* By early 1945, after a relatively idle fall, the Red Army was ready to begin its drive on the Reich again, pressing into western Poland, seizing East Prussia and obtaining a foothold in Pomerania. Once Soviet troops had seized German territory, German civilians suffered the full brunt of vengeance for German atrocities in the East.
With the end of the war in sight, Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta in Crimea to discuss the postwar order. There was not all that much of a discussion there: Stalin had his own ideas of what he wanted, was not inclined to make any real concessions to the Western Allies, and the meeting accomplished little other than raising suspicions of Soviet intentions.
* While the Red Army idled on the Vistula, Soviet armored columns pushed into the Balkans. Rumania quickly surrendered, with King Michael dismissing his prime minister, surrendering to the Soviet Union, and declaring war on Germany. When Soviet forces approached Sofia in September 1944, the Bulgarian government did a similar about-face. It was an easier turnabout for the Bulgarians, since they had traditionally been friendly with the Soviets and had not participated in the invasion of the USSR.
Winston Churchill visited Moscow in October 1944, the meeting becoming the "Fourth Moscow Conference". Churchill had never had many illusions about Stalin, and the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising was no more than confirmation of what he had always believed. However, there was not much he could do to check Stalin's ambitions in Eastern Europe. The Red Army was there, and there was no way to change that reality.
Churchill was able to obtain a small concession. He agreed with Stalin that Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary would be in the Soviet sphere of influence, with the condition that the Soviets would not interfere in Greek politics. Stalin found this agreeable, because it effectively meant that Churchill was conceding him the right to do what he wanted in Eastern Europe. Yugoslavia was left on the table, while Stalin simply refused to discuss Poland. Britain had gone to war with Hitler over Poland, however, and the British were not about to give up on the subject.
By that time, it was clear to almost everyone that the war in Europe was entering its last stage. Sensible Germans recognized it, but whatever sensibility Hitler had was disappearing. The rational strategy for the Germans would have been to hold the line as well as they could in the East and simply wait for the British and Americans to roll up from the West, sparing Germany a degrading occupation by the loathsome Bolsheviks.
* In fact, for the moment the situation in the East was stable and such a strategy was practical. Hitler hardly considered it. He intended to hold out to the bitter end, hoping for the chance that some miracle, above all a falling out between the Soviets and the Western Allies, would save the day. In hopes of such miracles, on 16 December 1944, he threw 300,000 troops against the Americans in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg. The offensive achieved tactical surprise and, with Allied air power neutralized by nasty winter weather, made good progress at first. However, American resistance solidified and the offensive began to grind down, failing to reach critical objectives.
On Christmas Eve 1944, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, now head of the German Army general staff, reported to Hitler at the Fuehrer's "Adlerhorst (Eagle's Roost)" headquarters, not far from Frankurt-on-Main. Hitler had prudently given up his Wolf's Lair headquarters in East Prussia in November. Guderian informed the Fuehrer that the Ardennes offensive had shot its bolt, and that once the weather improved and Allied reinforcements arrived, the offensive would be crushed. In the meantime, he continued, German intelligence had determined that the Red Army was engaged in an enormous buildup along the northern sectors of the Eastern Front. Guderian suggested that the Ardennes offensive be terminated immediately, and the troops transferred East to meet the Soviet threat.
Hitler refused to listen to Guderian, astoundingly replying that the estimates of Soviet strength were "rubbish"; that the Red Army was actually threadbare and hardly had any tanks; that the Soviets were on the edge of collapse. Jodl backed the Fuehrer and Guderian was stymied. At dinner, Heinrich Himmler, who Hitler had just recently given a military command on the upper Rhine, told Guderian that the threat of a Soviet attack was a fraud: "It's all an enormous bluff."
Within a week, Hitler had finally admitted to his generals that the Ardennes offensive had failed, but still insisted that Germany would be able to fight on and triumph in the end. On 9 January 1945, Guderian returned from an inspection tour along the Eastern Front and informed the Fuehrer that Army Group A and Army Group Center were completely vulnerable, being badly weakened in the first place and their lines penetrated by Soviet bridgeheads where buildups were clearly being concentrated. The commanders of the groups recommended withdrawal to better defensive positions.
