NBC Radio – Heart Of The News – Release Of The Yalta Papers – March 16, 1955.
A political and diplomatic storm was blowing up around the long-suppressed records of the Yalta conference where the late President Roosevelt dealt Communist Russia into the war against Japan. Yalta proved to be a good deal for the Russians. Their armies struck in the East only five dyas before Japan accepted unconditional surrender.
The State Department Wednesday made the Yalta Papers public Wednesday night in a hurry-up climax to a series of maneuvers which, like the Yalta record itself, was confusing and open to various interpretations. The conference involved President Roosevelt, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. The Yalta meeting laid down the terms for bringing Russia into the closing stages of the war against Japan. Republican political leaders have charged Mr. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party with making unnecessary concessions to Stalin and selling out Chinese Nationalist interests in Manchuria.
There are shocks and some surprises for those at home and abroad in the Yalta documents. Germans may flinch to read of Mr. Roosevelt’s “bloodthirsty” attitude toward them and the Yalta plan to dismember their nation. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had said only Tuesday that 834 pages of documents would not be made public now.
The State Department gave no| official explanation as to why Dulles changed his mind. However, The New York Times said the papers were “suddenly released” after “Republican Senators had protested to the State Department” that New York newspapers had copies.
The State Department had delayed publication to avoid what described as international complications. There was anxicty here. and in Great Britain lest blunt Yalta references to. Germany, as revealed today, might strengthen German political opposition military alliance with the West. The papers becloud the time and place when Stalin first agreed to enter the war against Japan.
Republican spokesmen long have insisted that Mr. Roosevelt sold out China to Communism when he traded the Soviet Union into the war in the even though he knew a month before he went to Yalta that the United States would have the A•bomb by Aug. 1. But Democrats have contended that Mr. Roosevelt was acting on urgent advice of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to obtain speedy Russian entry. Americans of Polish descent may be jolted to learn that it was Mr. Roosevelt who surrendered to Soviet Russian objections to supervised elections in postwar while the British stood fast for observers to protect an honest poll. Public opinion in France may react to the agreement of Mr.Roosevelt and Stalin that France should have no part in postwar administration of Occupied Germany – although France might, perhaps, a zone of her own as a “kindness.’ Churchill demanded that France resume her place in postwar Europe. He said he had to think of the time when the Americans went home (in “two years,” F.D. R. told him) and Britain might need France again as a defense against Germany.
Publication of the Yalta papers promised lively developments. The over all Yalta story, the commitments and results, long had been known. But the details were secret. Much will remain SO because the documents published Wednesday night admittedly were not complete although they were certified as giving the most re definitive and complete possible at this time. The State Department said it had deleted no matter of substance.
The documents cannot fail to whip up new debate whether F.D.R. was justified in making, at the expense of China, political and territorial concessions to persuade the Soviet Union to join the war against Japan. They show Mr. Roosevelt thought ‘breaking Germany into five or seven different states would be “a good idea.”
He was deeply concerned about Poland at the Yalta conference. The President told Churchill and Stalin that the Polish vote was big in the United States and he wanted at least “a gesture” to take back to the 6,000,000 Americans of Polish extraction. But Stalin and Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov finally beat down the British-American plan to have the Big Three ambassador observe the postwar Polish elections to insure a free and honest ballot. Mr.Roosevelt backed down on that. The British protested to the last.
Alger Hiss emerges from the papers as an occasional participant in discussions, but with no discernible policy part in the show.
Charles E. Bohlen, then an assistant secretary of state and now U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, was the principal contributor to what admittedly is a far-from-complete official record. He served at Yalta as Mr. Roosevelt’s interpreter. Papers of some of the other participants were not made available to the State Department in preparing the documents as published. They were compiled largely from department records, notes such as Bohlen and others took and documents in the Franklin D. Roosevelt library in Hyde Park. Bohlen recorded Mr. Roosevelt’s great shock at the Crimea devastation effected by the Germans. He said the President seemed “more bloodthirsty” against the Germans at Yalta than a year before at Tehran where he had advanced the idea of cutting Germany up into five or seven parts. He set down that Mr. Roosevelt expressed the hope that Stalin would propose again a toast for the execution of #50,000 officers of the German army.”
The British and Americans did not give Stalin all he wanted, balking him more or less on German reparations and in the Near East.
Top revelation’ of the Yalta papers was the report of Averell Harriman dated Oct. 10, 1944 that he had obtained full agreement from Stalin for Russia to join all -out in the war against Japan. That report didn’t give Stalin’s price for making war on Japan. The price came later – in a Dec. 5 report from Harriman, then U. S.ambassador to the Soviet Union. It was nearly four months later, on Feb. 4, 1945 that the Yalta conference convened and Mr. Roosevelt agreed substantially to the severe concessions demanded by Stalin. Some of these concessions were at the expense of Nationalist China and Mr.Roosevelt agreed without prior consultation with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
However, the Yalta papers revealed that Mr. Roosevelt knew as early as Dec. 30, 1944, that the atom bomb-later to blast Japan into submission-“should be ready about Aug. 1, 1945.” This information was contained in a top-secret report from Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project, to Gen. George C. Marshall. Army chief of staff.
It said the second bomb should be ready by the end of 1945 and “succeeding ones at intervals thereafter.” Actually the atomic weaponers beat their own schedule, exploding world’s first A• bomb at Alamogordo, N. M., on July 16, 1945. The second and third atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. Republicans cite this A-bomb information in their arguments that F.D.R. did not have to make concessions to Stalin.
But the Yalta papers also provided answering ammunition for the Democrats report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Mr. Roosevelt dated Jan. 23, 1945, month before his departure for Yalta. It said: “The date of the Russian entry into the Japanese War is of great importance to the United States and Great Britain in planning the delivery of supplies and also in planning operations.” The American chiefs wanted the Russians in as soon possible.
Here is that report from NBC Radio, given on March 16, 1955.
