On This Day – July 17th

On July 17th 1945 the main three leaders of the Allied nations – Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin – met in the German city of Potsdam to decide the future of a defeated Germany.

In the five months since the Yalta Conference, a number of changes had taken place which would greatly affect the relationships between the leaders.

Firstly, the Soviet Union was occupying Central and Eastern Europe. By July, the Red Army effectively controlled the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and fearing a Stalinist takeover, refugees were fleeing from these countries. Stalin had set up a puppet communist government in Poland. He insisted that his control of Eastern Europe was a defensive measure against possible future attacks and claimed that it was a legitimate sphere of Soviet influence.

Secondly, Britain had a new Prime Minister. Before VE Day, Conservative Party leader Winston Churchill had served as Prime Minister in a coalition government; his Soviet policy since the early 1940s had differed considerably from former US President Roosevelt's, with Churchill believing Stalin to be a "devil-like" tyrant leading a vile system. A general election was held in the UK on 5 July, the results of which became known during the conference: with a Labour Party majority, Labour leader Clement Attlee became the new Prime Minister.

Thirdly, President Roosevelt had died on 12th April 1945, and Vice President Harry Truman assumed the presidency; his succession saw VE Day (Victory in Europe) within a month and VJ Day (Victory in Japan) on the horizon. During the war and in the name of Allied unity, Roosevelt had brushed off warnings of a potential domination by a Stalin dictatorship in part of Europe. He explained that "I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man" and reasoned, "I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, 'noblesse oblige', he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."

Truman became much more suspicious of the Soviet's intentions than Roosevelt had been, increasingly so under Stalin. Truman and his advisers saw Soviet actions in Eastern Europe as aggressive expansionism which was incompatible with the agreements Stalin had committed to at Yalta the previous February. In addition, it was at the Potsdam Conference that Truman became aware of possible complications elsewhere, when Stalin objected to Churchill's proposal for an early Allied withdrawal from Iran, ahead of the schedule agreed at the Tehran Conference.

Truman mentioned an unspecified "powerful new weapon" to Stalin during the conference. Towards the end of the conference, Japan was given an ultimatum to surrender (in the name of the United States, Great Britain and China) or meet "prompt and utter destruction", which did not mention the new bomb but, at the same time promised 'it was not intended to enslave Japan'. The Soviet Union was not involved in this declaration as it was still neutral in the war against Japan. Stalin, though, with full knowledge of the atomic bomb's development due to Soviet spy networks inside the Manhattan Project, and told Truman at the conference to "make good use of this new addition to the Allied arsenal".

In the aftermath of the agreement which saw the reinstatement of the central European countries and their borders, the Soviet Union converted the other countries of eastern Europe into satellite states within the Eastern Bloc, such as the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Republic, the People's Republic of Romania, and the People's Republic of Albania.

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