The Grand Alliance: A Marriage of Convenience - Case Study Example

 The Grand Alliance: A Marriage of Convenience? World war II may be remembered in modern history as the most terrible war. Fifty years after its end, the world still lives with the unfolding of its consequences- the rise and decline of the Soviet Union, the end of German aspirations to European dominance, the demise of Western colonialism, a forty five year East-West Cold War and its aftermath, the rebirth of Imperial Japan as a bastion of liberal capitalism, the rise of China as East Asia's dominant power. Whether in the continued tension between Japan and China or in the turbulence of the Middle East, the war's legacies loom large in all our lives (Keegan, 2005). On January 1, 1942, three and a half weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China signed the Declaration of the United Nations in Washington, DC. Twenty-two smaller countries soon joined them. The document, never submitted to Congress for approval, had scant official standing. One of its four major signatories, the Soviet Union, remained aloof from the fight against Japan, although Japanese aggression had brought the United States to war (Keegan, 2005). From the beginning, the military effort was to focus on Germany, already at war with Britain and the Soviet Union. The United States agreed in considering Germany the most dangerous member of the Axis alliance, Japan a secondary threat, and Italy (the third Axis power) militarily insignificant. The United Nations Declaration made specific reference to the principles of the Atlantic Charter, a statement of joint war aims, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August, 1941 (Keegan, 2005). Neither a treaty nor an executive agreement, it likewise had no official standing beyond that of a press release. No formal treaty of alliance between the three great powers in the "Grand Alliance"- as Churchill later named it, was ever concluded or even seriously attempted. From the beginning, the Grand Alliance possessed neither a binding diplomatic agreement nor common postwar goals. For this reason, the human tendency to embody nations in their leaders seems especially appropriate and may serve as an organizing principle for this lesson (Michael, 1999). Roosevelt clearly expected the United States to emerge from the war as the world's strongest power and hoped to lead America away from its isolationist tendencies toward a world leadership that would not include territorial gain but would mean dominance somewhat akin to that exercised by Britain in the nineteenth century. He saw himself during the war as a mediator between Prime Minister Churchill ("the Old Tory") and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ("the Old Bolshevik"). Roosevelt's liberal and anti-imperialist outlook notwithstanding, the United States clearly saw itself as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere and intended to defend that position (Michael, 1999). Churchill assuredly believed in the liberal principles of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter, especially for Europeans, but he was also committed to the preservation of the prewar British Empire, the most endangered portions of which were in Asia: India, Burma, and Malaya. Their peoples he deemed unready for self-government, in contrast to those in the predominantly British-colonized Commonwealth nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and (along with Dutch Boers) South Africa. Roosevelt conversely thought the days of European empire had been brought to an end by the war and saw it as no part of the American mission to defend either the British, French, or Dutch holdings in South and Southeast Asia (Denning, 1986). Churchill had long been hostile to the Soviet Union, although he was willing to accept it as an ally of convenience. Throughout the war, he would be an advocate of protecting the independence of Poland and other East Central European states from Soviet dominance. Roosevelt, by contrast, was much more open toward the Soviet state and clearly hoped to maintain the alliance once the war had ended. However, Stalin had been absolute ruler of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) for more than a decade and a half. During that time, he had ruthlessly eliminated any opposition (Michael, 1999). The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had been bitter enemies through the 1930s. The major Western European democracies, Great Britain and France, nonetheless had deplored Soviet totalitarianism about as much as the Nazi variety. Lacking a Western European alliance, Stalin negotiated a treaty with Germany. Signed in August 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Pact contained a secret rider in which the two powers agreed to divide Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe between them (Michael, 1999). Churchill and Britain embraced the USSR as an essential ally against a common enemy. Stalin had an equal need for Anglo-American assistance. Thrown together by the vagaries of history, the three nations all needed each other. The United States, already sending aid to Britain under the Lend-Lease program, quickly concluded that the Soviets could hold the line against the German invaders and began sending them Lend-Lease shipments. Churchill, however, remained sceptical of the USSR throughout the war and hoped to limit its territorial gains (Keegan, 2005). The British proposals reflected more than narrow self-interest. They were also motivated by the terrible losses Britain had suffered a generation earlier in the four-year trench warfare of World War I. Americans had been involved in extensive World War I land conflict for only a few months; they tended to remember only advance and victory. The differences in experience led to one of the early issues that had to be settled between London and Washington—the British "peripheral" military strategy versus the American plan of a buildup of forces in Britain, then a massive attack across the English Channel into the heart of Northern Europe (Keegan, 2005). When 1942 began, the Soviet Union had driven German forces back from Moscow. By the spring, however, a German offensive toward the oil fields of Southern Russia pushed Soviet forces back. The Soviets pressed hard for a second front in Western Europe, and President Roosevelt promised it to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov in May, 1942. They also demanded much-increased Lend-Lease supplies from the United States. As the year progressed, however, no significant military action was forthcoming. American-British Arctic supply convoys, ravaged by German air and sea power, had to be suspended in the summer (Keegan, 2005). It was natural enough for the pathologically suspicious Soviet leadership to believe that, at best, their Western allies were unreliable; at worst, deliberately letting the USSR take the brunt of the German offensive in the hope the two forces would bleed each other to death. By September, 1942, Soviet forces had been pushed back to the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River. Stalingrad became the focus of a desperate battle that lasted from September, 1942, into January, 1943 (Keegan, 2005). German and Russian diplomats are known to have held discussions in Stockholm. Japan encouraged the talks in the hope that a Soviet exit from the war would force the