World War II Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees Read Free Book Online Page A

German attack on Poland which had led us into war’. The three leaders then gathered around a map of Poland to discuss the border the Soviets wanted – along what Eden called ‘the Ribbentrop-Molotov line’ and what Molotov swiftly remarked ‘was generally called the Curzon line’. ‘Call it whatever you like’, said Stalin.
    After a ‘prolonged’ study of the map, Churchill announced that he ‘liked the picture’ and that he ‘would say to the Poles that if they did not accept it they would be fools, and he would remind them that but for the Red Army they would have been utterly destroyed’. Crucially, Churchill then volunteered that he believed the new Polish state would be ‘friendly’ to Russia. Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union wanted a ‘friendly’ Poland. This apparently throwaway line from the British Prime Minister was almost as damaging to the interests of the Polish government in exile as the unilateral decision of the Big Three to shift their country to the West. The problem was that it was impossible to define ‘friendly’ – if the Poles ever did anything the Soviets disliked, they could be accused of acting in an ‘unfriendly’ way. The only way the Polish state could be permanently ‘friendly’ was to be a puppet of the Soviet Union. And so it was eventually to prove.
    The meeting then moved on to the final subject to be discussedat Tehran – the question of the future of Germany. Everyone present wanted to break up post-war Germany – the dispute was over the question of how many pieces it should be split into. Churchill suggested that Prussia, which he saw as the most dangerous region – should be detached from the rest. Roosevelt then launched into a plan to split Germany into five separate parts, plus two areas, the Kiel Canal and the Ruhr, which would be controlled by the international community. It was an astonishing idea; and one that came as a shock to Churchill, who had never heard such a wide-ranging plan suggested before.
    Stalin, not surprisingly, liked Roosevelt's proposal more than he did Churchill's. He wanted Germany so fragmented as to present no military threat for the foreseeable future. Churchill, on the other hand, was alert to the danger of central Europe lacking strong states. Who, he must have been thinking, would stand in the way of the Red Army and the English Channel, once the war was won and the Americans had withdrawn?
    The policy of the Big Three on the future of Germany – unlike the future of Poland – was not resolved at Tehran, although the relative positions of each of the protagonists had certainly been demonstrated. After this final meeting Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin attended a farewell dinner, said their goodbyes and left for home early the following morning.
    The meetings at Tehran had lasted only from 28 November to 1 December, but in these four days historic decisions had been taken. The conferences that followed, at Yalta and Potsdam, would both exist in the shadow of Tehran. It would have proved virtually impossible – even if Roosevelt and Churchill had desired it – to backtrack on the fundamental issues of principle that had been decided here in Iran; most notably, of course, that Poland would shift to the West.
    But Tehran is important not just for the epic political and military questions that were resolved, but also for the way both Churchill and Roosevelt – in particular Roosevelt – sought to make themselves amenable to Stalin. Partly, as we have seen, they felt it was essential to get on with the Soviet leader. Red Armysoldiers were still fighting the majority of the German forces – indeed, they would continue to do so until the end of the war in Europe. And during 1943 more Soviet lives were lost at Kursk and elsewhere on the Eastern Front than the British lost in the entire war. The Western Allies thus needed the Soviets to keep fighting – and consequently to keep dying.
    But there was also a sense in which