Harry S.

Truman
Potsdam Article
Task: 7
1.Read the article
2. Summaries the outcomes of the meeting
The National WWII Museum: New Orleans, July 18, 2022 (edited)

Between July 17 and August 2, 1945, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill (replaced on July 26, 1945, by Prime Minster Clement Attlee), and US
President Harry Truman met at Potsdam, Germany, to negotiate the terms for the end of
World War II. Even though the Allies remained committed to fighting a joint war in the
Pacific, mutual distrust stemming from differing views of what a postwar world should look
like led to disagreements on several key issues. Consequently, some historians have pointed
to the Potsdam conference as one of several fissures between the Soviet Union and the West
that set the stage for the Cold War.

The three most pressing issues discussed at Potsdam concerned how to handle a defeated
Germany, the fate of Poland, and the final destruction of Japanese military power. Questions
dealing with German reparations, the economic rehabilitation of Germany, Poland’s postwar
borders, and the composition of Poland’s government proved to be the most contentious. The
Big Three, however, also had to make decisions regarding the stabilization of China, Axis
satellite states, and orderly population transfers.

Unlike the previous conferences at Tehran and Yalta, Stalin and his Western counterparts
were becoming increasingly suspicious of each other’s postwar intentions. On the one hand,
the United States and Great Britain feared a Soviet-backed communist domination of Europe,
which drove their decision making at Potsdam. On the other hand, Stalin believed that his
Western Allies did not appreciate the sacrifices made by the Red Army and Soviet citizens
during the war, remarking at times that the West was committed to denying the Soviet Union
appropriate compensation.

DIFFERING WORLD VIEWS

Stalin came to Potsdam with the impression that the West had depended on the Soviet Union
for victory in Europe. Estimates place Soviet military deaths in battle between 8.8 million and
10.7 million and civilian deaths at 14.6 million, which equated to about 13.9 percent of the
country’s total prewar population. In comparison, Britain lost approximately 383,800 in battle
and 67,000 civilians while the United States had about 416,800 deaths in battle and 1,700
civilian deaths. “Soviet loss and suffering played a profound role in the attitudes and
behaviors of the Soviets at Potsdam,” argues Neiberg, which complicated matters since the
Soviets possessed a desire for revenge that the West did fully comprehend and, therefore,
“badly underestimated.”

Britain came to the table as they did during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which outlined
the parameters of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, with the same conviction:
protecting the balance of powers in Europe. In 1919 Britain viewed France as the biggest
threat to that balance, but now its leaders, especially Churchill, saw the Soviet Union as the
greatest danger. Some within the British government even argued that communism was more
menacing than Nazism, and prior to Potsdam, Churchill made it clear that the West would
“respond in meaningful ways to Russian aggression.” As a result, the British foreign
delegation advocated for policies aimed at containing both Germany and the Soviet Union.

The United States remained divided on how much of a threat the Soviet Union posed to
European peace. While some officials, such as Admiral William Leahy, agreed with
Churchill that one of the Soviet Union’s main goals was the spread of communism, others
held a more optimistic view. Truman, for instance, thought the mistrust between Stalin and
the West stemmed from miscommunication during the weeks between FDR’s death and the
German surrender. He also believed that Soviet desires to have control over Poland, recover
lands lost to the Japanese in 1905, and a guaranteed access to the Dardanelles were similar to
those of Russian tsars. As a result, he did not think the West needed to fear Soviet power
plays in other areas of the world.

PRE-CONFERENCE CHALLENGES
One of the biggest challenges facing the Allies during the Potsdam Conference dealt with
changes to the heads of government in the United States and Britain. During the interim
months between Yalta and Potsdam, Franklin Roosevelt died, leaving an enormous void in
US foreign policy. FDR had conducted most of US war diplomacy himself, often shutting his
own State Department out of the process, which left Truman unprepared for his new role as a
member of the Big Three. Conversely, in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, Britain’s
Labor Party won the general election and Clement Attlee replaced Winston Churchill as
Prime Minister. Similar to Truman, Attlee had served as Churchill’s deputy prime minister in
a coalition government, but was rarely involved in making any key decisions.

The introduction of new personnel within the US and British delegations also created
challenges because some of the new diplomats held different views concerning the postwar
world, the main goals of the Potsdam conference, and the interpretation of agreements
reached at Yalta than their predecessors.

