America's Retreat From Victory

by Senator Joe McCarthy


CONTENTS

  1. Background Leading Up to the Marshall Speech...1
  2. Marshall and the Second Front.................14
  3. The Struggle for Eastern Europe...............23
  4. The Yalta Sellout.............................38
  5. Marshall and Stillwell
  6. The Marshall Policy for China
  7. The Marshall Mission to China
  8. The Marshall Plan
  9. The Marshall-Acheson Strategy for the Future

BACKGROUND

LEADING UP TO THE MARSHALL SPEECH

On June 14, 1951, I reviewed the public career of George

Catlett Marshall from the beginning of World War II before

the United States Senate. It was an exhaustive review, running

to 72,000 words, drawn from the acknowledged sources of

this period.

Among the questions raised by that speech were these:

What were McCarthy's motives' Why did McCarthy single out

the Secretary of Defense and spend so much time preparing

such a searching documentation of his history?

Those questions recalled the advice given me by some of my

friends before I gave the history of George Marshall."

Don't do it, McCarthy," they said. "Marshall has been built

into such a great hero in the eyes of the people that you will

destroy yourself politically if you lay hands on the laurels of

this great man."

My answer to those well-meaning friends was that the

reason the world is in such a tragic state today is that too

many politicians have been doing only that which they consid-

er politically wise -- only that which is safe for their own

political fortunes.

My discussion of General Marshall's career arose naturally

and inevitably out of a long and anxious study of the retreat

from victory which this Administration has been beating since

1945. In company with so many of my fellow citizens I have

become alarmed and dismayed over our moral and material

enfeeblement.

The fact that 152 million American people are officially

asked by the party in power to adopt Marshall's global strategy

during a period of time when the life of our civiliza-

tion hangs in the balance would seem to make it imperative

that his complete record be subjected to the searching light of

public scrutiny.

As a backdrop for the history of Marshall which I gave on

1

June 14, there is the raw, harsh fact that since World War II

the free world has been losing 100 million people per year to

international Communism. If I had named the men responsible

for our tremendous loss, all of the Administration apologists

and the camp-following elements of press and radio led by the

Daily Worker would have Screamed "the Big Lie," 'lrresponsi-

ble," "smear," "Congressional immunity," etc., etc., etc. How-

ever; it was the Truman branch of the Democratic Party

meeting at Denver, Colorado, which named the men responsi-

ble for the disaster which they called a "great victory" -- Dean

Gooderham Acheson and George Catlett Marshall. By what

tortured reasoning they arrived at the conclusion that the loss

of 100 million people a year to Communism was a "great

victory," was unexplained.

The general picture of our steady, constant retreat from

victory, with the same men always found at the time and place

where disaster strikes America and success comes to Soviet

Russia, would inevitably have caused me, or someone else

deeply concerned with the history of this time, to document

the acts of those molding and shaping the history of the world

over the past decade. However, an occurrence during the

MacArthur investigation was the immediate cause of my deci-

sion to give the Senate and the country the history of Mar-

shall.

A deeply disturbed Senator from the Russell Committee

came to my office for information. "McCarthy," he said, "I

have always considered Marshall as one of our great heroes

and I am sure that he would knowingly do no wrong. But,

McCarthy," he said, "tell me who prejudiced the thinking of

this great man? Why, for example, did he keep from Roosevelt

the complete and correct intelligence reports at Yalta? Why

did he, as Roosevelt's military adviser, approve that Yalta

agreement which was drafted by Hiss, Gromyko, and Jebb?

Who persuaded him to disregard the intelligence report of 50

of his own officers, all with the rank of colonel or above -- an

intelligence report which urged a course directly contrary to

what was done at Yalta and confirmed at Potsdam?"

He handed a copy of that report to me and asked: "Why

did a man of Marshall's intelligence ignore such a report as

this compiled by 50 of his own top intelligence officers?" The

report, dated April 12, 1945, read as follows:

 

 

The entry of Soviet Russia into the Asiatic war would be

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a political event of world-shaking importance, the ill effect
of which would be felt for decades to come. Its military
significance at this stage of the war would be relatively un-
important * * * The entry of the Soviet Russia into the Asiatic
war would destroy America's position in Asia quite as effect-
ly as our own position is now destroyed in Europe east of
the Elbe and beyond the Adriatic.

If Russia enters the Asiatic war, China will certainly lose
her independence to become the Poland of Asia; Korea,
the Asiatic Rumania; Manchuria, the Soviet Bulgaria. Whe-
ther more than a nominal China would exist after the im-
pact of the Russia armies is felt is very doubtful. Chiang
may well have to depart and a Chinese Soviet government
may be installed in Nanking which we would have to recog-
nize.
To take a line of action which would save few lives now,
and only a little time -- at an unpredictable cost in lives
treasure, and honor in the future -- and simultaneously de-
stroy our ally China, would be an act of treachery that
would make the Atlantic Charter and our hopes for world
peace a tragic farce.
Under no circumstances should we pay the Soviet Union to
Destroy China. This would certainly injure the material and
moral position of the United States in Asia.

Marshall had ignored this report.

The Senator went on. "McCarthy," he said, "who of evil

allegiance to the Kremlin sold him on the disastrous Marshall

Mission to China, where Marshall described one of his own

acts as follows: 'As Chief-of-Staff I armed 39 anti-Communist

divisions. Now with a stroke of a pen I disarm them'?

"When that was done," he asked, "who then persuaded

Marshall to open Kalgan Mountain Pass, with the result that

the Chinese Communists could make contact with the Rus-

ians and receive the necessary arms and ammunition to

overrun all of China?

"McCarthy, who on earth could have persuaded Marshall

to side with Acheson and against American interests on the

question of Formosa and the use of the Chinese Nationalist

troops?"

Upon searching for the answers for the Senator, I found to

my surprise that no one had ever written the history of

Marshall -- Marshall, who, by the alchemy of propaganda,

became the "greatest living American" and the recently pro-

claimed "master of global strategy" by and for the party in

power. In view of the fact that the committee, the Congress,

3

and the American people were being called upon either to

endorse or reject Marshall's "global strategy," I felt it was

urgent that such a study be made and submitted to the

Congress and the people.

I decided that the record of Marshall's unbroken series of

decisions and acts, contributing so greatly to the strategy of

defeat, should be given not from the pens and lips of his

critics but from sources friendly to him. I drew on the written

record -- on the memoirs of the principal actors in the great

events of the last ten years. I drew heavily from the books out

of which the history of these times will be written for the next

500 years; I drew from the pens of Winston Churchill, Admir-

al William Leahy, Cordell Hull, Henry L. Stimson, James F.

Brynes, Sumner Welles, Edward Stettinius, Jr., Robert Sher-

wood, Hanson Baldwin, General H.H. Arnold, General Claire

Chennault, General Lucius Clay, General Mark Clark, Gener-

al John R. Deane, General Omar Bradley, and others. No

one of them alone was trying to or did give anything re-

motely approaching a complete record of Marshall. The

picture emerges, however, as we piece together their recollec-

tion of the events in which he figures -- oftentimes fragmen-

tary, never directly uncomplimentary, but when fitted

together, pointing unerringly to one conclusion.

It is from those sources, plus the State Department's record

taken from Marshall's own files, that the picture becomes

generally complete.

As I commenced to write this history of Marshall, one of the

first things that impressed me was that Marshall, one of the

most powerful men in the world during the past ten years, is

one of the least known public figures. He shuns publicity.

Back in 1943, Sidney Shalett, eulogizing Marshall in the New

York Times magazine, quoted him as having said: "No pub-

licity will do me no harm, but some publicity will do me no

good." This perhaps is why Marshall stands alone among the

wartime leaders in that he has never written his own memoirs

or allowed anyone else to write his story for him.

One of the criticisms of the June 14 speech was that it was

inadequate because of the omission of any references to Mar-

shall's history prior to the winter of 1941 and 1942. I think

this criticism is perhaps well taken. For that reason, I shall

here attempt to cover briefly the pertinent aspects of Mar-

shall's earlier history.

He was graduated from Virginia Military Institute and soon

4

thereafter entered the army as a second lieutenant. He served

creditably in World War I, finally at the end of that war

reaching a position on General Pershing's staff which brought

him the friendship of that great soldier. The postwar years are

more pertinent because, having reverted to his permanent rank

as Captain, Marshall underwent the usual disappointments

and the boredom of our peacetime army. In his case, the

disappointments were perhaps more grievous than with most

of his fellow officers.

In the American Mercury for March 1951, Walter Trohan

published a sketch of General Marshall's

career under the title "The Tragedy of George Marshall."

The article is a study of Marshall's army life prior to acces-

sion to the office of Chief of Staff. Trohan deals with what

must have been the gravest disappointment that befell Mar-

shall. This happened in 1933. According to Trohan, Marshall,

impatient over slow promotion, besought the inter-

cession of General Pershing with General Douglas MacArthur,

who was Chief of Staff. Trohan puts it:


McArthur was ready to oblige, but insisted that the promo-
tion go through regular channels. Pershing agreed, confident
Marshall could clear the hurdles. Friendly examination of
the Marshall record showed what his superiors regarded as
insufficient time with troops. MacArthur proposed to rem-
edy this, giving him command of the Eighth Regiment at
Fort Screven, Ga., one of the finest regiments in the army.
Marshall was moved up from lieutenant colonel to colo-
nal, but his way to a general's stars appeared to be blocked
forever when the Inspector General reported that under
one year of Marshal's command the Eighth Regiment had
dropped from one of the best regiments in the army to one
of the worst. MacArthur regretfully informed Pershing that
the report made promotion impossible. To this day Mar-
shall is uneasy in the presence of MacArthur.

A footnote to that version appears in the quasi-biography

written by Mrs. George C. Marshall in 1946 and published

under the title Together. After Colonel Marshall had been

removed from command at Fort Screven, he left far Fort

Moultrie 1n South Carolina. The residence of the Command-

ing Officer of that post was a large, rambling structure, replete

with 42 French doors Opening on two verandas. Mrs. Mar-

shall, as she reports it, had barely provided 325 yards of

curtains for the French doors when orders came transferring

her husband to Chicago as senior instructor of the Illinois

5

National Guard. Mrs. Marshall describes what ensued in these

words on page 18 of Together:


He [Colonel Marshall) wrote to General MacArthur, then
Chief of Staff, that be was making the first request for spec-
cial consideration that he had ever made while in the Army.
After four years as an instructor at Fort Benning, he felt it
would be fatal to his future if he was taken away from
troops and placed on detached service instructing again. He
asked that he might remain with his regiment...


We left for Chicago within a week. The family, my
daughter and two sons, waited in Baltimore until we could
find a place to live. Those first months in Chicago I shall
never forget. George had a gray, drawn look which I had never
seen before and have seldom seen since.

This was in 1933. Six years later, Marshall, who had been

relieved of the command of a regiment by Douglas MacAr-

thur, would be placed by Roosevelt in command of the entire

United States Army. What happened to change the unsuccess-

ful regimental commander into the first choice of the President

for the highest army post still remains somewhat shrouded in

mystery. Did Marshall rise during those six pears on sheer

merit? Was his military worth so demonstrated that he became

the inevitable choice for the Chief of Staff upon the retirement

of Malin Craig? Or were there political considerations that

turned failure into success?

During the early years of the late depression the army was

extensively employed by President Roosevelt in setting up his

social welfare projects. The army supplied much of the high

personnel for WPA. Many officers who there established con-

tact with Harry L. Hopkins later reaped high command as a

result. So it was with the CCC -- Civilian Conservation Corps.

At Fort Screven, Marshall had under his command the CCC

activities of Georgia and Northern Florida. At Moultrie he

directed the CCC in South Carolina. As we read Mrs. Mar-

shall's biography, we note that Marshall devoted care and

attention to his labors with the CCC. Mrs. Marshall wrote:

I accompanied him on many of his inspection trips to
these camps and always attended the opening of a new
camp, at which he made quite a gala occasion.

That year, one of the camps under Marshall's supervision

6

was rated the best in the United States. His activities in charge

of CCC camps commended Marshall to the favorable notice

of those persons in Washington interested in the CCC camps.

Among them were Mrs. Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and Au-

brey Williams, head of the National Youth Administration.

However short Colonel Marshall's record as a regimental

Commander may have fallen in the eyes of the Inspector

General and Chief of Staff, his CCC exertions made him

friends who perhaps were far more influential in his later

career.

After 1933, when Marshall failed to he promoted to general

because the Inspector General of the Army reported be was

incompetent to handle troops, Marshall apparently discovered

that there were other avenues to promotion and power outside

narrow military channels.

I think it is necessary, if we are fully to understand General

Marshall, to see the disappointed and frustrated 52-year-old

of 1933 in the background of the world-famous Chief of-Staff of 1945.

