Best-Laid Plans

As every participant in the Potsdam negotiations intended, the agreement finally solved the problems that the Versailles treaty had failed to solve—in fact, that Versailles had helped to create—even if it was 26 years too late and after another world war, the most destructive in history. The trouble was, the Big Three, who gathered outside Berlin after Hitler had died and Germany had surrendered, didn’t provide for a lasting, stable order on European soil. But that’s not the concern of this book. Instead, Neiberg shows how the three men and their associates put to rest the difficulties that Wilsonian idealism, diplomatic errors, and American avoidance had created in 1919, difficulties that had led to an even larger world conflict. In his estimation, Potsdam was a major achievement despite the Cold War that followed it.

All historians of geopolitical affairs face a choice about how to proceed. Borrowing from political scientists and theorists, they can structure their works around arguments that are as old as Herodotus (the immemorial clash between East and West) or more modern (like Halford Mackinder’s emphasis on control of the European “heartland”). They can invoke broad themes, like Russia’s historical suspicions of the West, to organize their books, or they can design their subjects as narratives of what occurred, finding what meaning the subjects hold in the succession of events and decisions that brought about certain outcomes. Neiberg’s approach is firmly of that last, traditional kind: He’s a skilled storyteller—although, as is often the case with narrative, his book yields no surprises and adds no fresh arguments to earlier studies.  

It’s in his details that the significance of Potsdam emerges. Neiberg, a historian at the Army War College, sets up his narrative by pointing out that its three main characters—Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—were veterans of the Great War. Truman, an artillery officer, had been under fire in France. Churchill had served as first lord of the Admiralty until the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, then as an officer on the Western Front. Stalin had participated in the Soviet Revolution during the war as commissar of nationalities. 

Their experiences in that war, and their understanding of its failed aftermath, determined them once and for all to exorcise the “ghosts” of Versailles, two especially: the reparations enforced on Germany and the American withdrawal from responsibility for ensuring the peace. Aiming to end what some of them saw as another Thirty Years’ War, they also had in mind a third “ghost”—appeasement, the notorious 1938 Munich agreement that freed Germany to invade Eastern Europe. This time, Germany would be permanently brought to heel and leashed. But did these men have the stuff—the skills, the knowledge, the political authority—to achieve their vital aim?

Truman arrived at Potsdam not long after having assumed the presidency from the deceased Franklin Roosevelt, who had resolutely kept his vice president in the dark about everything, including the atomic bomb. So unknown and underestimated was Truman that many contemporaries dismissed him as a weak, provincial country boy who required the tutelage of Ivy League statesmen. (Truman reciprocated such feelings, calling British foreign secretary Anthony Eden a “perfect striped-pants boy.”) Churchill considered himself capable of influencing the freshman president but was exhausted by the war, drinking heavily, and often distracted. Like FDR with Truman, Churchill held Clement Attlee, the Labour party leader, at arm’s length; but Attlee, a member of the British war cabinet, was more knowledgeable about world affairs than was Truman. When Attlee took over after Churchill was ousted from power by elections at home, he got up to speed more easily than did the new American president. Stalin, who thought Truman “vulgar” and belittled Churchill, was the only one of the three to enter the negotiations in a position of unchallenged power at home. 

This was not a gathering of people overly gracious about each other. Yet the meeting was not without its civilities: sumptuous quarters, lavish dinners, lively parties, sightseeing. Potsdam, formerly home to wealthy Germans, was in the Soviet zone in 1945. It had emerged from the war unscathed. Not so the nearby (formerly) great city of Berlin. As if to make clear the kind of destruction the Soviets had endured, Stalin opened the leveled Berlin cityscape to a kind of tour of the damned for the visiting delegations. Their members took in the stench of rotting corpses, saw thousands of wandering, starving refugees (a huge proportion of them fleeing vicious Soviet depredations in the east), and strolled through Hitler’s bunker—from which they didn’t hesitate to take souvenirs. 

The Soviets, with the usual exception of foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, proved themselves uncharacteristically friendly and accommodating, which in no way was to affect their negotiating stance. All three allies held firmly to the conviction that Germany had brought its suffering upon itself. Somehow, the defeated nation and its people would have to pay for what they’d wrought. Yet while making Germany pay, the Big Three also had to prevent another rise of revanchiste sentiment there. It was not to be easy.

Relating how these aims were achieved, at least on paper, composes the core of this book. Neiberg shows how differing views within, and then between, delegations gradually made way for the final agreement. The key difficulty was determining how to satisfy the Soviet insistence on humiliating vengeance through German reparations. This failed to take into account the risk of once again beggaring Germany and forcing it to rely on American and others’ financing to stay afloat in order to avoid the emergence of another embittered Hitlerite regime. 