Hitler brushed off Guderian's concerns. Reichsmarshal Goering was there and broadly declared that most of the huge number of Soviet aircraft cited by German intelligence were merely decoys. OKW chief Keitel emphatically agreed with Goering. The Fuehrer refused to authorize a withdrawal, claiming that the current situation simply proved how foolish all the previous withdrawals had been. Hitler told Guderian that the German Army was strong and could halt the Soviets; Guderian replied that the defense was about as sturdy as "a house of cards".
BACK_TO_TOP* Stalin was planning on moving very soon, having decided to jump off on 12 January 1945. His decision to move up the date from 20 January was due to a message sent him by Winston Churchill dated 6 January 1945, in which Churchill asked Stalin to move against the Germans to help relieve the pressure in the Ardennes, and Stalin graciously agreed.
Stalin was privately contemptuous, believing his weak-kneed allies couldn't carry their weight, needing the Red Army to bail them out. That was a half-truth at most: the German offensive in the Ardennes had been broken by Christmas 1944, with Hitler ordering the withdrawal of his forces on 7 January. The fighting in the West wouldn't die down until late in January, but by the time the Red Army jumped off on 12 January, the Wehrmacht was trying to escape back to Germany, and no rescue was really needed. The Soviet action was still all for the good, since it made perfect strategic sense for the Red Army to attack while German forces were under pressure and in disarray. The Western Allies actually did Stalin more of a favor than he did them, by effectively destroying the last substantial German combat reserves, making the job of the Red Army substantially easier.
In any case, the Red Army offensive would be conducted over a 480 kilometer (300 mile) wide front, with the Third Belorussian Front on the northern end of the line, skirting the shores of the Baltic; the Second Belorussian Front next; the First Belorussian Front in the center; and the First Ukrainian Front in the south.
The Third Belorussian Front was still under Chernyakhovsky, but in November Rokossovsky had been moved to command of the Second Belorussian Front, with Zhukov taking his place in charge of the First Belorussian Front. This switch meant that Rokossovsky had been moved off center stage to a supporting role, and he suspected Zhukov, who had seemed friendly to him, had engineered it. In reality, Stalin himself had made the decision: Rokossovsky was half-Polish, and was not entitled to top honors. The First Ukrainian Front remained under Konev. The entire operation was under the direct personal control of Stalin.
Although the weather was cold, icy, and foggy, rendering air power ineffective, the offensive went forward as Stalin promised. Indeed, the Red Army tended to like to fight in foul weather, believing with good reason that under such conditions Soviet troops had the advantage over the enemy. Before dawn on 12 January, the First Ukrainian Front began the assault from the Red Army's bridgehead across the Vistula at Sandonmierz, well south of Warsaw. The attack opened with the Red Army's traditional massive artillery bombardment, which lasted for three hours. A German officer on the receiving end compared it to "the heavens falling down on earth."
When the big guns ceased, waves of armor and infantry poured forward. The Germans were caught off guard and the entire 48th Panzer Corps, consisting of three divisions, was almost completely wiped out. The 24th Panzer Corps was supposed to be operating as a reserve, but the offensive slammed into it before a counterattack could be organized, with the Germans losing two more divisions.
To the north of Warsaw, Chernyakhovsky's Third Belorussian Front jumped off on 13 January, to be followed by Rokossovsky's Second Belorussian Front the next day, 14 January. These attacks initially bogged down in the face of stubborn German resistance -- as well as marshy terrain, snowstorms, and thick fog that made fighting difficult. Zhukov was not happy with the weather, but his First Belorussian Front also went forward on 14 January, the troops encouraged by loudspeakers blasting out inspiring music. The Germans had been expecting Zhukov's attack, having observed the buildup and Red Army sappers clearing minefields, and had sensibly abandoned their front lines before the artillery barrage fell on it. It did them little good, since Zhukov's tanks and troops quickly punched through the rear defenses, driving around Warsaw and into the ruins of the city.