At what point and with whom did he forge

the alliances that suddenly were to propel him out of his

obscurity into high position in 1939? Marshall, incidentally, is

practically the only military man in the history of the world

who received high rank with such a lack of combat duties. I

know of no other general who served in the military through

as many wars as Marshall with less participation in the com-

bat of a single one.

In 1936 he became a brigadier and was appointed to

command the Seventh Infantry Brigade at Vancouver Bar-

racks, Washington, an old frontier post across the river from

Portland, Oregon. It was at Vancouver that Marshall first

reached the attention of the general public. His first appear-

ance in the New York Times Index occurs in the fall of 1936.

It grew out of the circumstances that the Soviet transpolar

fliers, headed for a reception in Oakland, landed instead on

the small airfield of Vancouver Barracks, where General Mar-

shall was the commanding officer.

General Marshall came to Washington in the summer of

1938 as Assistant Chief of Staff in charge of War Planning.

In less than a year's time, President Roosevelt sent for him to

announce that he was to succeed General Craig upon his

retirement as Chief of Staff in September. It came as a shock,

because the public had expected General Hugh Drum to be

appointed. Roosevelt had jumped Marshall over the heads of

7

20 major-generals and 14 senior brigadiers. The appointment

was generally accepted as a personal one. Roosevelt, it was

assumed, had followed his own judgment rather than

the consensus of high army authorities, active and retired. We

know from Robert Sherwood's book Roosevelt and Hopkins

that Hopkins favored Marshall's appointment. It was

also favored by Mrs. Roosevelt.

The part of General Marshall's career as Chief of Staff that

relates to the activities of the enemies of our country

has received too little notice. We know that the army, while

Marshall was Chief of Staff, commissioned known Commu-

nists during World War II.*

While Marshall was Chief of Staff, there occurred the

famous incident of the attempted destruction of the files,

wherein the Army, acting under the highest authority, set out

illegally to destroy the Army's counterintelligence files on sub-

versives, including civilians as well as officers and men. That

unlawful attempt to protect enemies of our country, men who

are by definition servants of Soviet interests was frustrated

only through the vigilance of Senator Styles Bridges of New

Hampshire. I do not know whether the motion so to protect

Communists in the army originated with General Marshall. I

do know that it could hardly have reached the stage of action

without his approval.

This generally hits the high points in Marshall's history up

to the point where I picked up in my speech of June 14.

However, I note that in the history of Marshall covering the

past ten years, I omitted a number of points of some interest

during his tenure as Secretary of State. For example, during

this time a Senate committee sent him a confidential report,

which is here reproduced:

CONFIDENTIAL

June 10, 1947

Memorandum to Secretary of State George C. Marshall

It becomes necessary due to the gravity of the situation

to call your attention to a condition that developed and still

flourishes in the State Department under the administration

of Dean Acheson.

It is evident that there is a deliberate, calculated program

being carried out not only to Protect Communist personnel

* Special Committee of the Committee on Military Affairs, House of

Representatives, February-March hearings, pp. 3591-3593.

8

in high places to reduce security and intelligence pro-

tection to a nullity.

Regarding the much-publicized MARZANI case, the evi-

dence brought out at his trial was well known to State

Department officers, who ignored it and refused to act for

a full year.

MARANZI and several other Department officials, with

full knowledge of the State Department, and with Gov-

ernment time and money, promoted a scheme called PRES-

ENTATION, Inc., which contracted with a Communist

dominated organization to disseminate propaganda.

Security objections to these and other even more danger-

ous developments were rebuked by high administrative

officials; and there followed the substitution of unqualified

men for the competent, highly respected personnel who

theretofore held the intelligence and security assignments

in the Department. The new chief of Controls is a man

utterly devoid of background and experience for the job

who is, and at the time of his appointment was known to

those who appointed him to be a cousin and close associate

of a suspected Soviet espionage agent. The next develop-

ment was the refusal of the FBI, G-2, ONI. and other

federal agencies to continue the wholehearted cooperation

they had for years extended to the State Department.

On file in the Department is a copy of a preliminary re-

port of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United

States which involves a large number of State Department

employees, some in high official positions. This report has

been challenged and ignored by those charged with the re-

sponsibility of administering the Department, with the ap-

parent tacit approval of Mr. Acheson. Should this case

break before the State Department acts, it will be a national

disgrace.

Voluminous files are on hand in the Department proving

the connection of State Department employees and officials

with this Soviet espionage ring. Despite this, only two per-

sons, one Of whom is MARZANI, were released under the

McCarran rider of their subversive activity. [Nine

other named persons] are only a few of the hundreds now

employed in varying capacities who are protected and al-

lowed to remain despite the fact that their presence is an

obvious hazard to national security. There is also the exten-

sive employment in highly classified positions of admitted

homosexuals, who are historically known to be security

risks.

The War and Navy Departments have been thwarted for

a year in their efforts to carry out the German Scientist

program. They are blocked by one man in the State De-

 

9

partment, a protege of Acheson named --, who is

also the chief instrument in the subverting of the overall

security program. This deplorable condition runs all the way up and down

the line. Assistant Secretary Braden also surrounded him-

self with men like----- and -----, who bears a notori-

ous international reputation, The network also extends into

the office of Assistant Secretary Benton.

Committee on Appropriations

United States Senate

[Signatures of Committee members]

This report was completely ignored by Marshall. He failed

to take any action of any kind on it. In fact, he did not even

give the Committee the courtesy of acknowledging the report.

He did act, however, and very promptly, in another case.

On Friday, June 16, 1948, while was Secretary of

State, Robert C. Alexander, who was employed in the Visa

Division of the State Department, testified under oath that

Communists were being allowed to enter the United States

under the aegis of the United Nations. Marshall immediately

denied the truth of this statement and set up a committee

which denounced Alexander's allegations as "irresponsible and

untrue."

On September 9, 1948, Alexander received a letter from the

State Department which contained the following:

The Department proposes to take appropriate disciplinary
actions against you... for misconduct in office and dere-
liction of duty.


The intended action grows out of your testimony and infer-
ences arising from your statements made before the staff
of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization,
Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate.

On June 30, 1949, Senator McCarran wrote Admiral Hil-

lenkoetterr, who was then head of the Central Intelligence

Agency, to inquire whether Communists actually were coming

into the country through the United Nations. He wrote as

follows:

Dear Admiral Hillenkoetter;

There is attached to this letter a list of the names of 100

persons.

This is a partial list of those to whom visas have

10

been issued for admission into the United States either as

affiliates of international organizations or as officials or

employees of foreign governments, and their families....

Many of the names given in McCarran'a letter were names

which had previously been referred to by Mr. Alexander.

I now quote two pertinent paragraphs from Admiral Hillen-

koetter's answer:

Thirty-two of the individuals named in your attached list

have reportedly or allegedly been in active work

for the intelligence services of their respective countries.

Twenty-nine of the individuals named in your attached

Letters are high-ranking Commumst Party officials.

Shortly thereafter, Admiral Hillenkoetter was removed as

head of the Central Intelligence Agency and assigned to a

post of duty in the Western Pacific.

Another incident in the Marshall history, omitted from the

June 14 speech, is described by George Morgenstern in his

book Pearl Harbor as follows:

The key witness on the "winds" message, Capt. Safford,

received special attention from Sonnett and Hewitt, but

steadfastly stuck to his story that the "winds" signal had

been intercepted, that be bad handled it, and that he had

seen that it reached his superiors. (pp. 202-203)

The "winds" message was a Japanese coded message as to

the time and target of their attack.

Morgenstern then describes the pressure put upon Safford

to change his testimony. On page 204, the following is found:

Despite all this pressure upon him, Safford, when he was

called as a witness before the congressional committee on

February 1, 1946, opened his statement with the flat as-

sertion: "There was a 'winds' message. It meant war -- and

we knew it meant war."

Safford said that the 'Winds" message was part of a

Japanese overseas news broadcast from station J-A-P in

Tokyo on Thursday, December 4, 1941, at 8:30 am

Washington time.

According to Morgenstern, page 216, Safford testified that

he had been told by W. F. Friedman, chief army cryptoana-

11

lyst, that the 'winds" message had been destroyed prior to the

Pearl Harbor investigation "on direct orders from Chief of

Staff Marshall" However, for some mysterious reason, Fried-

man was never called either to support or repudiate this

testimony of Safford's.

Another interesting point brought out by Morgenstern on

Pages 201 and 202 was that Marshall, fearing that Thomas E.

Dewey, in the 1944 campaign, was about to expose Marshall's

part in the Pearl Harbor disaster, sent to him a staff officer

with letters from Marshall, and persuaded Dewey that such an

exposure would inform Japan that we had broken her code

and would thereby impair our military efforts. Dewey was

apparently convinced and, being a loyal American, did not

mention this matter during the campaign. On page 202, Mor-

genstern points out that this was a deliberate deception prac-

ticed upon Dewey, because Marshall knew the Germans had

found out as early as 1941 that we had broken the Japanese

code and had so informed the Japanese.

Incidentally, I do not know what has happened to Captain

Safford, but I do not recall having read of his being promot-

ed.

Another item of interest in regard to Marshall is found in

the Readers Digest of January 1944.

The late Frederick C. Painton was describing an interview

had with General Marshall by 60 Anglo-American correspon-

dents in Algiers:

A door opened, a hush fell, General Marshall walked in.

He looked around the room, his eyes calm, his face im-

passive. "To save time," he said, "I'm going to ask each of

you what questions you have in mind" His eyes turned to

the fist correspondent. "What's your question?' A pene-

trating query was put; General Marshall nodded and went

on to the next man - and so around the room, until 60 cor-

respondents had asked challenging questions ranging from

major strategy to technical details of the war on a dozen

fronts.

General Marshall looked off into space for perhaps 30

seconds. Then he began. For nearly 40 minutes he spoke.

His talk was a smooth, connected, briliantly clear narrative

that encompassed the war. And this narrative, smooth

enough to be a chapter in a book, included a complete

answer to every question we had asked.

But what astounded us most was this: as he reached the

point in his narrative which dwelt upon a specific question,

12

he looked directly at the man who had asked the question!

Afterward I heard many comments from the correspon-

dents. Some said they had just encountered the greatest

military mind in history. Others exclaimed over the en-

cydopedic detail Marshall could remember. All agreed on

one thing: "That's the most brilliant interview I have ever

attended in my life."

The above interview becomes extremely interesting when compared

to Marshall's inability to recall what he was doing on

the morning of Pearl Harbor. Originally, Marshall testified

that he was out horseback riding and for that reason could not

be contacted. Later, he testified his memory had been re-

freshed and that he actually had not been horseback riding but

was at home with his wife. The third version of where the

Army Chief of Staff was on that fateful morning is contained

in Arthur Upton Pope's book Litvinoff, in which the diary

account of Litvinoff's trip from Russia to the United States

shows that Marshall was meeting Litvinoff at the airport on

Pearl Harbor morning. While the question of whether Mar-

was riding horseback, or with hid wife, or with Litvinoff

seems unimportant today, it does form a very interesting

comparison of Marshall's memory on these two occasions.

From here we proceed to the history of Marshall which I

gave on June 14, 1951.

 

13

Chapter 2

MARSHALL AND THE SECOND FRONT

 

I BEGIN MY review of George Catlett Marshall's history with

the winter of 1941 and 1942, when the comprehensive out-

lines of Anglo-American strategy were drawn. During the

Christmas holidays of 1941 Winston Churchill, attended by

his military advisers, came to Washington and held a series of

conferences at the White House with President Roosevelt and

his military advisers. Japan had struck at Pearl Harbor on the

7th of December. Our fortunes were then joined with those of

the British and the lesser powers engaged against Japan and

Germany. We faced, for the first time in our history, global

responsibilities. We were everywhere on the defensive. The

British occupied a precarious foothold in Egypt. We still held

Corregidor and Bataan, although the end there was in sight.

Singapore had not yet fallen, but the Japanese were well

advanced in their southward drive. Germany, master of the

continent as far as the Pyrenees and the North Cape, was still

marching toward the east into Russia.

The President and the Prime Minister, with their military

counselors, agreed then upon a strategic plan embracing the

globe. Included in this plan was a provision for the invasion

of the mainland of Europe at some time during 1943. It was

rightly considered that we would lack the men and the equip-

ment to cross the Channel before 1943. What came to be

known as the second front was allotted its appropriate place

in the world-wide scale as this conference came to a close in

the middle of January. It was at this time that the enormously

destructive battle of the Atlantic began -- the ruthless subma-

rine warfare aimed at our shipping -- which was to hamper

our war effort far mere than the conferees at the White

House had expected.

The Soviet Union, its armies reeling back, had been be-

seeching the British since the preceding summer to attack

Germany across the Channel as a means of relieving their dire

pressure. After the White House conference known as Arcadia

ended, the efforts of the Russians to promote a diversion in

Western Europe were redoubled. The pressure was not

14

alone maintained against our government; it took the form

of public propaganda, in which the Communists both of

England and America, and their friends and well-wishers, took

a leading part.

