continent, in the air, on the sea, under the sea, on land, under every kind of regime.
After the United States, Britain in 1945 was probably the most powerful nation on the face of the devastated earth, with the biggest empire in the history of the world. The Soviets had to remember that in any confrontation with Britain, huge resources might be available to Britain from Canada and the USA, who were able to pour billions of dollars in food, munitions, and advanced equipment into her ports. The Royal Navy was the strongest on earth, after the American fleet; the Royal Air Force enormous and highly skilled; the armies numbering millions of men, well-equipped and flush with victory.
There was recent and powerful precedent for the British to resist Russian influence in Europe. Britain had actually sent troops and ships against Russia twice before in recent times, once against the Tsar in the Crimea, and once again during the Russian Civil War. To assist them in a land battle, the British could call on more than two million German captives in their possession in the summer of 1945. The warlike spirit was still strong in the land. Churchill in May 1945 was keeping many German prisoners ready for battle, in their original formations, with all their guns and other equipment intact.7 For the British of yore, personified in Churchill, the commitment to Poland would have been a matter of Britain’s national honour, and her ancient pride – a test of British mettle. To fulfil it by driving out Russia would have been a stern duty. But the Empire’s power depended largely on the willingness of the Canadians and Americans to go on subsidizing the British. Billions of Canadian dollars had already been sent, billions more were on their way to shore up the British economy. How long would it last?
Mackenzie King, the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, who had been arrested and jailed for leading a Canadian rebellion against the British in 1837, was opposed to an Empire dominated by the British. On a visit to Downing Street in September 1945 to receive British petitions for food and money, he wrote: ‘It is strange that Mackenzie [his grandfather] should have gone to Downing Street to try and get self-government, Canada’s grievances remedied and that Downing Street today should be asking me to come to help Britain with her difficult problems.’8 By King’s decision, Canada would not send the troops Churchill had wanted to help the British reconquer south-east Asia. But his objections went deeper than that. ‘I was thinking a day or two ago, that I had first my grandfather’s work to carry on; then Mulock’s work, Laurier’s work, and now my own work. All on this one theme, seeking to have the organization of Empire such that it will hold together by its several supports rather than all fall asunder through the efforts of Tory imperialists to create a vaster Empire than has been, thereby sowing the seeds of another world war.’9
Bankrupt, short of food, weary of war, lacking warlike allies, the British made no threats against the Russians. Most of the imperial grandeur was swept overboard like cannon from the deck of a listing ship. The guarantee to Poland was ignored by all but the Poles.
The Americans had made no guarantee to Poland, but they felt strong sympathy for her people, and the politicians were keenly aware of the large Polish vote in the USA. Herbert Hoover had toured the US raising millions of dollars for relief to Poland in both the wars. By March 1945, even Roosevelt, invincibly credulous about Stalin, was beginning to wonder if the Soviets had any intention of accepting Anglo-Saxon ideas for sharing world power, or of making the United Nations work. By September 1945, when the Japanese war was over and the atomic cloud had spread around the world, no one could doubt that the Soviets were already breaking all their promises about Poland. The Western sympathizers in Poland were being arrested and murdered, the communist Lublin Poles controlled Poland in the interests of the Soviets.
The Americans now had a strong complaint against the Soviets, and a strong ally in Britain. They would gain much in other parts of the world by bringing the Soviets to heel. The Soviets threatened the growing American oil interests in the Middle East; they were helping Mao Tse-tung in China against the pro-American Chiang Kai-shek, and communist spies were caught stealing secrets from the highly advanced Canadian atomic development programme.
If the British and Americans had issued a joint ultimatum to the Soviets over Poland, one choice for Stalin would have been war against the most powerful nations in the world, whose aid was now essential to the Soviets just to keep the nation from starving. The USSR, strong compared to Germany, was feeble against the West. The USSR had huge armies in Europe, but much of their food came from Canada and the United States. Their soldiers marched into battle in fifteen million pairs of North American boots. Over 21,000 of their planes, half a million trucks, 12,000 tanks, and one-third of their merchant shipping fleet, were made in Great Britain, Canada or the United States.10 Stalin said in 1943 that ‘without this equipment, we would lose this war’.11 Stalin’s train arrived at Berlin for the Potsdam Conference on Canadian rails; much Russian bread was made from wheat grown in Canada and the USA.12 Not only that, but there were revolts, insurrections and guerrilla movements in several places in the ramshackle Soviet confederation. There was guerrilla warfare in Poland and the Baltic countries; an uprising in the Ukraine; and low-grade protests in the army, in industry and in the Gulag, the Soviet administrative department responsible for maintaining prisons and labour camps. Not only did the allies know the full extent of the supplies the Soviets needed, they also had a statistical picture of the destruction that the country had suffered. In February 1945, the US State Department issued a confidential summary of the state of the Soviet economy, under the title ‘Outline of Factors Determining Russia’s Interest in American Credits’. The summary showed that the Allies judged that the Soviets had lost 25 per cent of their stock of fixed capital (i.e. buildings, dams, roads, equipment, bridges). The losses in inventory (stocks of food, clothing, etc.) would add approximately another 6 per cent to that. In all, the Soviets had lost close to one-third of inventory and equipment, plus millions of young men.13
In addition to the millions of men in their own world-wide forces, the British and Americans in the summer of 1945 held over six million German troops in their camps, while the Soviets had just over two million. The British and American armies nearly matched the Soviets in numbers, and they were far better supplied and more mobile. A lot of the Soviet transport was still drawn by horses, but the armies of the West were the first in the history of the world to be propelled entirely by engines. And the Westerners had the most powerful weapon ever known – the atomic bomb. Why, with the danger of the Soviets plain to see in every sphere, did these two victorious powers not stand firm while they were so superior? For the British, Poland was a matter of honour; for both British and Americans, Poland was a useful pretext to deliver an annihilating lesson to the Soviets. Why did they not do it?
First, there was the fear that Germany might rise from the wreckage and challenge the democracies again. This fear soon diminished as the Allies took over in Germany, then finally disappeared into the antagonism between communism and democracy. But even more important was the desire in the democracies to find a better way than war to settle the hostilities of the world.
They had tried once before with the League of Nations, they would try once again with the UN. But the UN could not work without the USSR. To bring the Soviets into the world community of nations – to create that sense of community in the first place – the democracies sacrificed eastern Europe, including Poland and eastern Germany, and placed their honour and their power in the balance.
Their policy was partly in Churchill’s plan to share power with the Soviets in Europe,14 partly a determination to crush Germany under an occupation so heavy that it could never again threaten the supremacy of the West. It was in the remnants of Wilson’s 14 Points; it was partly in Mackenzie King’s ‘law of peace, work and health’; and it was partly in the determination of Roosevelt and other American leaders to ‘get along with’ the Soviets.
But there were people in the West who believed that the Second World War was only the crusade against Hitler. Victory was all, Poland scarcely mattered, the Soviet threat meant little. After the war, these few powerful people kept the war going in the form of camouflaged vengeance. On the Western side, this vengeance