On 15 January, Hitler returned from the Eagle's Roost headquarters to Berlin to deal with the crisis, taking up residence in a bunker built under the Reichs Chancellery. Those around him found him sickly, far from the domineering personality he had once been, aged and seemingly senile beyond his years. His breath was very foul, which made listening to his rants at close range even more unpleasant.
The Fuehrer did little but issue useless orders, and fume at the incompetence of the Wehrmacht as Soviet forces rushed forward. To spite the Army generals, on 24 January he ordered Himmler to take charge of Army Group Vistula, a newly-formed command in East Prussia made up of the remnants of units that had been chewed up on the front lines. Hitler felt that a true Nazi like Himmler would be able to accomplish the miracles that the German Army let slip from their fingers.
When Himmler arrived at Army Group Vistula, the staff he inherited found him appalling, uninspiring in manner and appearance -- if he was a Nazi superman, nobody could have realized it by looking him over -- and with not the least notion of how to fight a war. Himmler had of course a lot of experience in directing terror against unarmed civilians, but dealing with people who could shoot back, and then some, was an entirely different matter. He was oblivious to his limitations as a general, making it clear that he had no interest in taking advice from experienced professionals.
To no surprise of anyone but himself, Himmler's attempts over the next few weeks to stem the Red tide ranged from ineffectual to disastrous, though he was diligent in mouthing threats to keep the weak-willed in the fight, ordering a few executions to show the threats were serious: that was what he knew how to do, after all. He did everything he could to disguise the disastrous state of affairs at the front from the Fuehrer.
No doubt when Soviet intelligence got wind of Himmler's command, they cheered Hitler for being so helpful. One Soviet tank commander crowed: "Our tanks move faster than the trains to Berlin!" Tankers would often drive through the night, though the drivers would sometimes fall asleep and blunder into things. This usually did the tanks no great harm, but it would give the crews a nasty jolt.
* The house of cards in the East was falling down as Guderian had predicted. As he probably also could have predicted, the Fuehrer blamed everyone for the disaster, railing about the "weaklings and traitors" around him. Hitler was particularly furious when the defenders of Warsaw pulled out on 16 January, with the city completely in Soviet hands the next day. Hitler had demanded that Warsaw be held, even though German forces there were far too thin on the ground to have done more than inconvenienced the Red Army before being crushed. Hitler sacked General Joseph Harpe, commander of Army Group A, and replaced him by General Ferdinand Schoerner. Harpe might have been able to consider himself the luckier of the two.
Guderian had pleaded with the Fuehrer to transfer forces to the East, and was somewhat surprised when Hitler agreed and said that he would transfer the 6th SS Panzer Army. However, to Guderian's outrage, the Fuehrer then said that 6th SS Panzer would be sent to try to recapture oilfields near Budapest in Hungary, and not be thrown into the fight in Poland. The counteroffensive into Hungary would go ahead as ordered, and would come to nothing.
Guderian had approved the withdrawal from Warsaw, and so he was the brunt of the Fuehrer's wrath. On 18 January, three of Guderian's staff officers were arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated. Guderian insisted that they had acted according to his instructions, and so he was interrogated as well.
* By 26 January, Zhukov's First Belorussian Front had isolated the fortress city of Poznan. The Wehrmacht got a short breathing spell from a blizzard on 27 and 28 January. The snow melted quickly, bogging the Soviets down in mud. The Luftwaffe, operating off of hard-surfaced runways while the Red Air Force was trapped on muddy forward airfields, obtained temporary air superiority and hammered Soviet columns for two days, flying over 5,000 sorties and inflicting major damage.
However, the Red Army had endured worse, and pushed on. By the first of February, the Red Army had bridgeheads over the Oder. Zhukov wanted to drive right on to Berlin, but the Red Army had overextended itself and was too far out on the limb of its lines of supply. German resistance had solidified on the Oder line as well. In fact, Zhukov's northern flank was dangerously exposed, and the Germans predictably took advantage of it, launching an attack with the 3rd Panzer Army in mid-February that pressed the Soviets hard for a few days, until it ran out of steam. The Vistula offensive was over. Now the Red Army would regroup and resupply for the last push.