Sometime between the end of the Arcadia Conference and

the first of April, General Marshall, who was then, as we

remember, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, had prepared

in the War Department Planning Section a plan for the

invasion of Western Europe in 1942. This planning section

was under the command of Col. Dwight D. Eisenhow-

er. I might say, parenthetically, that at Arcadia in a closed

session among the President, the Prime Minister, and Ambas-

sador Litvinoff, the President had, with characteristic impul-

siveness, given Litvinoff some cause to hope that the western

allies might find it possible to mount this invasion in 1942. At

Arcadia the President had proposed an intermediate attack in

North Africa for the purpose of gaining command of the

Mediterranean and threatening the Nazis from the south. It

was over these two projects that the violent disputes of the

next three months were to wage, disputes largely hidden from the

public at the time, but in which General Marshall and the Prime

Minister played the leading roles.

The plan for a "second front now" has been described by

the late Secretary Stimson as "the brain child of the American

Army." There can be no doubt that it was General Marshall's

plan. He fought for it with the utmost vigor, a vigor going far

beyond the call of duty of a purely military adviser. As Mr.

Churchill once put it in a cable to Mr. Roosevelt, the matter

was "a political, more than a military, issue." The text of

this cable may be found on page 43 of Mr. Churchill's book,

the Hinge of Fate. By March 9, 1942, we are told by Mr.

Robert Sherwood, the President had fallen in to some extent

with the Marshall plan, cabling Churchill on that date:

I am becoming more and more interested in the establishment of a new front (on the European continent) this summer.

By the first of April, Mr. Roosevelt had been induced, as

Sherwood explains on page 521 of his book Roosevelt and

Hopkins, by Stimson, Marshall, and Hopkins to supersede

the North African venture known as Gymnast in favor of the

Trans-channel operation. By then, as Sherwood puts it, "Roose-

velt was attaching great importance to the political impor-

15

tance of this in relation to Russia." Hopkins and Marshall

were sent to London to persuade Churchill. The Americans

found Churchill reluctant. With his customary eloquence, the

Prime Minister explored the difficulties of the operation. They

lacked the landing craft necessary, they lacked the air

and the naval support. The venture would be costly, the

Prime Minister believed, and he foresaw the channel turned

into a "river of Allied blood." Should it fail, said Churchill, it

would not only expose our friends on the Continent to great

disappointment, it would hearten the Nazis and prejudice

subsequent attempts to invade the Continent. However, the

British agreed to give the matter careful study, which they

did.

The American strategists continued hurriedly and confident-

ly to plan for a "second front now" until early in June, when

disquieting news reached Washington with the arrival of Lord

Louis Mountbatten. He reported to the President that the

British military experts could find no feasible method by

which the invasion could be mounted. By this time the inva-

sion bore the name Sledgehammer. Churchill followed Mount-

batten to Washington, and under his representations of the

difficulties, the President weakened, returning to his preference

for Gymnast. When the President sought to moderate Mar-

shall's views, "he met with," as Mr. Stimson put it, on page

424 of his book On Active Service in Peace and War, "a

rather robust opposition." The general quickly submitted a

new paper in support of the "second front now" and against

Gymnast.

On July 10, as Stimson reports it, Marshall returned from a

White House conference "very stirred up and emphatic over a

British War Cabinet paper vetoing Sledgehammer and calling

for Gymnast." Still following Mr. Stimson's version of the

occasion, Marshall

proposed a showdown which I cordially endorsed. As the

British will not go through with what they agreed to, we

will turn our back on them and take up the war with Japan.

Stimson in retrospect was "not entirely pleased with his part

in this venture," it should be noted. The Army Chief of Staff

acquired the support of his colleagues, Admiral Ernest J. King

and General H. H. (Hap) Arnold. This is the appropriate

time to point out that during the war Admiral King's preoccu-

pations were almost wholly with the Pacific theater. He had

16

little or no interest in the strategy of the war in Europe and

Asia and only exercised himself there when the claims of

those theaters infringed on his own supply of ships and men.

I find no evidence in the sources I have consulted that Gen-

eral Arnold ever took a leading part in thee strategical questions.

To all intents and purposes it is quite clear that General Marshall

spoke the voice of the Joint Chiefs in matters of

over-all strategy. Returning to the Sledgehammer quarrel,

Marshall submitted to the President a paper, signed by all

three chiefs, proposing that we withdraw from the

war in Europe unless the British acceded to his plan. Here I

quote Mr. Stimson, page 425:

The President asserted that he himself was absolutely sound on Bolero (Sledgehammer), which must go ahead unremittingly, but he did not like the manner of the memo-
randum in regard to the Pacific, saying that it was a little like taking up your dishes and going away."

Stimson came to describe as a "bluff by Marshall

was never tried. Furthermore, Stimson knew that the President

had a "lingering predilection for the Mediterranean," and the

Prime Minister had shown on his last visit that he, too, knew

the President's feeling; on June 21 he "had taken up Gym-

nast, knowing full well I am sure that it was the President's great

secret baby." The quotation is from Stimson.

Mr. Sherwood, in commenting on these events - page

594 -- recalls that Roosevelt described the Marshall showdown

as "a red herring," a phrase that has a familiar ring; Sher-

wood does not agree with Stimson that it was a tactical

maneuver in the struggle between Marshall and Churchill,

saying, "It is my impression that the plan was far more than a

bluff in General Marshall's mind and in Admiral King's. Indeed

the first step in it -- the assault of Guadalcanal - was approved on June

25, the last day of Churchill's stay in Washington."

The President resolved this crisis by dispatching Marshall,

Hopkins, and King to London to have it finally out with the

Prime Minister and his advisers. They arrived in Scotland on a

Saturday, finding the Prime Minister's train and an invita-

tion to Chequers, the Prime Minister's country place, awaiting

them. Rather mystifyingly Marshall, who was so obviously the

guest of the Prime Minister, bluntly declined his invitation to

stop at Chequers and insisted on proceeding directly to Lon-

 

17

don. Churchill protested this "rudeness" in talks with Hop-

kins. Marshall, it was clear, did not want to put himself under

the persuasive fire of Churchill. Sherwood testifies that those

were tense days for the Anglo-American Alliance. Marshall

found heavy going in London. Before long Admiral King had

been alienated by representations of the Royal Navy that the

French coast would become a lee shore in September and

hence difficult to invade.

What was perhaps the most crushing argument against

Sledgehammer was dealt by a general who was taking no sides

in the political question, Mark Clark. Clark was then in

command of all American Army forces in the British Isles.

Rather belatedly, it seems, he was called before the Combined

Chiefs of Staff and asked by Marshall what American forces

could be contributed to a "second front now." I quote from

page 34 of Clark's book Calculated Risk his version of that

occasion:

I pointed out that all we could count on using would be

the Thirty-fourth Division then in North Ireland. * * *The

Thirty-fourth, however, had little amphibious training, it

lacked antiaircraft support and it had no tanks. The First

Armored Division, also in Ireland, was not yet fully

equipped, nor would any other units scheduled to arrive

before September 15 be prepared for battle. * * * There

would be a difficult problem getting the men and equip

ment together and * * * there seemed to be no possibility

that invasion boats would be ready * * * to say nothing of

bad weather conditions prevailing at that time of year * * *

the American forces will be ready to contribute compara-

tively little until spring of 1943.

With Clark's report it at once becomes evident that Mar-

shall had virtually nothing to contribute in support of his

plan. What he was, in effect, doing was calling upon the

British to execute an operation in which they firmly disbe-

lieved with scarcely any support from his own forces.

I leave it to the reader to characterize the general's zeal. We

were to learn later that as far along as the spring of 1943, the

Nazis had 1,300,000 troops in France and the Low Coun-

tries.

It should here be noted that the first troops that we sent

abroad in 1942 were, as we discovered in North Africa,

insufficiently trained for combat. It is no reflection upon them

to say that in the first weeks of the American Corps' venture

18

into battle they did not behave as hardened veterans. Indeed,

General McNair, who unhappily lost his life by misdirected

American air fire in the Normandy invasion, observed to

General Clark after a visit to the North African front, "the

American soldiers are not fighting in Tunisia." This may be found on

page 168 of General Clark's memoirs. He qualified that in favor

of the First Division. McNair attributed their lack of battle

stability to the failure to inculcate discipline in their training

here at home. We have been assured times without number that General

Marshall's greatest achievement in World War II was the organization and

training of our armies. When our forces in

North Africa had become battle-hardened and General Clark

and General Patton had put them under advanced training,

they behaved in the best tradition of the American Army. But

what would have happened had we thrown the green troops

of Kasserine Pass against Hitler's Panzers in the fall of 1942?

We find a curious retrospective glance at that incident in

Sherwood's recollections, where, on page 807, he quotes Hop-

kins to this effect:

In trying to figure out whether we could have gotten

across the channel successfully in 1942 or 1943, you have

got to answer the unanswerable question as to whether

Eisenhower, Bradley, Spaatz, Patton, Bedell Smith, and also

Montgomery and Tedder and a lot of others could have

handled the big show as they would if they hadn't had the

experience fighting Germany in North Africa and Sicily.

So at London in July of 1942, the plan of the "master of

global strategy" went awry and the Combined Chiefs settled

on Gynmast. Sherwood recalls that "General Marshall had

firmly opposed it and so had General Eisenhower, who is quoted

as having described the day when the decision was

made by Roosevelt as possibly the blackest day in history."

In this connection, I should like to summon as a witness

Hanson W. Baldwin, the distinguished military critic of the

New York Times, whose strategic insights are universally

recognized.

I think it goes without saying that the wisdom of Marshall's

fervent determination to cross the Channel in the fall of 1942

or the spring of 1943 is open to grave doubts. It was, in fact,

the first of a series of major decisions made by this "master of

global strategy," some of them producing consequences which

19

today increasingly threaten the well-being and survival of

West. In his book Great Mistakes of the War Baldwin says on

page 33:

In retrospect it is now obvious that our concept of invading

Western Europe in 1942 was fantastic; our deficiencies in

North Africa, which was a much-needed training school for

our troops, proved that. The British objection to a 1943

Cross-channel operation was also soundly taken militarily;

we would have had in that year neither the trained divi-

sions, the equipment, the planes, the experience, nor (par-

ticularly) the landing craft to have invaded the most

strongly held part of the Continent against an enemy whose

strength was far greater than it was a year later.

Baldwin's estimate goes far to support Churchill's objections

that a disaster on the French coast due to a hasty, reckless

invasion might have proved "the only way in which we could possibly lose

this war." That Churchill remark appears on page 590 of Sherwood.

It was at this time, whether or not because of the fervor with

which Marshall pushed his plan, that Roosevelt superseded

him in the military circle around the White House. The

President chose Admiral Leahy, a naval officer of eminent

achievements and the saltiest of common sense, as his personal

Chief of Staff. Leahy became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

and thus, nominally, Marshall's superior, although, as we shall

see, Marshall overcame him at several of the most critical

junctures. Although Leahy came on the scene, having been

our Ambassador at Vichy, too late to participate in the

discussions of Sledgehammer, he was familiar with their gen-

eral setting. He wrote on page 110 of his valuable book of

memoirs "I Was There" his own judgment of that sorry and

provocative incident. Leahy wrote:

The Russians could not have been more disappointed

than our own Army people. * * *There was much grum-

bling about Britain and much criticism of Winston Church-

ill. The Prime Minister was convinced that England was

not ready to undertake such a major effort and I did not

think that we were either. He [Winston Churchill] wanted

to have much more assurance of success than General

Marshall could give him.

It became evident with the Sledgehammer quarrel that Mar-

20

shall intended to make his mark on the political and strategic

decisions of World War II. The next assertion of his will came

late in August 1942 when, without advance notice, the Ameri-

can Chiefs of Staff -- meaning Marshall -- served notice on the

British that they opposed the hitherto agreed upon plans to

invade North Africa by way of the Mediterranean as well as

the Atlantic coast of Morocco. "The Army," as Admiral

Leahy wrote, "was not well disposed toward the adventure."

The North Africa expedition had by now been christened Torch. The news

reached Churchill on the 25th of August.

Until that moment plans had been proceeding full speed ahead

for landings at Casablanca on the Atlantic, Oran, which is at

the western end of the Mediterranean coast of Algiers, and

at a point or points farther east toward Tunisia. Suddenly the

American chiefs notified the British that they now believed

the Mediterranean landings too hazardous to undertake.

