US and WWII

Notes on Video: Pear Harbor Simplified and Pearl Harbor Smithsonian

(Youtube)

Source Interference
Read the five interpretations of FDR and WWII.
Which reason to you has more merit? Explain your answer

The great stateman
The gullible idealist
The ruthless realist
The diplomatic failure
The war time myth of Roosevelt presents a picture of a far-sighted statesman,
working in close harmony with Winston Churchill guiding the Western Allies to
ultimate victory over the forces of evil. This is not myth: it is essentially true
Roosevelt was putty in the hands of Churchill, who conned him into giving vast
quantities of money and manpower to fight ‘Britain’s war’
Roosevelt was the opposite of gullible. He drove a hand bargain with Britain over
Lend-Lease, and he waited to see if Britain was defeated before acting to help.
Roosevelt could have avoided war with Japan, but he made a mess of the
diplomatic negotiations. A few sensible concessions on Japanese grievances

The devious conspirator
could have avoided war and saved the US from fighting two wars at once. He
also delayed telling the truth to the American people or to Congress.
Roosevelt knew most Americans were isolationist, so he set out to deceive and
trick them into a war they did nit want. He connived with Churchill to extend
help from Britain, and concealed his true intentions until the 1940 election had
been safely won.

Task: Look at the table, assess the extent to which living standar4ds in America
improved between 1939-45. Suggest reasons why this is so.
Country 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945
Japan 107 109 111 108 99 93 78
Germany 108 117 108 105 95 94 85
USA 96 103 108 116 115 118 122
Source Inference
Assess how valuable the recollections of Sybil Lewis are as evidence about the
impact of the Second World War on women, and on African-Americans.

Yalta Conference
Read the article from IWM and summarise what the conference was.
Yalta, a seaside resort on Russia’s Black Sea Crimean coast, was the scene of the second and
last wartime conference between the ‘Big Three’ Allied war leaders, Winston Churchill,
Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. It was held between 4 and 11 February 1945 and
was designed to decide on the final strategy of the war against Germany and Japan and settle
the post-war future of Europe.

Since 1945, and especially during the Cold War, the agreements reached at Yalta have been
the subject of subsequent criticism, especially in the United States. President Roosevelt, who
died only two months after the conference, was accused by some of handing over Poland and
the rest of Eastern Europe to Stalin and for allowing the Soviet Union to gain a foothold in
the Far East against a promise of Russian intervention in the war against Japan.

Future Secretary of State James Byrnes, who was present at Yalta, recorded in his memoirs
that, 'so far as I could see the President had made little preparation for the Conference'. Lord
Moran, Churchill's doctor, thought that the President was 'a very sick man' with only a few
months to live. Churchill was to complain to Moran that: 'The President is behaving very
badly. He won't take any interest in what we are trying to do.'

But Churchill was also criticised for his seemingly passive acceptance of Soviet domination
of Poland and Eastern Europe. In the House of Commons debate on Yalta, 21 Conservative
MPs, including future Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, tabled an amendment which
regretted 'the transfer of the territory of an Ally to another power'. Junior minister George
Strauss resigned in protest against the government's policy on Poland.

In the late 1970s, Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden also came in for criticism
when it became widely known that they had made a concession to Stalin that all former
Soviet prisoners of war, including thousands who for whatever reason had changed sides and
fought in German uniform, be forcibly repatriated. But again there were fears that if this was
not agreed upon, then the Russians might prove highly obstructive when it came to
repatriating Western prisoners of war the Red Army had liberated.

Churchill's effectiveness at Yalta was robustly defended by others, with Admiral William
Leahy, Roosevelt's Chief of Staff, later writing that 'Churchill, I thought was at his best at
Yalta', in fighting not only for Britain's interests, but also for those of France, Poland and
other small powers.

Positive results
At the time, and despite some disappointments not immediately made public, the results of
the conference were generally seen as positive. Time magazine asserted that 'all doubts about
the Big Three's ability to co-operate in peace as well as war seem now to have been swept
away'. A verdict on which, at the time, James Byrnes agreed: 'That's how I felt about it. There
is no doubt that the tide of Anglo-Soviet-American friendship had reached a new high'.

At Yalta Stalin agreed to collaborate in the establishment of the United Nations Organization,
a project very dear to Roosevelt's heart. Reluctantly, and after a great deal of effort on the
part of both Churchill and Eden, Stalin also agreed to France having an occupation zone in
defeated Germany. With the atom bomb still untried and the prospect of heavy American,
British and Australian casualties in an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the promise of
Russian participation in the Far Eastern war was seen as a great coup.