BACK_TO_TOP* The Vistula offensive brought the war home to German citizens in full force. Masses of civilians had fled west from East Prussia and Pomerania to get away from the Red Army. Erich Koch, who retained his authority over East Prussia after the Reich had lost Ukraine, had refused to authorize any evacuation of civilians -- but he and his cronies sensibly decided to run away themselves. That gave the green light for everyone else to do the same, though since the rules technically still applied, citizens were liable to be shot for defeatism. Fear of what Red Army troops would do to Germans made that risk worth taking.
The fears had plenty of basis in fact, since Soviet propaganda and political commissars at the rank-and-file level were hammering it into the troops that the time for revenge was near. Propagandist Ilya Ehrenberg led the charge with bloodthirsty editorials in the Red Army's newspaper, KRASNAYA ZVEZDA (RED STAR). They didn't need much encouragement, since the troops were all aware of what the Germans had done in the USSR, and many of the soldiers had personal scores to settle.
When the Red Army came upon German villages, the soldiers had a drunken party of looting, vandalism, rape, and murder. Rape was the preferred instrument of vengeance, partly because the proportion of German menfolk around was low, most of them being in the ranks. The failure of the Germans to dispose of their liquor before the enemy arrived did much to aggravate the situation, since even good-natured Soviet soldiers tended to become animals when they were good and drunk. Old women and young girls were gang-raped, sometimes to death, and anybody who showed the slightest inclination to object was casually shot. Women were found stripped naked, crucified with nails to barn doors. Tanks rolled over and crushed columns of refugees.
What really enraged many Soviet troops was the relative prosperity of even the humblest German farmer, compared to the common poverty of the USSR. Most German farmhouses had electric lighting and radio receivers -- unthinkable luxuries for the average Soviet peasant. These folk had invaded the Soviet Union to plunder the people, when the Germans were so much better off?! The worst that could be done to them wasn't half bad enough.
Not all of the soldiers were so cruel, of course, some trying to be kindly to destitute civilians -- particularly children -- but there was little official attempt to restrain the troops, and in fact, on occasions soldiers simply shot officers who tried to do so. Red Army troops were often very undisciplined and insubordinate, surprising given the Soviet state's inclination to the most drastic punishments for downright imaginary infractions. They were not the obedient little Red robots that state propaganda made them out to be. Although newsreels might have reported how troops would charge shouting: "For Stalin! For the Motherland!" -- later a veteran would comment: "I'm sure we shouted something ... but I don't think it was that polite."
One story related how a truck was blocking a vital road, badly snarling traffic. A woman soldier named Lydia who was trying to direct the traffic lit into the driver, who simply poured back abuse in her face -- until he noticed the door of a staff car open, to see an angry Marshal Rokossovsky get out, with a pistol in his hand. The driver froze with terror. An officer who was in the cab of the truck with him got out and ran away into the bushes.
Those officers who tried to go up the chain of command about the rapes and atrocities were told to shut up; if they didn't, they stood a good chance of being arrested. The official line was that things like that didn't happen. Of course they did. If young men, of any nationality or race, are given weapons and allowed to go wild as they please, more than a few are likely to take full advantage of the situation without any apparent pains of conscience.
* Besides, it wasn't like they were doing things that those at the top didn't do as well. After the informal looting and vandalism of frontline troops had moved on, specialist NKVD units came in to inventory the catch and grab everything they could, as per Stalin's plan to squeeze the Germans for everything he could get out of them.
The NKVD would obtain very valuable German technologies and technical expertise for the Soviet Union, though most of the top German scientists and researchers would flee West and surrender to the British and Americans. The Soviets would also obtain quantities of raw materials and numbers of Germans for forced labor, though Soviet citizens would continue to be the backbone of Stalin's work camps.
As far as the grab of factory machinery went, however, it would prove to be about as wasteful an exercise as the mindless looting of the troops. Industrial machinery is normally specified to meet the requirements of a specific task; trying to take some machine and shoehorn it into a process it wasn't specifically designed for is troublesome, in fact likely to be more troublesome than it's worth. Such machinery also requires regular maintenance and people who are trained in its operation, as well as a logistical system to obtain parts and support to keep it running. Without such things, it's not more than bulky junk.