Upon receipt of the advice from Washington that Torch

had been ditched by Marshall and his associates, Churchill

wrote a disparaging letter to Hopkins. This was on the 4th of

September and the text of the letter appears on page 540 of

The Hinge of Fate. He wrote Hopkins:

Frankly, I do not understand what is at the back of all

this. I thought there was agreement with Marshall and that

King bad been paid off with what he needed for his Pacific

war. But now it seems there is a bad comeback from the

professional circles in the American Army and I have a

deep and growing fear that the whole of the President's

enterprise may be wrecked bit by bit. With it will fall the

brightest hope of the Allies and the only hope this year.

The Prime Minister's letter was never mailed. Before it

could reach the letter box he had a cablegram from the

President announcing that he had overcome the opposition of

his staff and that the bell could again be rung for full speed

ahead on Torch. Had Roosevelt not overruled Marshall at this

critical time, undoubtedly Russia would enjoy the same domi-

nation over the Mediterranean area which she now enjoys over

the other unhappy areas behind the Iron Curtain. As early

as the White House conference known as Arcadia, the President

had given his full support to North Africa, saying at

that time, as quoted by the late General Arnold in his mem-

oirs Global Mission, "We must get into North Africa before the

Germans." In this connection it may be mentioned that

Stimson remarked in his book that 'The Mediterranean Basin

21

always fascinated Roosevelt." Sherwood likewise recalls the

President's strong preference for this operation, basing it upon

Roosevelt's "naval mindedness," and his knowledge that by

ridding North Africa of the Nazis we would free the lifeline to

the Middle East and the Far East by way of Suez, thus

obviating the long voyages around the Cape and providing for

ourselves a whole new theater from which the assault against

the Nazis could be carried out.

It is an interesting speculation as to the future of World

War II had we abandoned Torch or curtailed it by landing on

the Atlantic alone. There was strong British sentiment to land

in Tunisia as well as Tangiers at that time. A proposal from

British quarters suggested that several thousand soldiers could

be flown from Malta into Tunisia, which was only weakly

garrisoned by the French, to coincide with the landings in

Morocco and Algiers. This was vetoed. As it turned out, Hit-

ler was able to send more than 100,000 of his best troops into

Tunisia. These forces, With Rommel's army retreating before

Montgomery, made a formidable opposition, and it maybe

assumed that without the overpowering strength in the air

which the Allies were able to command, the war in North

Africa might, have dragged on indefinitely. Suppose we had

not landed in Algeria, suppose that the battle of North Africa

had continued for months on end and engaged ever larger

numbers of our forces -- in whose interest would that have

been? By winning the war in North Africa and by our

subsequent conquest of Sicily and Italy -- enterprises which

were unflaggingly opposed by Marshall -- we, instead of Russia,

were able to hold postwar command of at least the

Mediterranean away from the Red armies. The European

picture as of today would have been far different if the Red

armies had themselves received the surrender of Italy. As it

stands, we have Italy and a foothold on the opposite shore of

the Adriatic at Trieste, a foothold which is no doubt today a

reassurance to Tito.

No sooner had the North African campaign been launched

than Marshall again began to press his views in opposition to

what Churchill called the exploitation of the prospective victo-

ry. In spite of Churchill's most eloquent pleading, Marshall only very

reluctantly agreed to the attack on Sicily and Eisenhower, who had become

commander in chief in North Africa, was Marshall's firm supporter.

22

Chapter 3

THE STRUGGLE FOR EASTERN EUROPE

We now come to what was without question the most signi-

ficant decision of the war in Europe; the decision by Marshall

which was made against Roosevelt's half-hearted wishes and

Churchill's bulldog determination, to concentrate on France

and leave the whole of Eastern Europe to the Red armies. This strategical

struggle was pursued with great vigor, some-

times very violent on both sides. It only reached its

terminal point at Teheran, as we shall see, where the com-

bined weight of Stalin and Marshall defeated Churchill. I

cannot dwell too urgently on this great decision. Its military

effects were of no very great importance although the un-

necessary invasion of southern France, enjoined by Stalin and

Marshall gave Kesselring a welcome breathing spell in north-

ern Italy and protracted Mark Clark's campaign for the Po with an

attendant 1oss of American lives. It is the political

consequences of this controversy which stand forth in all

their stark implications for us today. I will attempt to sum-

marize the debate briefly.

The British, from the beginning of the strategical discussions

over North Africa, had been intent on carrying the war into

the Mediterranean. Their motives were mixed. Foremost per-

haps was their desire to relieve their forces in Egypt, which

had suffered several crushing blows. Secondarily, they wanted

the use of the Mediterranean for very obvious purposes of

communication. Thirdly, the British have had for many gener-

ations a paramount position in the eastern Mediterranean and

had wide interests both in those lands and in the Suez Canal

as a gateway to India and their great possessions and depend-

encies in the Orient and the Southern Seas. There was a further

and personal factor, which Marshall frequently charac-

terized as the Prime Minister's preoccupation with eccentric

operations, such as the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign in

World War I with which Churchill's name will be forever

associated. Overshadowing and of much more importance of course,

as we see it now and as we get glimpses in the writings

the principal actors of those times, was a steady desire on the

part of the British to reach Eastern Europe and the Balkans

before the Red armies.

23

I think there can be no question that Hanson Baldwin is

correct when he stigmatizes our military planning in this

connection as short-sighted. Churchill, with his intimate and

profound knowledge of the continuing drama of Europe

knew that a war is only a phase of history. Victory is one

thing; where you stand at the end of a war is another. He had

the ability to foresee what Europe would look like as a result

of certain policies.

Marshall triumphed over Churchill at the First Quebec

Conference in August 1943 with reference to this question.

That conference marked the end of Churchill's sway the

great decisions of the War. Thereafter the policy of the United

States in the European war was wholly and without deviation

the policy announced by Joseph Stalin. There was a break in

the relations between the two English-speaking powers, who

were carrying the brunt of the war, and the United States

thereafter was found always on the side of Stalin. To obtain

this result, Marshall bore down on British preoccupation with

the Mediterranean. I. have enumerated some of the basic

factors in the British position. Marshall ignored all of them

except the one addressed to British self-interest. He minimized

and derided the British position, likewise ridiculing the Prime

Minister's strategical judgment by frequent references to the

Dardanelles.

I believe that the rupture of interest between the United

States and Great Britain signified by this decision was one of

the most fateful changes in world relationships of our times. It

embittered our relationships at the first Quebec meeting, at

Cairo, and at Teheran.

At the moment le me generalize that the year 1943 was by

all odds the critical year of the war, casting its shadow over

the whole postwar period in which we now find ourselves

convulsed by anxiety and doubt. It was in February of 1943

that the Russians achieved victory over the Germans at Stalin-

grad. In fact, it can, I believe, be safely stated that World War

III started with the Russian victory at Stalingrad. Thereafter

they opened their diplomatic war against the West when they

gave every evidence of turning upon the Polish armies, the

Polish people, and the loyal and devoted Polish government in

exile in London.

The Kremlin's treatment of the Poles, beginning in the

spring of 1943, was the touchstone of this whole period, and

it was at the Quebec Conference that the whole dangerous

policy of the United States toward the Soviet Union was

24

forecast and prefigured. At Quebec the decision was made to

invade southern France and keep the weakened American

Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army indecisively engaged

in Italy. It was at Quebec also that the most amazing and

indicative document that has so far emerged from the volumi-

nous records of World War II was brought to bear. This

document, a memorandum entitled "Russia's Position," affords

us clear insight into our subsequent surrenders at Teheran and

Yalta as well as at Potsdam. The document appears, and only

there in Sherwood's book about Hopkins. It is on page 748.

The memorandum is ascribed there to "a very-high-level

United States military strategic estimate." Sherwood reports

that Hopkins had it with him at Quebec. Can it be doubted

that this document emanated from General Marshall, whoever

drafted it? The question of its authorship is extremely impor-

tant. I hope that some day its authorship will be fixed for

all to see.

No document of World War II was more controlling on our fate.

Here it is in full:

Russia's postwar position in Europe will be a domninant

one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to

oppose her tremendous military forces. It is true that

Great Britain is building up a position in the Mediterranean

vis-a-vis Russia that she may find useful in balancing power

in Europe. However, even here she may not be able to

oppose Russia unless she is otherwise supported.

The conclusions from the foregoing are obvious. Since

Russia is the decisive factor in the war, she must be given

every assistance, and every effort must be made to obtain

her friendship. Likewise, since without question she will

dominate Europe on the defeat of the Axis, it is even more

essential to develop and maintain the most friendly relations

with Russia.

Finally, the most important factor the United States has

to consider in relation to Russia is the prosecution of the

war in the Pacific. With Russia as an ally in the war against

Japan, the war can be terminated in less time and at less

expense in life and resources than if the reverse were the

case. Should the war in the Pacific have to be carried on

with an unfriendly or negative attitude on the part of

Russia, the difficulties will be immeasurably increased and

Operations might become abortive.

Sherwood understood the memorandum's significance. He wrote,

'This estimate was obviously of great importance as

indicating the policy which guided the making of decisions at

25

Teheran and, much later, at Yalta." What this document is, in

effect, is a rationalization of the whole policy of submission to

Russia during the remainder of world war II and, most

notably, in our relationships with China thereafter. What it

said was that as a result of the utter destruction of Germany

which we had erected into s policy at Casablanca with the

phrase "unconditional surrender," Russia would be the un-

questioned "top dog" in Europe after the war, and that it

bebooved the great, enlightened, and truly progressive English

speaking peoples therefore to cater to, to placate, and, in fact

to submit to the will of the Kremlin thereafter. It said unmis-

takably that the British endeavors in the Mediterranean, which

Marshall had succeeded in blocking, were aimed at balancing

Power in Europe vis-a-vis Russia.

That is bad enough But the document went further. It

insisted that we must carry this attitude of solicitude and

deference beyond Europe. We must bow to Russia in the Far

East as well. It is here that we find the fist explicit delineation

of the policy which produced the shameful betrayal of China at Yalta, the

blackmail paid by Roosevelt to get Russia into a war which she

had already announced her eagerness to wage.

The debate over Mediterranean policy had reached a focus

at the White House late in May of 1943 when Churchill again

crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a common objective. He

found that Marshall was opposed to any action in the Medi-

terranean beyond taking Sardinia after the occupation of

Sicily, and that then all of our subsequent efforts were to be

devoted to what the late Sir John Dill, who was Chief of the

British Military Mission in Washington, once referred to in a

letter to Churchill as "Marshall's first love" -- the transchannel

invasion. Roosevelt was pulled and hauled on this issue as

much as on any in the war. His inclinations, based upon his

knowledge of geography and his adventurous strategic desires,

were toward expanding the war into eastern Europe. Ultimate-

ly, however, Roosevelt went along with Marshall.

So determined was Churchill at the White House in May to

have his views prevail that he induced Roosevelt to send

Marshall with him to North Africa for a further discussion

with military leaders in that theater. I gather from The Hinge

of Fate that it was at this point that Churchill realized that his

great antagonist in the war was Marshall, that he and Mar-

shall were virtually contending for the mastery of their views

over the impulsive will of the President. It was in connection

with this journey by Churchill and Marshall to North Africa

26

that the Prime Minister wrote in The Hinge of Fate, pages 812 and

813, a tribute to the general as a "statesman with a penetrating

and commanding view of the whole scene." It maybe noted that

Churchill did not ascribe to Marshall a correct and trustworthy

view of the whole scene and it may be wondered in

light of their great conflicts, whether the Prime Minister

was not perhaps indulging his rather frequent taste for irony.

In Tunis, Churchill brought to bear upon Marshall and Eisenhower,

who invariably sided with Marshall, the whole

battery of persuasion of himself and his military subordinates.

The views of the British were made more persuasive by the fact that

they had carried the major burden of the war in

North Africa. Marshall resisted, remaining, as Churchill com-

ments, "up 'til almost the last minute, silent or cryptic." The

upshot was that Marshall insisted upon deferring the decision

until Sicily had been made secure and "the situation in Russia

known." The quotation is from Churchill's report of the conference.

We recur to the Quebec Conference of August 14, as Admiral

Leahy reports it on page 175 of his book:

Marshall was very positive in his attitude against

a Mediterranean commitment.

Churchill did, however, temporarily prevail, and we invaded Italy;

but Marshall and Stalin won out in the end when Roosevelt sided

with them at Teheran, where there was thrown a

way the advantage of the Italian campaign. We are indebted

to Mr. Sherwood for the fullest account of the Stalin position

at Teheran. This account was obtained, of course,

from Hopkin's oral and written recollections. At one point, quoted

on page 780 of Sherwood's book, Stalin urged that the "entry

of Turkey into the war -- a development to which Churchill

was passionately committed, and which the Russians

had been previously urging -- might be helpful in opening the way in

the Balkans, but the Balkans were far from the heart Germany,

and the only direct way of striking at that heart was through France."

