Filling in the gaps reading: "Six Months in 1945" by Michael Dobbs

There are two Michael Dobbs(es). One wrote the original UK version of House of Cards (and is credited as "executive producer" of the recent US version). He is not the author of this book. The other Michael Dobbs (how much he must hate that) is a renowned US Cold War historian and Washington Post journalist. He did write this book, which (I now discover) is the last of a series of three books on the Cold War. 

I say that just to get it clear, because I wasn't so clear when I impulsively picked up this book in Brussels' Waterstones. 

Why did I pick it up? Because I did have a kind of gap, exactly the gap that this book is designed to fill. I have read plenty about the end of World War II, plenty about the Cold War and the early years of the Soviet satellite states, but that bit in the middle, the manoeuvrings between the Allies at Yalta and Potsdam, the geopolitical background to Hiroshima, the transitions from Roosevelt to Truman and from Churchill to Atlee (in this context), had slightly passed me by. Well, this remarkable book did the job.

In a book full of telling anecdote and detail, Dobbs sets out a tightly focused story of how the "Big Three" thrashed out, in many respects unsuccessfully, the deals which determined the shape of the postwar world, one which we still in many respects inhabit today. I have heard quite a lot lately (something to do with my job) about Polish resentment about how they were "sold out", perhaps even "betrayed" by the Western Allies at Yalta. Well, yes, this book makes it all too clear how ambivalent and, yes, guilty, Churchill in particular and Roosevelt felt about the deal they felt able to secure at Yalta and subsequently concerning Poland, but also how, as they say, possession was nine parts of the law when it came to Stalin's intransigence over the new power structures in Poland (in particular) post 1945. 


It was all, as Facebook says, "complicated". The comparison is apt, as the outcome of the negotiations between the victors of World War II was a mixture of personal chemistry and geopolitical rationalisation. None of the three leaders wanted a Cold War. It was in none of their interests. But the logic of their respective positions and priorities was remorseless: Roosevelt sought a stable and democratic new World Order, with firm guarantees of lasting peace to present to the home electorate. Churchill wanted an honourable outcome, and one guaranteeing the perpetuity of British global influence and of the Empire itself (little sympathy from the Americans on that, probably a lost cause anyway). Stalin wanted just desserts for the indisputably disproportionate sacrifice of the Soviet Union to defeating Hitler, and, more concretely, to consolidate the de facto territorial conquests made by the Red Army. Though there are ambiguities and compromises on all sides however (in hindsight, Truman's delight in the leverage the atomic bomb gave him is deeply questionable), don't get me wrong: there is no moral equivalence here. Dobbs is careful to present all points of view, but there is no question that this was a negotiation between a brutal dictatorship, and a paranoid dictator obsessed with securing his own position, on the one hand, and two liberal democracies, who genuinely had to consider public opinion and did couch their concerns in terms of genuinely moral considerations, as well as in terms of national interest. 

In many respects, the narrative of this book is the unwinding of the inevitabilities implicit in the different starting points of the three negotiators. The Cold War, in short, was bound to happen.

At a more personal level, this book is full of minor revelations. The sheer frailty of Roosevelt, for example, as he negotiated in Yalta produces repeated moments of pathos. More bathetic is the fact that Western delegations struggled woefully with bedbugs and limited toilet facilities in the tsarist chateau where they were put up by the Soviet authorities in Yalta, accommodation moreover which had senior military staff and politicians sharing dorm-like conditions with their fellows. Churchill frequently comes across as an overly verbose and puffed-up aristocratic relic, but for all that the most sincere and heartfelt believer in what he stood for. Stalin, on the other hand, is single-mindedly calculating and suspicious, but an excellent debater, highly skilled in making his points succinctly and effectively, picking up the inconsistencies and ambiguities in his interlocutors' positions. Frankly he is the winner of Yalta, and most of the time subsequently, at least until the neophyte President Truman, who, as Dobbs tellingly points out, knew far less about the Manhattan Project than Stalin did until his sudden elevation, decides it is time to put his foot down and start issuing his own nyets in response to Soviet demands. 

Truman is one of the revelations (for me) in this book. It is amazing how unprepared he was for the presidency (Roosevelt had hardly ever spoken to him, let alone inform him of major questions of state), and yet he was called upon in the first days and weeks of his presidency to take some of the most momentous decisions ever to be taken by a human being. Whether and how to use the bomb, whether to accommodate or confront Stalin, whether to commit Americans to propping up postwar Europe (Roosevelt wanted out)... In the circumstances, one can only admire this "midwestern haberdasher", whose instincts vis-à-vis the Soviets largely appear right in hindsight, and whose decision on the use of the atom bomb, though deeply troubling from a moral perspective, is at least comprehensible - perhaps even justifiable - in terms of the geopolitical considerations of the moment. Whatever, at a personal level, it is impossible not to be in awe of the responsibilities thrust upon an almost totally unprepared individual and that individual's readiness to assume the mantle.

For me, anyway, this was a book worth reading, filling in a gap, and doing so in highly readable style. Its focus is tight, very much on the political negotiations between leaders, in the midst of innumerable other immense and fascinating stories that could be told, but which can't be here. That can be frustrating, but is fair enough, if Dobbs was ever going to finish the book. As ever, you have to be interested, but if you are, and don't know this period too well, you could do worse than start here.