It was another sign of Stalin's crude thinking that he saw machinery as something like so many bales of hay or trainloads of coal, to be tallied up on a list of valuables; and the results were the Stalinist system at its worst. The machinery looted from factories and the like would mostly end up as rusty scrap -- which was just as well, because often it had been damaged beyond reasonable repair in its removal and transport anyway. Of course, the effort did help weaken the hated Germans, but if that had been the objective, it would have been much less work to have simply dynamited the lot of it.
Such considerations were beyond the scope of the orders given to the NKVD teams, and they were very earnest in making sure nothing of importance was overlooked. Certainly not much was overlooked by Soviet soldiers, who had been helping themselves to what they could use on the spot or carry -- with Soviet generals, from Zhukov on down, generally finding luxuries the Germans had accumulated, many of them looted from occupied territories to begin with, as tempting additions to personal fortunes.
* Harshness might have been satisfying, but it had serious drawbacks. It made the Germans more willing to fight, and Goebbels' propaganda machine played up Soviet atrocities for all they were worth. Goebbels accused "the Jew Ilya Ehrenberg, Stalin's favorite rabble-rouser", of inciting the rapes. Ehrenberg protested, truthfully, that he had actually never said any such specific thing, for all the difference it made.
The revenge also distracted Soviet troops from the business of fighting. It was more fun to grab loot and women than it was to confront an enemy that, however badly bruised, was still able to fight back. Rokossovsky understood that and issued orders to discourage such misconduct, but his orders were weakly enforced. Having acquired bad habits, Soviet troops would also often become indiscriminate in their application, engaging in rape and looting against supposedly "friendly" populations elsewhere and leading local Communist leaders to complain to Stalin. Koba was furious when he was told British troops were much better-behaved than his own.
Many Germans managed to stay out of the rough hands of the Red Army. In the first few weeks of 1945, an estimated 8.5 million fled west. It was a brutal journey, undertaken in very cold weather without food or shelter, with Poles robbing and beating them when the opportunity arose. Even when the refugees made it to the strictly relative safety of Berlin and other place in the west, they were not treated very well by Nazi authorities, and things would remain harsh. Running away was still better than the alternative.
* Hitler continued his own preparations for a last stand. A few months earlier he had established a home defense force, the "Volkssturm", its ranks to be staffed by old men and teenage boys. Of course Hitler thought the Volkssturm would be able to work miracles, and he was also careful to make sure that the Volkssturm remained under direct Nazi Party control and not handed over to the untrustworthy German Army. He was oblivious to the unsuitability of the Volkssturm's personnel for combat -- not merely because of the ages involved, but because of the general lack of training and equipment.
That unsuitability was obvious to others. German troops in the front lines were demoralized to find out that their young brothers, young sons, fathers, and even grandfathers were being stockpiled as cannon fodder. The fact that the only significant military effect the Volkssturm soldiers were likely to have was to make the Soviets expend ammunition to slaughter them only added to the distress. Many German civilians were also deeply skeptical of the idea -- though there were others who believed Nazi propaganda that the Volkssturm would help turn the tide of the war. For many people, it was easier to cling to transparent fantasies instead of accept the humiliating truth that they were deluded.
BACK_TO_TOP* While the Red Army paused on the Oder, Allied leaders were converging on Yalta, a resort in Crimea, for a conference to discuss the final actions of the war and what would come after. Roosevelt arrived at Malta on the cruiser USS QUINCY on 2 February 1945, meeting up with Churchill and Anthony Eden. Roosevelt was 63 and in obviously poor health, and in fact he would be dead in a few months. The health of his adviser Harry Hopkins had long been bad, and he was now on the decline -- Hopkins had spent months in the hospital during 1944, effectively taking him out of the loop on events, and he would only live another year himself.
Roosevelt, Churchill, and their entourages flew on to Yalta on 3 February. Stalin arrived the next morning, 4 February, having come by train since he hated to fly. He was in good health and confident, knowing perfectly well that he held trump cards in the game. The negotiations were superficially polite and formally emphasized the solidity of the alliance against Hitler, but after the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising and other events of 1944 there was a strong undercurrent of suspicion.
