Michael Dobbs,Six Months in 1945: FDR,Stalin,Churchill,and Truman – From World War to Cold War

Reviewed by: Martijn Lak, Leiden University, The Netherlands

When German forces crossed the Polish border on 1 September, 1939, thus initiating the Second World War, the relationship between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, had been strained for years, to say the least. Almost two years later, one day after the German invasion of Stalin’s Russia on 22 June, 1941, senator Harry Truman – the future US president – declared, that ‘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, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word’. However, on 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II at last. After Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States a few days later, Washington, London and Moscow all of a sudden were allies. As Richard Overy wrote in Why the Allies Won, that the Western powers had shunned the Soviet dictatorship before 1941 much as they did Nazi Germany. To everyone it was clear that the alliance was forged out of pure self-interest. It survived only as long as each side needed the other to help achieve victory.

When Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin travelled to Yalta on the Crimea in February 1945, it was clear the war against Nazi Germany was won, and that it was a question of when and not if Japan would suffer the same fate. In Yalta, in some of the former palaces of the Tsars, the leaders of the Big Three discussed numerous post-war matters, although affairs were determined and formed by the still ongoing war. FDR, by then terminally ill, and Stalin got along reasonably well, and for most of the time the same applied to Churchill. Within six months, however, relations between their countries had deteriorated to a large extent. Already at the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945, where the fate of former Nazi Germany was decided, the (former) allies could only agree to disagree. What happened in those six months? Can the source of the Cold War be found here?

Those are some of the questions posed (and answered) here by Michael Dobbs. Dobbs, who previously wrote books on the Cuban missile crisis and the end of the Soviet Union, has a great writing style with a keen eye for detail, which offers a very pleasant and well-informed study, a true page turner. The description of the various persons involved, as well as of the places where they met or events that took place, brings alive those six months of 1945, which to a large extent determined the future of the world for the next decades. The author has a sharp eye for the ideological, economic and political differences between FDR and his successor Truman, Churchill and Stalin, as well as for the totally different experience of the Second World War in their respective countries. Although they were all victors and the Red Army had conquered the very capital of Nazi Germany itself, the Soviet Union was in ruins after the conflict ended. The enormous destruction done to the Soviet Union at the hands of the Wehrmacht ensured that the Russians would want Germany to be punished severely. This also meant that they wanted huge reparation payments, about which the Americans were not at all enthusiastic.

As Dobbs writes, during the first months of the Soviet occupation of Germany, ‘400,000 railway wagons of war booty were dispatched from Germany to Russia, containing, among other things, 60,149 pianos, 941,605 pieces of furniture, 3,338,348 pairs of shoes, and 20 million litres of alcohol’ (314). Soon after the Second World War, and in fact as early as the Conference of Yalta itself, the differences between the Allies became manifest. Dobbs analyses them with great precision and knowledge, all the time showing how different opinions were, and how understandable was the division between the leaders of the US, USSR and Britain. Dobbs ends on 15 August, with the Japanese surrender after two atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to Secretary of State Henry Stimpson, the atomic bomb gave America ‘a royal straight flush, and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it’. The poker-playing analogy was calculated to appeal to Truman, who liked nothing better than to sit around the card table in the evening with his friends (238). The explosion of the first atomic bomb indeed changed the future of warfare and international relations. After August 1945, the world was transformed. Apart from some minor mistakes (the Ardennes region is not in eastern France, p. 29), Dobbs has written a fascinating study, which all interested in the closing months of World War II cannot afford to miss.