When it became clear that the Soviets would not yield on extracting the maximum spoils of war from what was left of German wealth, the British and Americans, led by Secretary of State James Byrnes (whom Neiberg makes look better than he is usually portrayed), saw a way to satisfy the Soviet Union by agreeing to freedom of action in each victor’s respective zone of occupation. That way, at least some of Germany’s surviving industrial capacity in the American, British, and French zones might be preserved and put to use. And since, short of another war, there was no way for the Western allies to prevent Russia from doing what it was set on doing anyway—the Americans having strong reason to believe that the Soviets were already stripping Eastern Europe of its wealth—they had to accept this arrangement. That meant also giving up the aim of a united postwar Germany.

What to do about Poland—a problem for Europe since at least the 18th century—was another difficulty. Here, again, the Soviets held the strong cards: They already occupied Poland, and Poland was the historic buffer between Russia and Germany. To Stalin, “the blood of the Soviet people” was due repayment here, as in Germany. Moreover, to the Americans and British, Poland was of less importance than Germany. So Poland once again became the victim of greater powers’ needs, doomed to suffer harshly for decades more. As Neiberg puts it, by arranging the Potsdam Agreement to solve “the dilemmas created by the Treaty of Versailles .  .  . Poland’s political and ethnic borders at last lined up reasonably well, and its government would not be in a position to disturb the peace of Europe as it had in 1919.”  

Finally, there was East Asia. In their final discussions, the Americans and British tried to convince the Soviets to enter the war against Japan. Their pleas failed. Consequently, when the Japanese wouldn’t concede defeat short of invasion and destruction of the kind visited upon Germany, Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while on his way home. The Soviets entered the Pacific war only after the two cities’ destruction—and the rest of Asia was dealt with nonchalantly. To everyone in Potsdam, the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Koreans were insignificant. The result, of course, was that while a cold peace would hold in Europe, Asia (save Japan) was left to further warfare.

The Big Three also did not discuss the plight of refugees, the Holocaust, or Palestine. Potsdam wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive world agreement; it was designed only to solve immediate postwar European challenges. And in the author’s estimation, it succeeded in that aim: The agreement “did surely begin a new chapter in European, and world, history. Potsdam was the final paragraph of the chapter that began on a street corner in Sarajevo [in 1914].”  

Yet that convincing conclusion is also the frustration of this book. Neiberg only hints at history’s next chapter: post-Potsdam Europe. Like the men who gathered outside Berlin in 1945, he keeps glancing over his shoulder to Versailles and to the failure of Potsdam to deliver an acceptable, general solution to Europe’s situation along the lines of, say, Westphalia or the 1815 Congress of Vienna. In 1945, world leaders and their diplomats all wanted to avoid creating new problems for the war-weary European states, and that meant avoiding the errors of 1919. They succeeded, Neiberg believes, in this aim. But for that case to be made conclusively, Neiburg would have to show that the ensuing Cold War owed nothing to the limitations of the Potsdam Agreement.

On the face of it, that claim seems far-fetched, and Neiburg asserts his position without trying, even briefly, to substantiate it. To do so would, of course, require another book—one that contended with the massive existing literature on the origins of the Cold War. But given the depth of the author’s knowledge, and his narrative gift, it’s regrettable that he doesn’t sketch out his argument, indicate where he may differ from others—and thus contribute to one of the most freighted debates of modern history.

In the end, while a fluent narrative of Potsdam days, Neiberg’s study raises a key issue about the revival of narrative that so many people, including many professional historians, desire. The glutinous nature of much academic prose may yield little of interest to the general reader. But through debate, new evidence, and technical presentation, academic professional historians, while sacrificing some readership, advance knowledge that eventually finds its way into the stories of the past, such as this one. 

Narrative with a theme—the theme here being the effort of the Potsdam negotiators to put the shadows of Versailles behind them—is one thing; narrative with argument is something else. A theme is always necessary, but rarely, on its own, does it advance our understanding beyond the facts related. Argument offers an idea that can be assessed on grounds of evidence, clarity of assumptions, and strength of presentation. Then history becomes more than story. It becomes part of the endless arguments that reflections on the past have always been. And if we’re lucky, those endless arguments gradually yield to consensus, or at least a narrowing of differences.  

If we remove the Versailles conceit from Potsdam, the narrative stands strong, but it leaves us with nothing beyond. This book would have been even stronger had it included an assertive argument.

James M. Banner Jr., a historian in Washington, is writing a book about revisionist history.