Here Roosevelt suggested that it might be useful

if the Americans and British marched east in con-

junction with Tito's Partisans into Rumania and joined with the Reds

at Odessa. Stalin inquired if that would affect the thirty-five

divisions earmarked for the transchannel invasion of France.

Churchill replied that it would not. Sherwood com-

ments, however, that "nothing could be further from the plans

27

of the United States Chief of Staff." It was then that Stalin

brought his powerful guns to bear to conclude the controver-

sy. I am quoting from Sherwood -- and he wrote:

Stalin expressed the opinion that it would be unwise to scatter

forces in various operations through the eastern

Mediterranean. He said he thought Overlord (the name

given to the crosschannal invasion) should be considered

the basis of all Operations in 1944 and that after the cap-

ture of Rome, the forces used there should be sent into southern

France to provide a diversionary operation in sup-

port of Overlord. He even felt that it might be better to

abandon the capture of Rome altogether, leaving 10 divisions

to hold the present line in Italy and using the rest of

the Allied forces for the invasion of southern France. He

said it had been the experience of the Red Army that it was

best to launch an offensive from two converging directions,

forcing the enemy to move his reserves from one front to

the other. Therefore, he favored simultaneous operations in

northern and southern France, rather than the scattering

of forces in the eastern Mediterranean.

We may be sure that Stalin'a didactic observations fell

upon Marshall's ears with the authority of revelation. It was

made abundantly evident at Teheran that Marshall had

earned the warm approval of Stalin. On page 783 of the

Sherwood record, the author notes that both Stalin and

Voroshilov obviously recognized Marshall as the supreme

advocate of Overlord and therefore their friend.

Sherwood notes that after Marshall had discussed the difficulties

of Overlord, Voroshilov turned to him and said admir-

ingly,. "If you think about it, you will do it."

On page 791, in discussing the moot question at that time

of who was to command Overlord, Sherwood repeats a report

that Stalin in discussions with Roosevelt, made evident his con-

viction that "no wiser or more reassuring choice than Mar-

shall could be made.

It is noteworthy that the brusque, cynical Stalin exhibited

fondness for no other American at Teheran with the single

exception of Hopkins, with whom he had a personal ac-

quaintance dating from Hopkins's visit to Moscow in August

of 1941 upon an errand which must have gratified the tyrant's

heart. It was then that Hopkins offered the bountiful support

of the United States to the Kremlin's resistance of the Nazi

invaders without stint, quid pro quo, or any reservations

whatsoever.

General "Hap" Arnold, who was not present at Teheran

28

because of illness, himself commented on the reports as he

received them. His comments will be found on page 465 of

Global Mission. Said Arnold:

Apparently Uncle Joe had talked straight from the shoul-

der about how to carryon the war against Germany, and

his ideas, it seems, were much more in accord with the

American ideas than with those of the British.

Admiral Leahy, who was there, adds his comment after

giving his own version of the Stalin speech I have quoted from

Sherwood. He wrote, and this is on page 204 of his book.

The Soviets and Americans seemed to be nearly in agree-

ment as to the fundamental strateglc principles that should

be followed.

Teheran took place in November and December of 1943.The projected

invasion of southern France was given the name Anvil.

Although Churchill and his advisers continued to

fight for the eastern operation, it was manifestly a losing

struggle. Churchill himself employed his stormy eloquence on

Mark Clark as that great American general was fighting his

way up Italian peninsula, assuring Clark that, given his

way, the Western Powers could "slit this soft under-belly of

the Axis." The Prime Minister was pursuing a lost cause. After

the capture of Rome, the Fifth Army which had become, as

Clark proudly asserts, "a tremendous fighting machine" with

"horizons unlimited," was disrupted. Over Clark's strong pro-

tests, he lost the Sixth Corps and seven crack French divi-

sions, all withdrawn for Anvil. Clark was compelled to

abandon his drive to the Po, giving Kesselring respite, a deci-

sion that puzzled the German high command, as we were to

discover after their surrender. Writes Clark on page 371 of

Calculated Risks: "It was s decision that was likely to puzzle

historians for a much longer time." In considering his impres-

sion of that period when he sat down to write his memoirs

after the war, Clark says, on page 368:

Stalin, it was evident throughout the Big Three meeting

and negotiations at Teheran, was not one of the strongest boosters

of the invasion of southern France. He knew ex-

actly what he wanted in a political as well as a military

way; and what he wanted was to keep us out of

the Balkans, which he had staked out for the Red Army.

If we switched our strength from Italy to France, it was

obvious to Stalin * * * that we would turn away from cen-

29

tral Europe. Anvil led into a dead-end street. It was easy

to see why Stalin favored Anvil at Teheran and why be kept

on pushing for it.

I come to a most significant passage which deals specifically

with what lay before Clark and was denied him by Marshall

in collaboration with Stalin. Says Clark:

After the fall of Rome, Kesselring's army could have

been destroyed if we had been able to shoot the works in a

final offensive. Across the Adriatic was Yugoslavia * * *

and beyond Yugoslavia were Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.

At this point may I remind you that wherever the Russian

armies came to rest, there they stayed and there they remain

to this day. The Red armies have not relinquished one inch of

the soil upon which they stood at the defeat of Germany.

General Clark continues:

There was no question that the Balkans were strongly in

the British mind, but so far as I ever found out, American

top-level planners were not interested. It was generally

understood that President Roosevelt toyed with the idea

for a while but was not encouraged by Harry Hopkins.

After the fall of Rome, we "ran for the wrong goal," both

from a political and a strategical standpoint.

Clark has, moreover, a superior vantage point from which

to judge the consequences because he served with the utmost

distinction as the American military governor of Vienna after

the war. It was there that he felt the iron determination of the

Soviet imperialism to prevail over eastern Europe. It was there

that be had ample opportunity to consider how differently

things might have been bad we proceeded east from the valley

of the Po instead of turning our forces into the trivial and

wholly unnecessary operations in southern France. General

Clark concludes on page 3 of his book, and I here summarize

him as the most highly qualified witness in this matter:

Yet, I believe our mission was fulfilled and, save for a

high-level blunder that turned us away from the Balkan

states and permitted them to fall under Red Army control,

the Mediterranean campaign might have been the most de-

cisive of all in postwar history.

At another place, expressing his frustration over the enfee-

blement of his campaign in Italy -- and this is on page 368 -

Clark writes:

30

A campaign that might have changed the whole history of the relationship between the Western World and Soviet Russia was permitted to fade away. * * * The weakening of the campaign in Italy * * * was one of the outstanding political mistakes of the war.

President Truman's appointment of this great General

to the nonmilitary post of Ambassador to the Vati-

can, at this writing not yet confirmed, was Mark Clark,

a man pronouncedly in his military prime, a man of great achieve-

ment in Italy and of outstanding political and diplomatic

accomplishment in Austria? After his return home from Vi-

enna, General Clark was consistently relegated to secondary

commands.

So also is this true of General Wedemeyer, likewise in his

prime, likewise a soldier of great brilliance and great devotion

to his country.

Both Wedemeyer and Clark dared to oppose the judgment

of General Marshall in his history-making deci-

sions, Clark in Europe, Wedemeyer in Asia.

Where is Lucius Clay? Like MacArthur and Clark, a great

proconsul; young as generals go, brilliant and steadfast in

devotion not to party but to country. Clay insisted on resisting

the Russians at Berlin.

The lessons must be plain as a pikestaff to the military

leaders of our establishment. A prudent officer, looking for-

ward to his continued career and his pension, certainly has to

think twice before he expresses an objective and disinterested

opinion of strategy or of the conduct of our military opera-

tions.

MacArthur is not the only monument to the deter-

mination of Marshall to rule our politico-military policies now

as he ruled our policies in World War II. The evidence is

overwhelming that at Teheran we had no political policy. It so

appears in the recollections of Major John R. Deane. After observing,

an page 43 of his book The Strange Alliance, that "Stalin advocated the

American point of view in our differences with Britain" and again

that "Stalin's 'position' coincided with that of the American

Chief of Staff and every word he said strengthened the sup-

port they might expect from President Roosevelt in the ulti-

mate decision," Deane continues:

Stalin appeared to know exactly what he wanted at the

conference. This was also true of Churchill, but not so of

Roosevelt. This is not said as a reflection on our President

but his apparent indecision was probably a direct result of

31

our obscure foreign policy. President Roosevelt was think-

ing of winning the war; the others were thinking of their

relative positions when the war was won. Stalin wanted the

Anglo-American forces in Western and southern Europe;

Churchill thought our postwar position would be improved

and British interests best served if the Anglo-Americans, as

well as the Russians, participated in the occupation of the

Balkans. From the political point of view, hindsight on our

part points to foresight on Churchill's part.

The political immaturity of our generals, mentioned by

Hansen Baldwin, was never so glaringly manifested as at

Teheran -- if, indeed, it was political immaturity and not the

consequences of some hidden, and so far undisclosed, in-

fluence binding us to Stalin's world policy.

Could it be that, like children, our military advisers at

Teheran dwelt only on the pleasures and tasks of the day with

no thought for the morrow? Could they not envisage what

was so clear to many other minds, that after the conclusion of

hostilities the Soviet Union, conscious of its vast and violent

world mission, might be ranged against us in every quarter of

the globe? Or did Marshall and his supernumeraries on the

Joint Chiefs at Teheran think of England instead of Russia as

the future enemy?

Before quitting this question of the Marshall-Churchill

conflict over the most important phases of the recent war, I

shall cite another example of the ruthlessness with which

Marshall prosecuted the rift. It should be noted that Church-

ill, who is an indomitable adversary in the House of Commons

and elsewhere, fought on against Anvil long after

his was a lost cause.

At Malta, where the Yalta conferees on the Anglo-

American side met before proceeding to that Black Sea

conference, the British chiefs still persisted in the hope of

accomplishing some Mediterranean operations while pre-

paring for the attack across the Channel. In Sherwood's book,

page 848, is a revealing passage concerning those discussions

of the combined chiefs:

The arguments reached such a point that Marsball, ordi-

narily one of the most restrained and soft-spoken of men,

announced that if the British plan were approved by the

Prime Minister and the President, he would recommend to

Eisenhower that he bad no choice but to be relieved of his

command.

Again, as in the case of the ultimatum over the "second

32

front now," Marshall was threatening summary action unless

his will prevailed. Why was it so important to Marshall that

the British, as a full partner in the Anglo-American war effort,

should be prevented from creating that balance of military power in the

Mediterranean spoken of in the memorandum circulated by Hopkins

at the first Quebec conference?

Before we proceed to other matters of political strategy, let

us consider instances in the management of American military

affairs in World War II where Marshall's actions operated

directly against the interests of the United States.

General Deane is an uncommonly friendly witness for George

Marshall. He was Marshall's protege, having served as secretary

of the combined chiefs in Washington until Mar-

shall sent him in the fall of 1943 to Moscow as chief of our

military mission in Russia. It should be noted that we had

withdrawn our military and naval attaches from Moscow

because, in fulfilling the time-honored and expected duties of

military attaches, they had aroused the resentment of the

Kremlin. Those duties include discovering and reporting to the

home government all information that can be obtained legiti-

mately regarding the armed forces of the country to which the

are accredited. The information thus sought has to do

with weapons, tactical programs and methods, and the size,

training and disposition of that country's military forces.

Before General Deane departed for his mission to Moscow,

he had a long interview with General Marshall, in which the

Chief of Staff cautioned Deane to seek no information about

these matters for fear that he might "irritate" the Russians. We

were then devoting a substantial part of our military pro-

duction to Russia's war effort, and doing so in entirely good

faith. It was not long after General Deane reached Moscow

that he began to be impressed with the extraordinary contrast

between the Russian attitude and our own. This he describes

on page 49 of his book:

We had thousands of Soviet representatives in the United

States who were allowed to visit our manufacturing plants,

attend our schools, and witness tests of aircraft and other

equipment. In Italy, and later in France and Germany, Rus-

sian representatives were welcome at our field headquarters

and allowed to see anything they desired of our military

operations. Our policy was to make any of our new inven-

tions in electronics and other fields available to Russia

* * * each month I would receive a revised list of secret

American equipment about which Russia could be informed

33

in the hope that if it could be made available, it might be

used on the Russian front. We never lost an opportunity to

give the Russians equipment, weapons, or information which

we thought might help our combined war effort.

The head of the American military mission in Moscow en-

countered the Iron Curtain long before Churchill coined the

phrase. Toward the end of the war, when our always excessive

solicitude seemed to him no longer warranted, he advised a

more resolute attitude toward the Russians. Each time he

suggested that we demand a fu1f1llment of an agreement - and

they broke virtually every agreement we made with them - he

was called off in Washington. By whom? Deane's reports went

directly to General Marshall.