US to concentrate on the European theatre. (American forces, despite the Germany First policy, had managed to inflict decisive defeats on the Japanese. By mid-1943, they were pushing the enemy back on the island of New Guinea.) It appears that Stalin would have settled only for a return to the Soviet borders of June, 1941. Hitler, who still occupied large amounts of Soviet territory, was unwilling to give up the Ukraine. An ever-growing flow of American aid sustained the increasingly mighty Soviet war effort. Stalin apparently decided that total victory, however costly, was attainable. By late fall, he was ready to confer with his Western counterparts (Rzeshevsky, 1996). In November, 1943, the Big Three leaders met in Tehran, in Soviet-occupied Iran. Much of the discussion involved military strategy. Churchill pressed the British case for continued offensives in the Mediterranean, while Roosevelt and Stalin insisted on a second front in Northern Europe. Inevitably, they prevailed. Britain, by now, was clearly the junior partner in the Grand Alliance. The conference set May, 1944, as the target date for operation OVERLORD, the invasion of France; Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would undertake a major offensive on the Eastern Front at the same time. The USSR also pledged to join the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany (Rzeshevsky, 1996). Tehran was important in other ways. The three powers reached general agreement on postwar boundary lines, essentially ratifying all the territorial conquests the Soviet Union had made between September, 1939 and June, 1941. There was also general agreement on a full military occupation of Germany with each of the allies having its own zone of responsibility. The conferees discussed permanently partitioning Germany into three or more smaller states. The Soviet Union agreed in principle to Roosevelt's plans (floated with Molotov in May, 1942) for a United Nations organization to replace the League of Nations, with the understanding that its core would consist of "Four Policemen" (the United States, Britain, the USSR, and China), primarily responsible for maintaining the war settlement (Rzeshevsky, 1996). Further south, the Soviets advanced with much more dispatch. One by one, Germany's satellite allies and puppet regimes in Eastern Europe either surrendered or were overwhelmed. At the end of 1944, most of the region was under firm Soviet military occupation with civilian administrations installed by the Red Army (Rzeshevsky, 1996). This situation, if made permanent, would constitute a major affront to the ideals that both American and British leaders had invoked to justify the war. Moreover, it represented a potential threat to Britain's Mediterranean interests. Conferring with Stalin in Moscow (October, 1944), Churchill proposed the division of southeastern Europe into Soviet and British spheres of influence. Russia would have predominance in Rumania and Bulgaria, the British in Greece, which historically had been an area of British hegemony. The two countries would have joint 50-50 influence in Hungary and Yugoslavia. Stalin quickly accepted the deal. It is unlikely that he ever intended to give the British much of a voice in the 50-50 countries, but he would refrain from sending Soviet troops into Greece, where Britain would establish itself in early 1945. The Churchill-Stalin agreement excluded Poland and Czechoslovakia; scribbled on a piece of note paper, the accord was never formalized. The United States never recognized it. Indeed, it would have been a serious political liability for Roosevelt, campaigning for his fourth term as it was negotiated (Rzeshevsky, 1996). A final issue of increasing urgency was the future treatment of Germany. At the second Quebec Conference (September, 1944), Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., argued for the deindustrialization of Germany and its transformation wholly into an agricultural state. Churchill, among others, objected that in practice the result would be mass starvation and genocide. Roosevelt, at first favourably inclined, backed away as details leaked to the public during the presidential campaign. All the same, American policy makers never formulated any clear alternative to Morgenthau's vision. Agreements among the Big Three on reparations and occupation policy immediately after the war would be in fact loosely consistent with it (Rzeshevsky, 1996). Poland was the critical test case. The conferees reaffirmed the decision—first reached at the Tehran Conference—that Poland's eastern boundary would be relocated to the west. They further agreed that the Poles would receive German territory in compensation, but did not precisely specify the new Polish western boundary. They also agreed that the pro-Soviet Polish government established at Lublin would be reorganized to give representation to all democratic Polish factions. World War II had started with the Nazi invasion of Poland, giving both the United States and Great Britain a special interest in that nation's reestablishment as a liberal-democratic state. The large Polish-American vote in the United States underscored that interest in a way that no American political leader could ignore (Stoler, 2006). Despite President Roosevelt's upbeat report on Yalta to Congress and the American people, key agreements, especially those pertaining to Poland, quickly unwound. Roosevelt's sudden death (April 12, 1945) complicated the situation. His successor, Harry S. Truman, demanded Soviet compliance on the promise of democratic politics in Poland. Faced with the arrest of Polish leaders and Soviet questioning of UN voting procedures at the San Francisco conference, Truman sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow to meet with Stalin. Hopkins could not undo the increasing Soviet dominance in Poland, but he did achieve Stalin's agreement to go ahead with the establishment of the United Nations. By then, the USSR was also moving to control other nations covered by the Declaration on Liberated Europe (Stoler, 2006). The final Big Three meeting (Potsdam, July 17-August 2, 1945) would achieve resolution of none of these issues, although its closing communiqué put as good a face as possible on the results. A decade later, Europe would be divided between a Western Bloc with the United States and Britain at its core (NATO) and a Soviet Bloc (the Warsaw Pact). One can only ponder whether the Grand Alliance might somehow have endured after the war with different leadership, or was naturally fated to dissolve in the manner of the many victorious alliances of the past. For any reason, the grand alliance had been nothing more than the coming together of three powers with different long term objectives linked to their different ideologies to solve a potential common problem. Hence, the alliance has been, as with Queen Victoria and others in history, a marriage of convenience. Word Count: 2,315 Works Cited: Denning, Margarette. Sino-American Alliance in World War II. Peter Lang AG. 1986. Keegan, John. The Second World War. Penguin. 2005. Michael, Jabara. 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Ivan R. Dee. 1999. Rzeshevsky . War and Diplomacy: The Making of the Grand Alliance. Routledge. 1996. Stoler, Mark. Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. The University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Read More