THE POTSDAM DECLARATION ON JAPAN

Another goal the Western Allies had at Potsdam was to get Stalin to end the Soviet
nonaggression pact with Japan and declare war as soon as possible. At the time, both the
United States and Britain believed they needed Soviet help to end the war in the Pacific.
Consequently, at Potsdam, the Combined Chiefs of Staff set November 15, 1946, as the
estimated date for ending the war with Japan, with Stalin promising that the Red Army would
invade Manchuria no later than mid-August 1945.

With the successful test of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945, however, the Allies issued the
Potsdam Declaration. The Declaration pledged that if Japan surrendered, it would retain
sovereignty over the home islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku and promised
that the Japanese people would have “the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives.”
The Declaration reiterated this second point by maintaining, “we do not intend that the
Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation.” While the document stated that
Japanese militarists and war criminals would be prosecuted, it did not explicitly mention the
emperor, which left open the possibly of the emperor staying on the throne in some capacity.

CONCLUSION
Herbert Feis argues that the heads of the British, United States, and Soviet governments did
not “draw together at Potsdam in the same warm, personal association in a common cause as
the two wartime meetings at Teheran and Yalta.” During the war, the Allies were bound by
mutual military dependence, but once the war ended, “differences of memory and interest,
and visons of a good public and private life, proved to be too deep to make genuine ? possible
once the common danger was past.”

The Western Allies feared Soviet Communist domination over Europe and Stalin believed
that the West wanted to deprive the USSR of the benefits of its victory. The US and Britain
were also alarmed by the ways in which the Soviet Union was seeking to expand its sphere of
influence beyond Central and Eastern Europe by its effort to get Norway to turn over
Spitzbergen; its bid for one of the Italian colonies in North Africa; its demand for control of
the Black Sea Straits; its “menacing ways in Iran;” and a plan to extort from China special
privileges in Manchuria and Korea.

Some leaders such as Atlee and Kennan accurately predicted a future conflict between the
Soviet Union and the West, but it is important to remember that despite areas of
disagreement, each of the Big Three left Potsdam optimistic that they had solved the central
problems as they existed during the time. While the Potsdam conference did not answer all
the questions stemming from the end of World War II, it did, nonetheless, as Byrnes stated,
establish “a basis for maintaining our war-born unity [with the Soviet Union] and provided a
basis for the early restoration of stability to Europe.”

Task: Summaries the outcomes of the meeting

Source Analysis
From the source what can you infer?
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How would American’s respond to this 7
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Notes on video: Truman in 60 seconds, PBS Presidents (Youtube)

Extract Analysis

Extract 1
Present Tense: the United States Since 1945 by Michael Schaller, Elizabeth Scharff and Robert Schulzinger
[Houghton Miffin, 1996]

After the Republicans captured both houses of Congress in the mid-term elections of 1946, they looked
forward confidently to winning the White House in 1948. In a way, the late President Roosevelt helped
them, for whatever Truman’s merits might have been, he inevitably suffered from comparison to his
predecessor. Roosevelt had been a master coalition builder, establishing what is still known as the
Roosevelt or New Deal coalition. After 1948, now president by election, Truman tried to emerge from
Roosevelt’s shadow. He proclaimed his own reform program, the Fair Deal. Few of these measures came
to a vote in Congress. The enduring coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats blocked them.
Thus, the Fair Deal remained more of a promise than a reality. Nevertheless, Trauma’s proposals did set
a social agenda for later administrations, and in this sense, they were more influential than politicians at
Identify the arguments put forward about Truman’s presidency.
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McCarthyism
Notes on video: Hunting the
Communists! Joseph McCarthy/The Cold War (Youtube)

Red Scare
 Since the end of WWII there had been a growing rival between the US and the only
Communist nation in the world, the Soviet Union.
  USSR created a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe post WWII. US feared Western
Europe would fall.
 China fell to Communism in 1949 and it was widely suggested that the State
Department had not done enough to prevent it – blamed on Communist infiltrators.
 Korean War 1950-53 – heightened fears of Communism spreading around the world.
 Spy scandals in UK, Canada and US increased fear.
 Suspected that USSR had developed nuclear weapons so quickly due to Soviet
agents in the Manhattan project.
 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for passing on atomic secrets.
 Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was imprisoned for giving secret
documents to the Soviets back in 1938. Accusations began to spread like wild fire!
 1947 – Loyalty Review Board – govt. employees sympathetic to ‘subversive
organisations’ could be fired. 1,200 fired, 4,000 resigned.
 Eleven leaders of the Communist Party were imprisoned up to five years as ‘their
beliefs suggested they would try to overthrow the government.’
 The Red Scare was probably a key factor in the escalation of the arms race in the
1950s – US test first H-Bomb in 1954.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

In 1951, Julius and his wife Ethel were tried and convicted of espionage
for providing the Soviet Union with classified information. They were
executed in 1953. Their trial remains controversial today. In the early
1930s, Ethel became a member of the Young Communist League.

Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an
American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for
the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Statutes of limitations had expired
for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with
this charge in 1950. Guilty on two counts of perjury. Alger Hiss
(pictured), a well-educated and well-connected former government
lawyer and State Department official who helped create the United
Nations in the aftermath of World War II, was headed to prison in Atlanta for lying to a
federal grand jury.

McCarthy Task
Research McCarthy’s DOB/DOD/ Key Jobs and Idealisms
Answer the below questions
1. What was the HUAC?
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2. What effect did it have?

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3. Why did McCarthy gain support?

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4. What led to his downfall?

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Eweww

Dwight D.
Eisenhower
 Notes on video: Dwight Eisenhower (PBS Presidents, Youtube)

Extract Analysis

Extract 2
Adapted from The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to
Barack Obama by Stephen Graubard [Penguin, 2009)
Identify Graubard’s arguments about Eisenhower's record in domestic policy.
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Fact File Task

Task:
Create a fact file on Eisenhower. You need to include:

1. Personal Background,
2. Jobs held before Presidency,
3. Strengths and Weaknesses
1960’s Election

Source Analysis
What does this source infer?____________________________________________________
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How would Americans respond? ________________________________________________
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Does this image feel familiar? ______________________

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How would Americans respond?
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 How is it different from JFK?
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Exam Question
Using your understanding of the historical context, assess how convincing the arguments
in Extracts 1, 2 and 3 are in relation to the American presidency between 1940 and 1960
Task:
1. Read the 3 extracts.
2. Map out how you would write your answer

Tip:
The focus of this question is on an assessment of the power and influence of the US presidency.
You will need to make up your own mid about this first, in order to place the views of the three
extracts in context.

Extract 1
Present Tense: the United States Since 1945 by Michael Schaller, Elizabeth Scharff and Robert Schulzinger
[Houghton Miffin, 1996]

After the Republicans captured both houses of Congress in the mid-term elections of 1946, they looked
forward confidently to winning the White House in 1948. In a way, the late President Roosevelt helped
them, for whatever Truman’s merits might have been, he inevitably suffered from comparison to his
predecessor. Roosevelt had been a master coalition builder, establishing what is still known as the
Roosevelt or New Deal coalition. After 1948, now president by election, Truman tried to emerge from
Roosevelt’s shadow. He proclaimed his own reform program, the Fair Deal. Few of these measures came
to a vote in Congress. The enduring coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats blocked them.
Thus, the Fair Deal remained more of a promise than a reality. Nevertheless, Trauma’s proposals did set
a social agenda for later administrations, and in this sense, they were more influential than politicians at
the time could guess.
Extract 2
Adapted from The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to
Barack Obama by Stephen Graubard [Penguin, 2009)

Eisenhower, the famed military alliance-builder in World War II, failed as a civilian. His Kansas-bred
belief in frugality, exacerbated by his Army-induced exaggeration of the values of an organized
hierarchical staff, blinded him to anything that might be mistaken for a social vision. Reared in a military
ghetto, given housing and a guaranteed income by the federal government, things that were denied to tens
of millions who had to weather the Depression, he lost touch with the Kansas world he was born into. His
intimate association with the very rich, his constant attendance on them on the golf links, were
insignificant blemished besides one ither, rarely mentioned: his isolation from men able to instruct him,
those in a position to offer constructive criticism of his policies. Neither a saviour nor a creator, he was,
quite simply, a five-star general out of his depth in the White House.

Extract 3
Adapted from Eisenhower: The White House Years by Jim Newton [Anchor, 2011]

Eisenhower took Nixon’s defeat personally, called it the worst of his life. To his brother Milton, Ike
confided that he felt the last eight years of his life ‘had gone down the drain’. Eisenhower rebounded but
Nixon fell into a deep gloom. He sulked through November and December while the country thrilled to
its president-elect, his stylish wife, and their adorable children. Near the ends of the year, Ike summoned
Nixon to discuss the future of the party and Eisenhower’s role in it. The conversations was constructive
until the two men began to reflect on the campaign. Nixon was bitter. Up to that point in his career, Nixon
had a fairly commendable record on civil rights and had paid some prices for it among conservatives.
When he resumed his quest for the presidency in 1968, he would pursue it through the so-called Southern
strategy. The goal was to break the Democratic Party’s hold on the South by allying the Republican Party
with the forces of racism. The Southern strategy might well be said to have been born that day in
Eisenhower’s White House.