The sessions began that afternoon and went on for the better part of a week. The first serious item on the agenda was a review of the strategic situation. The deputy chief of the Red Army general staff, General Aleksey Antonov, started off by delivering a report on the progress and current disposition of the Red Army on the Oder, concluding that the Germans were consolidating forces from other sectors to focus on the Soviet threat and that the final battle would be a tough one. In response, General George Marshall described plans in the West, stating that a drive on the Rhine would begin on 8 February. The Soviets were hoping that the Western Allies would also conduct a simultaneous offensive in northern Italy to keep the Germans from shifting forces from that front, but Marshall replied that the resources were being dedicated to the Rhine offensive.
Then the talks went on to political matters. The conquest of the Reich was a foregone conclusion; Allied leadership agreed at Yalta that they had no responsibility for the welfare of occupied Germany beyond provision of minimum sustenance; the German military machine and military-industrial system would be dismantled, and German war criminals would be tried by an international court.
There was no great controversy over the handling of a defeated Reich; Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe were of more concern. Formally speaking, the Big Three proclaimed the establishment of legitimate national governments in Eastern Europe, calling for "interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population ... and the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people."
Stalin, of course, had a different concept of such principles than did Churchill and FDR. That was evident in Soviet statements of intent towards Poland. Stalin made it clear that he had no use for the London Poles, astoundingly accusing them of being collaborators with the Germans. Koba also said that the prewar Polish border with the USSR was to be shifted to the west. The Soviets suggested that Poland's border with Germany could be shifted west as well to make up for the lost land. The proposal was accepted -- as a monstrous proposition when examined in any detail, implying the dispossession and eviction of roughly 12 million people from the regions changing hands.
The most the Western Allies were able to do was stipulate that the London Poles obtain participation in the Lublin government; the issue of shifting borders was deferred until later. Everyone recognized that the Soviet concession on the London Poles was meaningless; Roosevelt's closest military adviser, Admiral William D. Leahy, protested that the agreement established with the Russians was "so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without technically breaking it."
That was not news to Roosevelt: "I know, Bill, I know it. But it's the best I can do for Poland at this time."
Work on a plan for the occupation of Germany had been conducted by a "European Advisory Commission (EAC)", which first met in November 1944. The EAC's work was reviewed at Yalta, with Churchill insisting that the French have a part in the occupation, adding their weight should the Americans decide to go back home. In fact, Roosevelt came right out and said that the American occupation of Germany would probably last only about two years. Witnesses saw Stalin's eyes light up at the remark. In any case, the conference affirmed that Germany would be split into four occupation zones, authority over each being assigned to one of the four primary Allied powers -- Britain, France, the USA, and the USSR.
The Soviets were also insistent that the Germans pay war reparations. That made British and American diplomats uneasy, since they remembered how troublesome the reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War had proven -- but Stalin replied to objections with bottled-up fury that the Soviet Union had suffered greatly at German hands and that the reparations were only just. Roosevelt pushed through an agreement on a reparations commission would nail down the details of the issue, leaving the matter open to further discussion. Similarly, ideas for the postwar dismemberment of Germany into smaller states were deferred to further discussion, in effect stalling on the issue.
* The Americans had axes to grind of their own, the most important ensuring that the USSR declared war on Japan after the fall of Germany. This was an extremely important issue to Roosevelt. In hindsight, the war in the Pacific was in its last phase by early 1945, but at the time the Americans had good reason to believe that much worse was yet to come, and that it would take several more years to defeat Japan. US forces were now contemplating an assault on the Japanese home islands that promised to be hideously expensive -- dwarfing the misery accumulated by the campaign against Japan to that time, possibly even doubling American casualties for the entire conflict.
If the USSR entered the struggle against Japan, the Japanese would be that much more pressured to cave in, while Soviet forces would deal with the large numbers of Japanese troops still present in Manchuria and able to fight. Roosevelt was not at all keen on committing US forces to the East Asia mainland, believing with good reason that it would be as hideous a sink for American resources as it had been for the Japanese. Stalin had promised to help at Tehran, in return for territorial concessions; he reassured FDR that the Soviets would keep their part of the bargain.