Months later, on 8 August 1945, Russia did declare war on Japan as promised at Yalta, three
months after the end of the war in Europe, on the day before the atomic bomb was dropped
on Nagasaki. Later, during the Cold War, Soviet intervention in the war against Japan was
almost invariably overlooked by Western historians, but it is now considered as one of the
key factors in the Japanese decision to surrender, along with the dropping of the atom bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The problem of Poland and Soviet relations

The problem of Poland's future was a special focus of the Yalta conference. The Russian
frontier with Poland would be moved westwards to the Curzon Line, a boundary previously
suggested in the aftermath of the First World War. As compensation, Poland's new western
frontier with Germany was to be on the Oder-Neisse Line. Stalin agreed that free elections
should be held in Poland as soon as possible. He also accepted Churchill's pleas that members
of the Polish and Yugoslav governments-in-exile should be included in the new
administrations of those countries. Russia also adhered to a 'Declaration on Liberated Europe'
in which the 'Big Three' registered their desire for the establishment of democratic institutions
in the countries that their forces had or were about to liberate from Nazi rule.

Charles 'Chip' Bohlen of the US State Department, who acted as FDR's Russian interpreter,
believed that each of the 'Big Three' had achieved their major goals at Yalta, while
recognising that, 'there was a sense of frustration and some bitterness in regard to Poland'. To
American and British professional diplomats like Bohlen, the agreements reached at Yalta
seemed on the surface to be 'realistic compromises between the various positions of each
country'. Stalin had made a genuine concession in finally agreeing to a French zone in
Germany, while Churchill and Roosevelt had given in a great deal on Poland. But even then,
Bohlen thought, the plan as finally agreed upon might well have resulted in a genuinely
democratic Polish government if it had been carried out.

Bohlen's State Department friend George Kennan was not so optimistic. In a memorandum
written just before Yalta, Kennan had given a gloomy and prescient assessment of future
Soviet relations with the West. In it he saw no hope of co-operation with Stalin in a post-war
Europe, rather an 'unavoidable conflict arising between the Allied need for stable,
independent nations in Europe and a Soviet push to the west'. Within a very short time Stalin
was refusing to carry out his part of the bargain on Poland, disregarding the Declaration on
Liberated Europe. And only a year and a month after Yalta, on 5 March 1946, Churchill
made his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech in Fulton, Missouri.

If the political and diplomatic atmosphere at the conference was sometimes fraught and
heated, the social side was extremely cordial on both sides. Anthony Eden wrote later that, 'at
Yalta the Russians seemed relaxed and, so far as we could judge, friendly'.

There were banquets at which innumerable toasts of vodka were drunk. At one Stalin
described Roosevelt as 'the chief forger of the instruments which led to the mobilisation of
the world against Hitler'. He called Churchill 'the man who is born once in a hundred years'
and 'the bravest statesman in the world'. Eschewing vodka, the Prime Minister was described
by one of his aides as 'drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the
health of any ordinary man'. Roosevelt's declining health was evident to everyone present.
Accompanied by his daughter, Anna, the 7,000 mile journey to Yalta had left the President
sapped of energy.

Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent head of the Foreign Office, wrote in his diary that 'Uncle
Joe' Stalin was 'much the most impressive of the three men. He is very quiet and restrained…
the President flapped about and the P.M. boomed, but Joe just sat there taking it all in and
being rather amused. When he did chip in, he never used a superfluous word, and spoke very
much to the point'. James Byrnes wrote in his memoir that the Soviet dictator was 'a very
likeable person', while Churchill toasted him as 'the mighty leader of a mighty nation whose
people had driven the tyrants from her soil'.

Yalta - a prophetic warning?

Amidst all the feasting, euphoria and the self-congratulation that Yalta, as the New York
Herald Tribune wrote, 'produced another great proof of Allied unity, strength and power of
decision', it was Stalin himself who rang a prophetic warning note. Replying to President
Roosevelt's toast in which he hoped that the unity that had characterised the Grand Alliance
against Hitler during the war would continue, the Soviet dictator replied:

'It is not so difficult to keep unity in time of war since there is a joint aim to defeat the
common enemy, which is clear to everyone. The difficult task will come after the war when
diverse interests will tend to divide the Allies. It is our duty to see that our relations in
peacetime are as strong as they have been in war.'

Summarise what the conference was.

Half Term Homework
This is a brief overview of WWII
 Read Chapter 17 and 18 in your AQA book, make notes.
 Take a closer look at The Second World War: Synopsis
 Watch on youtube World War II Oversimplified.
 Complete a mind map ‘How far did WWII change America?’