal shares. Stilwell strengthened his control over the power of
“releasing”, but he did not win Roosevelt’s support for his pressure policy.
Although Chiang kai-shek did not recapture the controlling power, he
obtained the military aid from the US by promising to continue military
action. Though the dispute still remained, cooperation between the two sides
was further developed before the situation in the Pacific improved. The main
principle of Chiang Kai-shek presupposed guaranteed cooperation between
the two sides. The fight for command was the main obstacle in the military
cooperation and also affected cooperation in other fields.
Cooperation in the combined operations
During World War II, the Sino-US combined operations were, in fact,
based on Chinese forces. The US forces were limited in such areas as
operational command, airforce combat, military equipment and providing
military advisors. At this time, the main action of the combined operations
was participation by the US air-force group, “Flying Tigers”. The Burma
Campaign, February-May 1942, guaranteed the intersection point of the
Pacific and Chinese theatres.
The scale and role of the Flying Tigers was confined to co-ordinating
operations in parts of the Chinese theatre. The Burma Campaign was of
important strategic value for China, as well as for the US and the UK.
Therefore, a fierce struggle for operational command arose. The Burma
Campaign failed because the Sino-British Allied Forces had no cohesive
operational project, or effective centralized directions. America could hardly
realize combined operations just by using its power of leadership, supplying
military advisors and war materials, but not sending in troops. Chiang Kaishek would not permit it. After American-Japanese Coral Sea and Midway
Naval Warfare, the US army gradually gained the upper hand in the Pacific
theatre, and the Americans changed their view concerning the importance of
the strategic status of the Chinese theatre. Indeed, from February 1943, after
the Guam Island Campaign, the Japanese adopted a strategy of defense in the
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Shi Ping
Pacific Theatre. In May, the American troops waged a strategic counterattack.
And for America, the strategic status of the Chinese theatre began decline.
Because of the change in the US strength and strategic situation in the Pacific
theatre, Japanese troops had been forced to become defensive. The strategic
importance of the Chinese theatre was no longer the same as in the first period
of the Pacific War, when the US troops, in a state of passive defense, needed
the role played in the Chinese theatre, and American strategy towards China
still admitted the strategic status of Chinese theatre. But first, China had to
wage an attack in the Burmese direction to prevent the Japanese troops in the
Southern Pacific Ocean from being dispatched to Burma and to ensure the
implementation of the US strategy in the Pacific Ocean. Second, China as a
military base, should partly undertake the task of attacking the shipping line
through the forward islands in Japanese sea territory and the Pacific Ocean,
and directly waging air attacks against mainland Japan, which could
coordinate with the US operations in the Pacific theatre.
In July 1942, after several months of military cooperation with China,
Stilwell suggested that the key for China to defeat Japan did not lie in
armament and technology, but in comprehensive military reform. In the first
few months of 1943, the US government had realized the serious
shortcomings of China’s political power and army, but the Americans would
not make the Sino-US military cooperation conditional on China’s promise to
carry out internal reforms and wage war against Japan. The bilateral military
cooperation had proven US aid to be ineffective in altering the intrinsic
qualities of age-old China and making it depend exclusively on US support.
For the US, the strategic counterattack might benefit from China’s efforts in
its war against Japan, and China might be transformed into a base for strategic
attacks. So Roosevelt refused to force China to give in for fear that it would
make China withdraw from the war, which might foil the strategy designed to
triumph over Japan. In February 1943, the US started a strategic counterattack
in the Pacific theatre. The strategic defense policy of the Japanese was to
guarantee the key regions by relying on the dense forefront islands, to
consolidate the back lines, and to scramble for one island after another. In
view of this policy, Roosevelt explicitly pointed out that the US could not
afford the slow moving and costly scramble for isles, because that would
undoubtedly affect the war process as a whole. Transforming China into the
base of counterattack was the key way to achieving triumph over Japan. In
accordance with this strategy, the US government shared Chiang Kai-shek’s
views and those of the pro-Chiang Kai-shek Americans at home. In support of
General Claire Lee Chennault, who had been in favor of the Chinese, the US
government developed and strengthened air power in China and undertook air
operations so as to maintain China as a battlefield. At that time, the United
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States held a dominant position in the Pacific. As Japan shifted into strategic
defense, the United States began to adjust its strategy to China, expecting
China to be a strategic partner that would safeguard the American interests in
the Pacific after the War. The United States thought it could overwhelm
Russia politically “looking on China as a possible balancing power to deal
with the Soviet Union”. As the War situation developed in March and April,
the US made it clear that Sino-US military cooperation would lie mainly in air
support and air operations. The Chinese troops provided ground support. And
the US was responsible for the supply of military equipment. In May, the US
initiated a strategic counterattack in the Pacific and soon felt the effects. This
attack made the United States less dependent on the strategic position of the
battlefield in China, so that it was able to attack Japan directly from the
Pacific Ocean. The US then paid more attention to drawing Chiang Kai-shek,
the most powerful man in China, over to its side, so that the US could play a
big role and enjoy superiority in the Pacific and Far East after the War.
Thus, the adjustment of the American strategy on China determined the
process of Sino-Asia military cooperation and the US understanding of the
situation in China made it possible for the US to gain the greatest strategic
value at that time. In August 1943, the Quebec Conference, held between
American and British leaders, formulated plans for the allied forces’ strategic
attack and counterattack. China gradually lost its significance as a strategic
base and was confined to being an air base for the US After that, the United
States set the norms for Sino-US military cooperation. But the development of
the situation after the Second World War and the founding of the People’s
Republic of China proved that the American strategic policy on China was
superficial. The US did not realize its strategic goal through military
cooperation with Chiang kai-shek. This shows that when developing relations
with China, a country with a long history, the US should not impose its own
philosophies, but respect the tradition of the country and have a clear idea of
its national condition. This is the prerequisite for good cooperation between
the two countries.