Roosevelt was also able to obtain Soviet agreement to the president's ideas for establishment of a United Nations (UN) organization that would help keep the peace in the postwar era. The president saw the UN as a way to encourage collective security that would prevent a Third World War, and also restrain America from slipping back into isolationism, squandering all the nation had achieved in international influence from the expenditure of blood and treasure. Stalin was agreeable, seeing the UN as a tool that he might make use of if convenient -- and otherwise ignored.
* The Big Three signed a final document over lunch on 11 February. Churchill signed first, Stalin suggesting it would be appropriate, since otherwise people might think he, Stalin, had run the conference. He might not have actually run it, but Stalin certainly held the good cards, and played them for all they were worth. It had been a confrontational meeting, more a session in adversarial negotiations than a conference of friends. At one point Roosevelt, ever the smooth talker, had tried to reduce the tensions by telling Stalin that he was known as "Uncle Joe" in the West. Stalin simply became offended, calling it "unfriendly" -- though he was merely toying with Roosevelt, Molotov quickly adding: "He is just pulling your leg ... all Russia knows you call him Uncle Joe."
Despite the difficulties, Roosevelt had got what he wanted out of the Yalta Conference -- Soviet agreement to join the war on Japan and to help set up the United Nations. In contrast, Churchill and the British were disgusted. Foreign Minister Eden wrote later: "A terrible party, I thought, the president vague and loose and ineffective. W [Winston Churchill] understanding that business was flagging made desperate efforts and too long speeches to get things going again. Stalin's attitude to small countries struck me as grim, not to say sinister. I was greatly relieved when the whole business was over."
As far as Stalin was concerned, he couldn't have been happier with the results. There was little the British and Americans could really do about what happened to countries occupied by the Red Army, and so all the agreements amounted to was cosmetics, which Stalin planned to pay no more mind to than he needed. When Molotov fussed about some of the wording of the agreements afterwards, Koba shrugged it off: "Never mind. We'll do it in our own way later."
The Western Allies have been accused ever since of "selling out" Eastern Europe at Yalta, with parallels drawn to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. There was no real comparison: the Nazi-Soviet pact was an agreement between the Reich and the USSR to collaborate on aggression, while Yalta simply amounted to Stalin saying, in a lightly veiled fashion, that he would do as he pleased, and there was nothing the Western Allies could do about it.
There wasn't. Britain didn't have the resources to fight the Soviets, and though the USA did have the resources, Roosevelt had absolutely no political mandate for doing so -- what could he do, simply tell the electorate that he had personally decided to commit the nation to a bloody, expensive war with an ally that had been publicly praised up to that time? Hitler could and did do such things, but everyone knew Hitler was a tyrant, including Hitler.
Even before America entered the war, the Nazis had been seen as the real threat to US interests, and the primary American goal of the conflict was to destroy the Nazi regime. After the US entered the war, it was obvious that the Soviet Union would do the lion's share of the work in that endeavor, and that the defeat of the Reich by the USSR would mean Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The most the British and Americans could do for the nations of Eastern Europe was engage in diplomacy in hopes of softening Soviet policy. Doing more would have meant a military confrontation that wasn't going to happen. As James Byrnes, one of Roosevelt's advisers at Yalta, said later: "It was not a question of what we would let the Russians do, but what we could get the Russians to do."
* It is worth noting in this context that General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of newly liberated France, had visited Moscow in December 1944 to sign a Franco-Soviet friendship treaty. De Gaulle, cynical by nature, saw completely through Stalin, later describing him as a cunning tyrant with grand ambitions and dedicated to deception; de Gaulle bluntly rejected as dishonorable Soviet arguments that France recognize the Lublin Committee as the legitimate government of Poland.
During the dinner that followed discussions, Khrushchev later wrote that Stalin unusually got roaring drunk, making jokes about arresting various generals and officials, and even saying that he ought to send his own interpreter to the Gulag since "he knew too much." De Gaulle commented in his dry, acid way that none of the guests at the dinner seemed very amused by these jokes.
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