Why have we not had, and do not have at this moment, an

American; or at least an allied, corridor to Berlin? Why are we

at the mercy of the Russians in our access to the joint capital

of the occupying powers? Why was it possible for the Rus -

sians to produce the blockage of Berlin with a simple set of

instructions with which General Clay found it impossible, as a

man of honor and a great American soldier, to comply?

It has been the fashion to place the blame for this lack of

foresight upon the late John G. Winant. As our Ambassador

to London he sat on the European Advisory Commission,

which worked out under the direction of the respective gov-

ernments the zoning of Germany for occupation purposes.

Winant cannot answer our questions now. General Clay, in

his report on his great career as the American governor in

Germany, Decision In Germany, accepts the version that

shoulders the blame onto Winant. Subsequently, on page

26, he himself takes the final blame. He was in Berlin in late

June of 1945 arranging with Marshall Zhukov for the entry of

American forces into their occupation position in Berlin.

The Russians were, as usual, hard to deal with. Clay was

eager to get his occupation going and to have American

forces on guard in Berlin. Instead of pressing the matter of a

corridor under American rule, guarded by American troops,

with supply and communication beyond the reach of Russian

interference, he accepted an oral understanding with Zhukov

that nothing would ever occur to impede American access to

Berlin. Our zonal border, it will be recalled, had been set a

distance of 100 miles from Berlin.

The legend which saddled the late Winant with the respon-

sibility for this tragic blunder in postwar arrangements has

been vigorously challenged by Hanson Baldwin, who fixes the

34

responsibility not on Winant but squarely on the War Depart-

ment. "War Department" at that time meant George Catlett

Marshall. From the fall of 1939 until the fall of 1946, Mar-

shall was, in effect, the War Department. I cannot find in

Mr. Stimson's memoirs any occasion on which he opposed the will

of General Marshall.

On page 47 of Baldwin's book, he expresses his conviction

that "the blame for Berlin cannot be laid exclusively, or even

to a major degree - upon the shoulders of Winant." Two

pages later, in reviewing the background of this deplorable

situation, Baldwin notes that the State Department at the end

of 1943 proposed that the zones of postwar occupation "be so

drawn as to bring each into contact with Berlin." I hasten

to add that Cordell Hull -- not Marshall or Dean Acheson --

was then Secretary of State.

I go on with Baldwin:

For some reason that defies logical understanding now,

the War Department rejected this suggestion, which would

have solved nearly all our postwar Berlin difficulties, so that

it was never even broached in the EAC.

In February 1944, the British informally suggested that a

corridor o Berlin be established and defined, but the War

Department again objected, stating that this was not a

subject for the EAC, but that the entire question of access

to Berlin was a military matter which should be settled at

the proper time by military representatives.

And this eventually was the solution, but the military

representatives made a botch of it. In May 1945 our allies

stood deep on German soil. The zonal occupation agree-

ments for Germany * * * placed Berlin in the Russian zone

* * *. In May 1945 ECA's work was done and SCAEF was

briefed as to its accomplishments.

The military were told the history of the problem. They

were told that the War Department had blacked any consider-

ation of it by EAC and were advised that the EAC staff

believed we should have an indisputably American corridor

under our own military supervision and guard. As we have

seen, neither Marshall nor Eisenhower made provision for a

corridor; General Clay concluded his improvised agreement

with Zhukov, and the fat was in the fire.

Why did the War Department, meaning Marshall, leave us

at the mercy of the Russians in Berlin? Why did not our forces

march first into Berlin? Why was General Patton not allowed

to take Prague? We have only glimpses of the inner reality

35

behind these questions. We gather from General Bradley's

memoirs that Eisenhower's decision not to reach Berlin first

was conditioned to some extent by the vagrant quarrel that

had arisen between Bradley and General Montgomery. In his

version of the matter, appearing on page 69 of Life magazine

for April 30, 1951, Bradley relates a discussion with Eisen-

hower wherein it was decided not to allow Montgomery the

forces with which to push on to Berlin. Eisenhower was

principally concerned at the moment lest the armies of Russia

and the English-speaking powers should meet in a head-on

collision somewhere in Germany. I quote Bradley on how

Eisenhower solved the problem:

Five days before Hodges and Simpson closed their trap

around the Ruhr, Eisenhower radioed Stalin through the

United States Military Mission in Moscow of his plan to

push east with a powerful force in the center to the line of

the Elbe.

The Elbe line was where Eisenhower proposed to Stalin

that he would bring the American armies to rest. Eisenhower

fixed this highly important point, be it noted, with Stalin. It is

clear from Bradley's recollections that Eisenhower acted on

this highly political question without consulting with Churchill.

Whether he consulted Roosevelt and Marshall is not men-

tioned by Bradley. Certainly he must have consulted Marshall.

I continue to quote Bradley:

Although Churchill protested Eisenhower's radio to Mos-

cow as an unwarranted intrusion by the military into a

political problem; he reserved his angriest vituperation for

the plan Eisenhower proposed. The Prime Minister, accord-

ing to Eisenhower, was greatly disappointed and disturbed

that SCAEF had not reinforced Montgomery with Ameri-

can troops and pointed him toward Berlin in a desperate

[sic] effort to capture that city before the Russians took it.

We gain another bit of insight into this situation -- which

provides a somewhat more startling example of command

discretion than any displayed by Macarthur in Japan -- from

Edward Ansel Mowrer in his book The Nightmare of Ameri-

can Foreign Policy, in which he relates having been personally

told by the White House that "the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised

Truman to let the Russians take Berlin." The Joint Chiefs of Staff,

of course, meant Marshall.

36

We have been reviewing General Marshall's record as it applies to the war

in Europe with an eye to his competence and the extent to which he

backed up Stalin in political decisions. The Democrats

in Denver proclaimed him "a master of global strategy." The term,

of course, implies much more than purely military planning.

As we have seen, when you reach the upper levels of command

inhabited during the recent war by Marshall, Churchill, and Roosevelt,

the military decisions blend everywhere with the political. They

cannot be disassociated. A war is not conducted merely as a means of

killing the enemy, although during the late war Mr. Roosevelt

expressed so much joy over Russia's accomplishments in that

line that it might be questioned if he always understood the

the nature of war. We have seen recently in Korea where, beg-

gered of any respectable and intelligent war purpose, our

forces were led to believe from Marshall's testimony that the

only objective of war was to kill the enemy. I put aside

the ethical considerations raised by such an attitude and point

out that the enemy's extermination is not enough. Of course, it

is necessary to have the enemy's submission. But, also, great

powers must have some understanding of what that submis-

sion portends and what they intend to do with the world over

which they will exercise sway once the enemy is defeated.

We have observed what calamities might have befallen the

allied cause had Roosevelt accepted Marshall's persistent de-

mand for a "second front now." We have seen the equivocal

and dangerous nature of his counsel with reference to the

North African invasion. We have observed how closely he

fitted his views into those of Stalin over every major issue of

the war. We have seen further how, in his instructions to

General Deane, his refusal to exercise foresight over the corri-

dor to Berlin, and his wish that the Russians might first enter

that great and shattered city, General Marshall's decisions

paralleled the interests of the Kremlin.

The Democrats at Denver may have been correct in their

appraisal of General Marshall's attainments as a strategist.

The question that arises, after examining the facts we have

enumerated and those we shall enumerate, is, in whose in-

terest did he exercise his genius? If he was wholeheartedly

serving the cause of the United States, these decisions were

great blunders. If they followed a secret pattern to which we

do not as yet have the key, they may very well have been

successful in the highest degree.

37

Chapter 4

THE YALTA SELLOUT

 

We turn now to the Pacific side of the recent global war and

an examination of General Marshall's behavior in that vast

theater.

First, we must consider what went on at Yalta. If, as

Hanson Baldwin observes, we lost the peace because of great

political mistakes in World War II, then it is clear that those

mistakes culminated in the controlling decisions made at the

conferences of Teheran and Yalta. It is my judgment that we

lost the peace in Europe at Teheran. It is even clearer that we

lost the peace in Asia at Yalta. At Teheran, Marshall's will

prevailed in concert with that of Stalin regarding the Mediter-

ranean and Eastern Europe. At Yalta, Marshall's will pre-

vailed, with that of Stalin, regarding Russia's entry into the

far eastern war as a full-fledged partner entitled to the spoils of

such participation.

Yalta is a former resort of the Romanoff Czars on the

shores of the Black Sea. Yalta is where Roosevelt, already

suffering from the enfeeblement that brought his death four

months later, went to meet again with the bloody autocrat of

all the Russians and the Churchill with whom he had signally

differed at Teheran.

The President, bearing the marks of his approaching disso-

lution, traveled the thousands of weary miles by plane, by

ship, and, at the end, by motorcar, to treat with the tyrant,

to seek accord with him, and to make the bargains over Po-

land and China that today plague and shame us all. The

principal, the most utterly damaging, of these bargains con-

tained the bribe he paid to Stalin for his eleventh-hour

participation in the war against Japan.

Manchuria is the richest part of Chins. In terms of area

and natural resources it may be described as the Texas of

China. But Manchuria has not been China's to enjoy for

many years. It must be recalled, and this is a key to much of

China's fearful history during the last generation that the age-

old empire of China came to its end in the years before World

War I. The causes of that event need not take up too much of

38

our time. The Imperial court, presided over by the aged

dowager empress was beset by western ideas, western-trained

Chinese reformers, notably Dr. Sun Yat-sen, by the incompe-

tence of the empress' advisers and by the conflicting and

greedy claims of the Great Powers. And so it fell, and for a

generation China has known neither peace nor freedom from

foreign invasion.

Manchuria itself has been the scene and occasion of wars

for more than half a century. Japan and Russia alike have

fought for its mastery since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894.

When, after that war, the Japanese were prevented by the

European powers from enjoying the fruits of victory in Man-

churia, Russia lunged down from the Maritime Provinces of

Siberia to fill that vacuum.

By the year 1904, Japan felt strong enough to challenge

Russia over Manchuria. That was what the Russo-Japanese

War was about, a war in which Theodore Roosevelt backed

Japan by deed and sentiment, out of a fear of the growing

might of Russia in eastern Asia. Theodore Roosevelt was

solely pursuing American interest, and when he saw that

Japan, if it won too conclusive a victory, might succeed to

Russia's mantle and advance farther into China, Roosevelt

intervened. He brought the Japanese and Russians together at

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to negotiate a peace which

checked Japanese ambitions even as it also ended Russian

sway in Manchuria.

The intervening years saw a steady encroachment by Japan

over Manchuria, an encroachment viewed with alarm by the

single-minded Americans who then conducted our foreign

policies, until the climax was reached in 1937 when Japan

launched full-scale war against China for undisputed control

of Manchuria and northern China. Korea, which is a geo-

graphical dependency of Manchuria, had, of course, been

sacrificed to Japan's imperial ambitions along the route and

had long since been integrated into the empire of Nippon.

The historic route of the invaders of China has been from

the north. During many centuries, China has mounted guard

on its northern frontiers against the peoples of Manchuria,

Mongolia, and Siberia, who have, for as many centuries, been

regarded as barbarians by the civilized Chinese. Manchuria

has been the key to the security of China since the Manchu

conquest nearly four centuries ago. This fact we should re-

member and consider, as we remember Yalta.

39

It was a rich, highly developed Manchuria that was at

stake at Yalta. It was Manchuria which Franklin D. Roosevelt

thrust upon the Russians; it was, moreover, conferred upon

the new barbarians with full understanding that the United

States was thereby satisfying an old imperialistic design of the

Kremlin. The very language of the secret protocol which

sealed the bargain at Yalta recognized this fact. What Roose-

velt ceded to Stalin at Yalta, without the knowledge or

consent of the Chinese, whose sovereignty there we always

bad upheld, was, and I quote from the work of Edward R.

Stettinius, Jr., Roosevelt and the Russians, page 93, in restora-

tian of "the former rights of Russia violated by the treacher-

ous attack of Japan in 1904." The testimony before the

Russell Committee shows that Cbiang-Kal-shek was not invit-

ed to the Yalta Conference and that the terms of the agree-

ment selling out Chinese interests were kept secret from him.

At the Cairo Conference, however, it was solemnly agreed

with him that China's rights in Manchuria would be fully

respected and protected. When Wedemeyer appeared before

the Russell Committee, he testified that when Ambassador

Hurley informed Chiang Kai-shek of the Yalta agreement

which sealed the doom of the Republic of China, Chiang

was so shocked that he asked Hurley to repeat it before

could believe it.

The project was not disguised. It was a nakedly imperialistic

aggression over the prostrate body of China. What Roosevelt

sealed and delivered in the protocol agreed upon by him and

Stalin in a secret parley consuming only eleven minutes, and

thereafter kept locked away in a White House safe for many

months, were the historic levers of power over China - the

ports of Dairen and Port Arthur and the Chinese Eastern and

South Manchurian railways. It was through those ports and

along those railways, with their armed guards and command

of all the communications, including the telegraph lines, that

first Russia, then Japan, and now again Russia, with her

satellite, exercised mastery over Manchuria.

