The Turning Point: Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, and Chiang-Kai-Shek, 1943: The Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran Conferences

381 Pages·1986·6.576 MB·English

by  Keith Sainsbury

THE TURNING POINT
Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, and Chiang-Kai-Shek, 1943
The Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran Conferences

THE
TURNING POINT
Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, and Chiang-Kai-Shek, 1943
The Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran Conferences
KEITH SAINSBURY
Oxford New York
O X FO R D U N IV ERSITY PRESS
1985
Um. libraty, Univ. Calif., Santo Crus
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© Keith Sainsbury 1985
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Sainsbury, Keith
The turning point.
I. Teheran Conference
I. Tide
94Q.53'14 D734.T4
ISBN 0-19-215858-9
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sainsbury, Keith.
The turning point.
Bibliography : p.
Includes index.
1. World War, 1939-1945—Diplomatic history.
2. Moscow Conference (1943) 3. Cairo Conference (1943)
4. Teheran Conference (1943) I. Title.
D749.S25 1985 940.53'2 84-12237
ISBN 0-19-215858-9
Set by Getset (Bowden Typesetting Services) Ltd
Printed in Great Britain
at the University Press, Oxford
by David Stanford
Printer to the University
To
Geoffrey Warner
amicitiae causa
The Russians referred to the year that had passed (1943)
as ‘perelom’—the ‘turning-point*.
Averell Harriman
The greatest tragedies of history have occurred not so
much because of what was finally done, but because of
what had earlier been foolishly left undone.
Robert McNamara

CONTENTS
Introduction and Acknowledgements 1
Abbreviations 5
Code-Names 6
I The Genesis of the Tripartite Meetings 7
II Conflicting Aims and Objectives 12
III Journey to Moscow 36
IV Moscow Meeting: The Surrender of Eastern Europe 53
V Moscow to Cairo—and Chiang-Kai-Shek 110
VI The Big Four and the Cairo Agenda 137
VII The First Cairo Conference: Problems without
Solutions 165
VIII Teheran Summit: Stalin Decides Allied Strategy 217
IX Return to Cairo and Conclusion 281
Appendices
A. Select Moscow Conference Documents 310
B. Select Cairo and Teheran Documents 321
C. J.C.S. Meetings 322
Notes 327
Bibliography 359
Index 364

INTRODUCTION AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Much has been written about the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, but
the first meeting between the three Allied leaders at Teheran has been
somewhat neglected. It is time the omission was remedied, because
the Teheran conference had its own importance. Militarily, it decided
the main course of Allied strategy till the war’s end. Politically, it
paved the way for the Yalta division of Europe and much of the rest of
the world into American and Soviet spheres of interest. There is also
a particular interest in the fact that it was the first tripartite con­
ference, and hence the first meeting of Roosevelt with Stalin.
The conference therefore was important in two different ways.
Militarily, it marked the moment when American strategic ideas pre­
vailed over the British plans which had dominated the first two years
of the Anglo-American alliance. It came also at the moment when it
became fully apparent that the USSR would almost certainly be mili­
tarily dominant in Eastern and perhaps in Central Europe after the
war; and that the Western Allies would need to adjust themselves to
this fact. At this conference Soviet pressures for a Cross-Channel
Attack at the earliest possible moment, accompanied by a landing in
the south of France, were supported by the Americans; and hence the
mainly British and Empire forces in Italy and the Eastern Medi­
terranean were relegated to a supporting role. It has been suggested
that, by pursuing a largely British strategy for the first two years of the
alliance and a largely American strategy for the remainder of the war,
the Western Powers missed the full benefit of either strategy; and that,
because of this, Soviet armies reached Berlin, Vienna, and Prague
first, and occupied the whole of Eastern Europe—with consequences
which are still with us. I have argued in a previous book' that the
pursuit of American strategic ideas in the first days of the alliance
would have involved courses that were either militarily reckless or
politically impossible. I examine the second possibility—the con­
tinuance of a Mediterranean strategy—in a purely tentative way at
the end of this book. It would have involved a military gamble on
campaigns across unpromising territory, and a political gamble on
events in Western Europe. On the whole I can find no clear evidence
that any feasible alternative strategy to that which was in fact pursued
2 Introduction and Acknowledgements
would have had better results. Others, of course, have concluded
differently, and may still do so.
The Teheran conference was also far-reaching in its effects politi­
cally. The outline of a Soviet-American concordat on Europe and the
Far East was sketched out by Roosevelt and Stalin, which looked
ahead to future agreements at Yalta. The breaking up of Germany
and control of its major industrial areas, the maintenance of a large
number of small States in Central and Eastern Europe, the annex­
ation of part of pre-war Poland by Russia, and of German territory by
Russia and Poland, the permanent reduction of France to a minor
power, and easy Soviet access to the Baltic and Mediterranean were
indicated as part of the future pattern for Europe. Churchill and
Eden, on the other hand, could not secure effective guarantees for
Polish independence and self-determination, or the creation of larger
and more viable States in Central and Eastern Europe. In the Far East
the Roosevelt-Stalin entente envisaged the return to China of all her
losses to Japan over the past fifty years and the acceptance of Chiang-
Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government as the legitimate government of
China. The United States was to keep its captured Japanese island
bases and become effective master of the Pacific: but Russia was to
have privileged access to that ocean through a Chinese port or ports on
the Yellow Sea. The need for assured communications with such ports
seemed also to imply a Soviet 'sphere of influence* in Manchuria. It
is clear that Stalin and Roosevelt did not intend that Britain would
play any major role in the Far East after the war.
In short, in many important respects the understandings arrived at
at Teheran—on Poland, Germany, China, and the Pacific—fore­
shadowed agreements at Yalta. Just as the military decisions reflected
broad Soviet-American agreement and the growing Soviet-
American military predominance at this stage of the war, so did the
political understandings.
It became apparent at an early stage in the writing of this book that
the four days* discussions at Teheran in November-December 1943
had to be seen in the light of previous negotiations at the Moscow
Foreign Ministers* conference and the Anglo-American-Chinese
conference at Cairo. The scope of this book therefore expanded to
include a detailed account of both those conferences. The fact that
most of the British documents, including the minutes of these con­
ferences, are still unpublished made a narrative account seem desir­
able. This in turn ruled out certain other things, if the book was to
remain a reasonable length. I have had largely to leave to other
scholars the task of whatever fresh analysis of the consequences of