According to the terms of the bribe, drawn up in Moscow

by that elusive statesman of the half world in which our

relations with Russia dwell, Averell Harriman, Dairen was to

be "internationalized," the preeminent interests of the Soviet

Union being safeguarded, and "the lease of Port Arthur as a

naval base of the U.S.S.R. restored." I have quoted from the

protocol as published by Stettinius. I again quote:

40

The Chinese Eastern Railroad and the South Man-

churian Railroad, which provides an outlet to Dairen, shall

be jointly operated by the establishment of a joint Soviet-

Chinese company, it being understood that the preeminent

interests of the Soviet Union shall be safeguarded and that

China shall retain full sovereignty in Manchuria.

There were other provisions. Russia's long-standing protec-

torate over Outer Mongolia was ratified, the southern end of

Sakhalin, of which Russia was deprived by the treaty of Portsmouth,

was restored to her, and, as if to boot, the Kuriles were handed her.

The Kuriles had been Japanese, never Russian.

What shall we say of Roosevelt's cynical submission to

Russian imperialism in that deal? This was the Roosevelt,

mark you, who is represented to us in Sumner Welles's book

Seven Decisions That Shaped History, as the high-principled

opponent of imperialism in Hong Kong and India. This is the

the Roosevelt who steadfastly through the war sought to persuade

Churchill to get out of India and surrender the British lease-

hold of Hong Kong. This was the Roosevelt who proposed to

Stalin at Yalta -- and I hand this in Sherwood on page 866 --

that Hong Kong be handed to the Chinese or international-

ized and that colony turned over to a United Nations trustee-

ship. This was the Roosevelt who suggested that French

Indochina be placed under a trusteeship. He broached this

idea to Sumner Welles.

What does this whole sordid transaction teach us about the

good faith of the advisers of Roosevelt and the assorted

liberals, Communists, Communist sympathizers, and agents of

the Kremlin - the Achesons, the Lattimores, the Philip Jes-

sups, and the Institute of Pacific Relations -- who have for so

long been insincerely befuddling the people with talk of impe-

erialism and people's rights in Asia?

Why, merely this, that in their minds the imperialism of the

West, that decaying instrument of European expansion, is

wicked and must be opposed. The imperialism of Russia is not

only commendable but must be advanced by every means of

diplomacy and war at whatever cost to the United States.

That is the liberal-leftist doctrine on imperialism. Have we

heard one liberal voice raised in the Senate or elsewhere in

condemnation of Roosevelt's surrender to Russian imperialism

at Yalta? This is the test, and by it we may measure the

monstrous hypocrisy of the liberal elements in Congress and in

41

the country which have assisted in and applauded the surren-

der of all China to Russia without the firing of a single

Russian shot.

The apologists for Mr. Roosevelt have attempted to palliate

his offense. Robert Sherwood suggests that Roosevelt was

enfeebled. I quote him: "Had it not been that the Yalta

Conference was almost at an end and he was tired and

anxious to avoid further argument," Roosevelt, in his opinion,

might have refused to sign the protocol This is on page 867

of Roosevelt and Hopkins. Yet on the preceding page, he

nullifies the argument of fatigue by conceding:

It is quite clear that Roosevelt had been prepared even

before the Teheran Conference in 1943 to agree to the

legitimacy of most if not all of the Soviet claims in the Far

East, for they involved the restoration of possessions and

privileges taken by the Japanese from the Rassiansin the

war of 1904.

And Sherwood elsewhere reports Roosevelt offering Stalin

the 'warm-water port" of Dairen as early as Teheran. Mr.

Sherwood is known as a fervent and practicing "liberal." He

sees nothing wrong in restoring the imperialistic "possession

and privileges" which had been wrested from a dying Chinese

empire by the forces of Czarism. The insincerity, the specious-

ness, the nonlogical workings of the liberal mind when it

comes to Russian ambitions are clearly manifested by Mr.

Sberwood. Mr. Welles presents a better case. He, too, is a

"liberal," but with a higher sense of responsibility to history. I

need not introduce Mr. Welles to the reader. He served in the

Department of State until the fall of 1943, when his long-

standing feud with Cordell Hull brought about the termina-

tion of his public service. Mr. Welles was Under Secretary

of State when dismissed. His book Seven Decisions That

Shaped History is an apologia for his late chief, Roosevelt,

and a justification for certain events in his own career.

Mr. Welles insists that Roosevelt's betrayal of China and

the United States at Yalta is excusable. On what ground? The

ground of military necessity. When Roosevelt acted, according

to Welles, he did so because he believed that we must entice

Stalin into committing what we see as a plain act of self-

interest, namely, getting into the war against Japan before it

was too late. The President made that judgment because he

bad been advised by his military advisers, the Joint Chiefs of

42

Staff, that we had a long, hard row to hoe with the Japanese

and that without Russia's help we might not achieve victory.

That is the Welles doctrine. It is likewise the Marshall-Acheson-State

Department line. Where Welles differs is that he exposes that

the military advice upon which Roosevelt acted

was false and misleading. And where does the

pursuit of this rationalization lead us?

As we might suppose -- to Marshall.

It was Marshall who stood at Roosevelt's elbow at Yalta,

urging the grim necessity of bribing Stalin to get into the war.

It was Marshall who submitted intelligence reports to support

this argument, suppressing more truthful estimates, according

to Hanson Baldwin on page 81, and keeping from the stricken

Roosevelt knowledge that the Japanese were even then feeling

for peace in acknowledgment of defeat.

Was this a sincere endeavor by the master of global strategy

to advance American interest? Did we sorely need Russian assistance?

Or was it another in the baffling pattern of General

Marshall's interventions in the course of the great war which

conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin?

The desire to have Russia's help in the Far East arose with

Marshall and was embodied, as we know, in the fateful appeasement

memorandum of the first Quebec conference in August of 1943;

the document which charted our course at Teheran and Yalta and

thereafter. The desire to entice Russiain to the Japanese war was

officially embodied in a combined Chiefs of Staff doctrine

which I have previously discussed and which was

presented at second Quebec, in September of

1944. Back in the fall of 1943 the President sent Averell Harriman

to Moscow as his Ambassador and Marshall sent General Deane, their

"prime objective," as Deane describes it on page 23 of his book,

being "to induce Soviet participation in the war with Japan."

Were inducements necessary? Was it in the Kremlin's inter-

est to become a full-fledged combatant in the war in the Far

East, to take part in the defeat of Japan and have a seat at the peace

table where the spoils of war would be divided? Was it to the

Kremlin's interest to march its armies into Manchuria, from which

they had been barred since 1905 by the Kwantung army, and to be

in possession there when the war ended?

If some Americans did not grasp the strategic importance

of Manchuria, there is certainly abundant evidence

that the Kremlin, faithful to Lenin's dictum that "he who

43

controls China controls the world," never lost sight of it. To

ask these questions is to answer them, even if we lacked the

indications of Stalin's determination to be in at the Far

Eastern kill, which we have. Any intelligent American, after

giving the matter sufficient thought, would know that the aim

of Roosevelt and Marshall at Yalta should have been not how

to get the Russians in, but how to keep them out.

I have evidence of four occasions before Yalta on which

Stalin indicated to American officials his desires in this respect.

The first such suggestion was made to Averell Harriman

when, in August of 1942, he went to Moscow with Churchill

to deliver the word that the operations in North Africa had

been substituted for the second front now so exigently de-

manded by Stalin and Marshall. The occasion is reported by

General Deane on page 226 of his book:

Stalin told Harriman then that Japan was the historical

enemy of Russia and that her eventual defeat was essential

to Russian interests. He implied that while the Soviet

Union's military position at that time would not permit her

participation, eventually she would come in.

Roosevelt knew of this: so, presumably, did Marshall. It

should be noted that Stalin ascribed Russian interests as his

motive for fighting Japan.

The Red Czar next informed General Patrick J. Hurley of

his intentions. And in April of 1943 Hurley so reported to

Admiral Leahy. The reference is on page 147 of Leahy's

book, and I quote him:

Hurley saw Stalin * * * and the Marshall told him that

after Germany was defeated, he would assist America in

the war against Japan * * * The [our] army, in its plans

for the defeat of Japan, was anxious to have the help of

Russia. It was my opinion that we could defeat Japan with-

out Russian assistance.

The stouthearted old sea dog Leahy held to that opinion

throughout, being overborne always by Marshall. The history

of the war in the Far East and our postwar loss of China,

with the resultant war in Korea, would have been far different

had Leahy been, as his rank prescribed, the principal military

adviser to Roosevelt. That was not to be. The iron will of

Marshall prevailed over Leahy, as it did over Roosevelt and,

after the invasion of Italy, over Churchill.

44

I digress to report the substance of Leahy's opposition to

asking the Russians in, became it bears so pertinently on the

issue and because Leahy's qualifications were so high, his

reasoning so soundly American. In the record of World War

II, were Leahy occupies an honorable place, no question can

arise at any time as to where his loyalties lie.

In the strategical discussions about how to end the war

with Japan, Marshall urged that a land invasion was necces-

sary; an invasion beginning in the southern islands of the

Japanese homelands and proceeding north; an invasion requir-

ing upward of 2,000,000 riflemen and entailing, according to

Marshall's estimates, casualties of half a million.

Leahy reports a conference at the White House on the 10th

of July 1944. This is on page 245 of his book. Wrote Leahy:

It was my opinion, and I urged it strongly on the Joint

Chiefs of Staff, that no major land invasion of the Japanese

Mainland was necessary to win the war.

Far more compelling even than Leahy's own judgment was

the agreement he reported, page 251, between General Mac-

Arthur and Admiral Nimitz at Honolulu on that point. Leahy

accompanied Roosevelt, it will be recalled, on that excursion,

which coincided with the Democratic National Convention of

1944. He attended the conversations at which the President

and the Army and Navy commanders in the Pacific projected

victory over Japan. These -- Nimitz and MacArthur -- were the

true experts on the Pacific. Let us have their judgment and

Leahy's conclusions thereon:

The agreement on fundamental strategy to be employed

in defeating Japan and the President's familiarity with the

situation acquired at this conference were to be of great

value in preventing an unnecessary invasion of Japan which

the planning staffs of the Joint Chiefs and the War Depart-

ment were advocating, regardless of the loss of life that

would result from an attack on Japan's ground forces in

their own country. MacArthur and Nimitz were now in

agreement that the Philippines should be recovered with ground

and air power then available in the western Pacific

and that Japan could be forced to accept our terms of sur-

render by the use of sea and air power without an invasion

of the Japanese homeland.

There we have the strategy of MacArthur, Nimitz, and

45

Leahy for winning the war in the Pacific -- but not Marshall's.

Who was right?

Yet, despite this expert advice, Marshall persisted. At the

staff discussions before second Quebec, two months later,

Leahy had this to report on page 259:

By the beginning of September, Japan was almost de-

feated through a practically complete sea and air blockade.

However, a proposal was made by the Army to force a

surrender of Japan by an amphibious invasion of the main

islands through the island of Kyushu. * * * The Army did

not appear to be able to understand that the Navy, with

some Army air assistance, already had defeated Japan.

The Army not only was planning a huge land invasion of

Japan, but was convinced that we needed Russian assistance

as well to bring the war against Japan to a successful con-

clusion.

So much for the strategy of the matter.

I return to the indications of Russia's intentions in

the Far East. Cordell Hull was the unexpected and extremely gratified

recipient of the third such proffer of help in the Far East. The

venerable Secretary of State, an upright and proud man,

although he did not wholly understand the currents of high

policy that swirled about him, went to Moscow in October of

1943 to attend a conference of the Allied foreign ministers. It

was a momentous occasion for Mr. Hull, the crowning accom-

plishment of a lifetime devoted to public service. At that time

Mr. Hull suffered from the current credulity about Russia's

good faith in the highest American circles. He was insisting, to

the annoyance of subtler minds, that Russia was one nation,

Britain another, equal in merit as in menace, and that we must

treat them with equal and exact consideration. A fair-spoken

man himself, Mr. Hull assumed that he was dealing with men

of like scruple.

On the final night of his stay in Moscow, Mr. Hull attended

the usual state banquet with which the master of the Kremlin

regales his visitors. The banquet took place in the Hall of

Catherine the Great at the Kremlin. They dined upon gold

plate and drank innumerable toasts from heavy crystal.

Mr. Hull felt himself honored at being on the right of the

prime author of world misfortune. After having suitably flat-

tered Stalin, Hull was "astonished and delighted" when the

46

Marshall turned to him and said, as recorded on page 1309 of

Mr. Hull's Memoirs:

clearly and unequivocally that, when the Allies had suc-

ceded in defeating Germany, the Soviet Union would then

join in defeating Japan. Stalin had brought up this subject

on his own. * * * He finished by saying that I could

inform President Roosevelt of this in the strictest confidence.

I thanked him heartily.

The Secretary of State lost no time in cabling the promise

to Roosevelt using both the Army and Navy ciphers in the

hope of keeping the news from the British. It was Mr. Hull's

belief, a belief too often verified, that the Foreign Office in

London leaked secrets.

In his reflections over Yalta--Hull had by then resigned -

he seemed to think it passing strange that Roosevelt had had

to acquire Stalin's assistance by means of "numerous territorial

concessions." He added, "When Stalin made his promise to

me it had no strings attached to it."

The fourth assurance from Stalin regarding the Far East

came at Teheran, where he observed that, once peace came in

Europe, "by our common front we shall win" in that quarter.

But by that time, recognizing that Harriman and Deane had

come to Moscow to ply him for his assistance, Stalin was,

quite naturally, thinking of his price. The price was not cheap.

In October of 1944, during Churchill's second visit to Moscow,

Harriman got Stalin on the subject of the war against

Japan. Deane noted, page 247 of his book that Stalin agreed

That the Soviet Union would take the offensive after Germany's

defeat, provided the United States would insist on building

up the necessary reserve supplies for (60 divisions in Siberia)

and provided the political aspects of Russia's participation

had been clarified. His latter proviso referred to the

recognition by China of Russia’s claims against Japan in the

Far East.

At this sitting Stalin agreed that the United States Navy

might have Petropavlovsk on the Pacific as a naval base and

our air forces the sites for heavy bomber bases in the Maritime

but denied us use of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Haul in supplies.

This was the gun pointed at Roosevelt's head. If we

47

 

wanted Russia in, we had to supply her armies and force

Chiang-Kia-shek to accept the loss of Manchuria, which had

been solemnly promised him by Roosevelt and Churchill at

Cairo. Marshall insisted, again beyond the call of duty, that we

needed Russia. Roosevelt believed him. The cost of supplies

was fairly heavy, the Russians stipulating what amounted to

860,410 tons of dry cargo, 206,000 tons of liquid cargo. All

this in addition to the supplies for the war in Europe called

for under the fourth protocol. The Russians got 80 per cent

of their Far Eastern requirements. One item was 25,000 tons

of canned meat. That would provide at least 50,000,000

courses, at a pound each, for the Red soldiers.

I return to Yalta, where Stalin got his price in full, the

conference which is described by Hanson Baldwin as "the

saddest chapter in the long history of political futility which

the war recorded."

What was the war situation in the Pacific in January of

1945? Leyte was ours, the Japanese fleet was defeated, Manila

fell during the Yalta Conference. Okinawa lay ahead, but the

Air Force was daily raining destruction and fire on Japanese

cities. General William J. Donovan's Office of Strategic Services

was reporting from China that the Kwantung army had

been dissipated and depleted. In any case, said the OSS, what

was left could not be moved to the Japanese home islands

because of the lack of shipping. Nor could the Japanese

troops in China be moved. Everywhere the story was the

same. The Japanese merchant marine was beneath the sea.

The blockade was strangling Japan. Admiral Leahy wrote on

page 293 of his book concerning his own views of the

situation at this time:

I was of the firm opinion that out war against Japan

had progressed to the point where her defeat was only a matter

of time and attrition. Therefore, we did not need Stalin's

help to defeat our enemy in the Pacific, The Army did not

agree with me and Roosevelt was prepared to bargain with

Stalin.

Hanson Baldwin writing after the event, endorsed Leahy's

conclusions, saying, on page 79 of his book:

At the time of Yalta, Japan was already beaten - not by

the atomic bomb which had not yet been perfected, not by

48

conventional bombing then just starting, but by attrition

and blockade.

Yet at Yalta, Marshall redoubled his endeavors for

Russia's entrance with all the indomitable persistence he had

applied to the "second front now" and to blocking Mark

Clark and the British over eastern European strategy. The

late Edward Stettinius, who, as Secretary of State, played a

hand at Yalta, recalled on page 90 of Roosevelt and the

Russians:

I knew at Yalta * * * of the immense pressure put on

the President by our military leaders to bring Russia into

the far-eastern war.

Before Stettinius left Washington he saw a memorandum

from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the State Department which said:

"We desire Russia's entry at the earliest possible date."

In support of his urgent demand, Marshall used what

Baldwin calls on page 80 of his book "a pessimistic intelli-

gence estimate," which placed the strength of the Kwantung

Army in Manchuria at 700,000, a total of 2,000,000 Japanese

forces on the Asiatic mainland--"all first rate troops and well

trained according to Marshall. Far worse than this, Baldwin

exposes the fact that more realistic intelligence estimates, cor=

responding to the facts as brought out after the war and held

at that time by Leahy and others, "never reached the top

echelon at Yalta. Even the Washington Post, that pillar of

leftism and scuttle in Asia, felt moved on September 9, 1948,

to declare that the Chiefs of Staff had "made a blunder to

advise Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta that Japan would last

18 months after VE-day."

Nor is this the end of this dismal story.

Rear Admiral E. M. Zacharias, in his book Behind Closed

Doors, declares that a Japanese peace feeler had

been received and transmitted to Washington by General MacArthur before

Roosevelt had departed for Yalta. So at the time we sold out China to

Russia to induce Russia to come into the Japanese

war, we already had Japan suing for peace, according to

Admiral Zacharias. The peace overtures were to come thick

and fast from Japanese sources after Yalta, and by the time of

Potsdam were so authentic that the Declaration of Pots-

dam was put forward to answer them.

Yet, in late April of 1945 Marshall was still intent upon

49

wooing the Russians into the Far Eastern war. As Stettinius

reports it on page 97:

At a top-level policy meeting in the White House just

before the San Francisco conference opened on April 25,

President Truman, the military leaders and I discussed the

failure of the Soviet Union to abide by the Yalta agreement

on the Balkans. At this meeting the United States military

representatives pleaded for patience with the Soviet Union

because they feared that a crack-down would endanger

Russian entry into the far-eastern war.

Who advised patience with Russia? Marshall? At Potsdam

in July, Marshall's determination to have the Red Army

equipped by us and moved into Asia had not abated. Stetti-

nius reports with some perplexity on page 98:

Even as late as the Potsdam conference, after the first

atomic bomb had exploded at Los Alamos on July 16, the

military insisted that tho Soviet union had to be brought

into the far-eastern war.

In his endeavor to exculpate Roosevelt of blame for

shame of Yalta, Welles saddles the blame on the combined

Chiefs of Staff. We know that it was Marshall who formed

and carried through those decisions. Welles attributed Mar-

shall's desire to have Russia in to "a basic misapprehension of

existing facts." This appears on page 153 of his book.

Is that the answer? Or was Marshall's insistence that Russia

should be allowed to serve her own interest - not our - in

eastern Asia a part of that pattern which has been emerging

with ever greater clarity as we trace his career: a pattern

which finds his decisions, maintained with great stubbornness

and skill, always and invariably serving the world policy of the

Kremlin?

The President had another adviser at Yalta, Alger Hiss.

Was it upon the advice of Hiss, who served on the Far

Eastern desks and was deep in the China plot, that Roosevelt

chatting companionably with Stalin, assured him that "the

blame for the breach [in China] lay more with the Comintern

and the Kuomintang than the rank and file of the so-called

Communists?" The quotation is from page 868 of Sher-

wood's revelatory book. It will be noted that the Communists,

the Kremlin lackeys who sent their armies against our

50

own in Korea, were to Roosevelt only "so-called' Commu -

nists, and pretty good fellows at that, more reasonable, the

President may have gone on to say, than Chiang Kai-shek's

bunch or even your own fellows, Generalissimo, in Moscow!

We shall encounter that view of the Chinese Reds as agreeable

innocents again when we examine Marshall's mission to China.

Let me assume for the moment that Marshall's judgment in

World War II was clouded by no ulterior objective, no hidden

thread of purpose which could not reach the light of day.

What kind of a "master of global strategy" would have made

the mistake of Yalta? What kind of strategic genius does that

display? The whole array of Marshall's strategical endeavors,

from Sledgehammer, or the "second front now," through his

timidity over invading Algiers by way of the Mediterranean,

to his downright insistence upon invading southern France two

months after D-day in Normandy, is un-reassuring. We inevit-

iably contrast Marshall's competence with MacArthur's during

MacArthur's grand march from New Guinea to Tokyo. In the

circumstances, how could we take Marshall's word on strat-

tegy? If he so overestimated the Japanese as to believe they

could fight on for a year and a half after the Germans quit in

Europe, how can we place any reliance upon his estimate of

the strength of the Russian empire and its Chinese satellite in

eastern Asia at this moment?

So the A-bombs fell on Japan and the war was over,

although so careful a military critic as Hanson Baldwin be-

lieves that the bombs hastened the end of the war, if at all, by

only one day. Japan's fate had been determined long, long

before. And with the end of the war Yalta's chickens came

promptly home to roost. The Red Army after a bloodless

campaign of six days took over all Manchuria; it stood also in

North China. The Reds were there by right, ceded them at

Yalta.

And so we come to the question of Korea. Who divided

that unhappy land at the thirty-eight parallel, ordering that

Russia should receive the surrender of Japanese forces above

that line, the United States below it? Here we have one of the

major mysteries of that time. At Yalta, Stalin had agreed with

Roosevelt on a four-power trusteeship for Korea, the powers

to be the United States, China, Russia, and Britain; a decision

which he ratified when Hopkins visited Moscow in the

late spring of 1945. The trusteeship called for a unified

administration a with a government of Koreans to

51

be freely elected and governing the whole peninsula. What

happened to the trusteeship? When Japan quit, there arose the

problem of accepting the surrender of the forces in the field.

Welles covers the situation on page 167 of his book Seven

Decisions that Shaped History:

Some subordinate officers in the Pentagon hastily recommended

that the Russians accept the Japanese surrender

north of the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea, while the

American troops would accept it south of that line.

I am told that this line was fixed because it was con-

venient. Certainly it was fixed by officials with no knowledge

of what they were doing, and without consulting any

responsible members of the administration who might have

had some regard for the political and economic considerations

which the decision so lamentably ignores.

There the matter rested until Senator Brewster of Maine

brought to light the fact that the thirty-eight parallel has

historic significance. I had wondered why the War Department

in August of 1945 chose to divide Korea for purposes, as was

said, of receiving the Japanese surrender, along the thirty-

eighth parallel. Why not the thirty-seventh, or thirty-ninth

parallel? Why had it to be the thirty-eighth parallel?

The Senator from Maine, in delving into United States

Relations, which is the continuing history of American foreign

affairs as published periodically by the Department of State,

found that the Russians had fixed the thirty-eighth parallel

nearly a half century ago, as the dividing line. They were

negotiating with Japan over the division of Korea between the

two imperial systems. So the Czar's diplomats proposed to

those of the Emperor of Japan that the 38th parallel be the border

between the two empires.

I refer to the testimony before the Armed Services and

Foreign Relations Committees on June 8, 1951, when Secretary

Acheson was being questioned by Senator Brewster on this point.

Acheson disclosed that the decision was taken not by "some

subordinate officers" but by the Secretary of War, was approved

by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the State, Navy, Air Force

Coordinating Committee, and by the President. This was a

high-level decision, initiated by the Secretary of War. Who was,

in effect, the Secretary of War during the later incumbency

of Mr. Stimson? I think no one who was touch with the inner

workings of those adjoining offices at the

52

Pentagon, who has read the late Secretary's explicit memoirs,

who knows the inner relationships between the two men, can

doubt that in matters of this sort it was Marshall who made

the decisions, Stimson who rubber-stamped them.

It was Marshall who selected the line for the division of

Korea which was chosen by the Russian Foreign Office and

General Staff nearly fifty years ago. It was Marshall who

restored Russia's pre-1904 claims on North Korea in August

of 1945.

I refer you particularly to this colloquy, the Senator from

Maine asking, Secretary Acheson answering thc questions:

Senator Brewster: Isn't it rather interesting to note the

thirty-eigth parallel in Korea was proposed 45 years

earlier by Russia as a means of dividing the spheres of in-

fluence of Russia and Japan incident to the episodes around

the Russo-Japanese War?

Secretary Acheson. I am not familiar with that, Senator.

I content myself with noting that a Secretary of State

unfamiliar with the complex of imperial ambitions in the Far

East during the days when the United States was playing a

humane, a creditable and an American part in those affairs

can scarcely qualify as an expert on the diplomacy of the Far

East.

The war was over. Millions of Americans, mistakenly think-

ing that their international troubles were over too, had a 24-

hour celebration only to awaken before long to find that, even

as we were spending vast amounts of flesh and blood and

steel to win the war, there was being conducted what ap-

peared to be a planned loss of the peace.

53

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