The Rise and Fall of the Big Three

At the beginning of the Second World War, there was no Allied ‘Big Three’, nor even a dual relationship. Great Britain was at first alone. Then, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the prognosis was not good. Senator Truman spoke for many of his fellow Americans: ‘If we see that Germany is winning we should help Russia and if Russia is winning then we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.’ Meanwhile, Churchill was attempting to come to terms with his deep-set antipathy towards the communist regime, while already aware of the UK’s dependence on the USA. He was particularly worried that some American aid might be diverted to the Soviet Union in what was already becoming a triangular relationship if not yet the Big Three. 

The most public pointer to later discussions was the joint declaration made by Roosevelt and Churchill on 12 August 1941. The ‘Atlantic Charter’, as it became known, set out eight broad principles for the establishment of human rights and a lasting peace after the destruction of Nazi tyranny. Yet whatever formulations were agreed, the unequal nature of the ‘special relationship’ could not be easily disguised. ‘Lend-Lease’ and ‘destroyers for bases’ agreements contained elements not only of American generosity to a beleaguered ally but also of hard-nosed promotion of American self-interest. A further pointer towards later Big Three meetings was a joint message to Stalin, suggesting a high-level meeting in Moscow to discuss how support could most expeditiously be continued for the Soviet Union’s ‘brave and steadfast resistance’ to Hitlerism. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 brought the USA into the war and the consolidation of the Big Three ever nearer. 

War-time Conferences 

In the build-up to the first meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Tehran in late 1943, two had been company, especially Churchill and Roosevelt, but even Churchill and Stalin after a shaky start. Roosevelt and Stalin also got on well when they talked together after their arrival in the Iranian capital. Already, however, there was talking behind the third man’s back, the President warning the Marshal not to mention India to the Prime Minister, and suggesting that something like the Soviet approach might be adopted after the war in this sub-continent not yet ready for democracy. When Churchill spoke with Stalin in the absence of Roosevelt, he began by pointing out that his mother was American and that nothing he said should be construed as indicating a wish to do the USA down. But he went on to stress the greater importance for the UK of the Mediterranean in joint preparations for Operation Overlord. Thus, already at Tehran, there were signs that three could be something of a crowd. 

Of course, the major disagreements were on Poland and Germany. Although accepting the Curzon Line first drawn up after the Russian Revolution as the eastern boundary of Poland, the Western Allies were less than content about the Oder-Neisse line as the western boundary, pointing out that this would mean millions of Germans being displaced. They also complained continually that their efforts to determine exactly what was going on in Eastern and Central Europe were faced with difficulties and obstructions. On Germany, they found Soviet demands for reparations excessive. They were not happy about the Red Army’s behaviour everywhere, although showing at least some awareness of what it must have been like to have been on the receiving end of the Master Race’s policy of Living Space and Race Extermination. They were less than welcoming when the Soviet side, possibly as a debating point, showed an interest in developments in France and Italy, and in the Mediterranean region. 

There were occasions, however, on which the Big Three appeared to be at one. At the second and most famous or notorious of the conferences, Yalta, in February 1945, Stalin provoked the laughter of the other two when he asked them and himself in turn about which of the powers sought world domination. He went on to say that as long as the three of them lived none of them would involve their countries in aggressive action. Their common task was to ensure peace after they had gone. Many analysts still find Churchill and Roosevelt guilty of conceding too much to Stalin. But there are at least some who are willing to defy the reputation of Yalta as the great giveaway, and suggest that the fate of Poland, Germany and the rest of Europe was decided by force of arms rather than the conversation of statesmen. 

In any case, Yalta marked the high point of the Big Three in the sense of the leaders of great powers talking together in the belief that they were deciding the fate of the world. Potsdam was different, marking a steep decline. And there is much more to this than the absence from the beginning of Roosevelt, who had died in April 1945, and from the middle of Churchill, defeated in the General Election of July. The decline, indeed the collapse, of the Big Three became particularly apparent since some of the focus of the conference was switching after VE Day from Europe to Asia. For example, while Churchill and Attlee were back in London for the announcement of the election results, on 26 July Truman issued an ultimatum to the Japanese government in the form of what became known as the ‘Potsdam Declaration’. The document began with reference to the US President, the Chinese President and the British Prime Minister in that order. Chiang Kai-shek had pointed out that to put him before the British Prime Minister would help him back home, and that, in any case, he and the US President were both ‘supreme heads of nations’ while the Prime Minister was ‘a secondary official’. In the limbo between Churchill and Attlee, British assent to this change appears to have been tacit. Certainly, Truman signed on behalf of Churchill after he had actually resigned. Churchill had given his assent to the proclamation, but not to the order of the signatures nor to Truman’s signature on his behalf. For their part, Soviet officials protested at their exclusion from the proclamation, but were told that, since they were not yet in the war against Japan, the President did not want to cause them any embarrassment.

On 28 July, the head of the Foreign Office Alexander Cadogan was already referring to ‘the Big 3 (or 2½!)’. To some extent, his remark might have been occasioned by his mandarin evaluation of the new Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. The latter, Ernest Bevin, he commented, did all the talking while Attlee nodded his head and smoked his pipe. However, personalities apart, especially after the demonstration to the world of the power of the atomic bomb, Truman and his government asserted their predominance in Japan and the Far East even more than before. Attlee had to request that Hong Kong should surrender to the British rather than the Chinese, as Chiang Kai-shek wanted. Molotov objected strongly to the exclusion of Soviet forces from Japan, but was given short shrift. Already, then, by the end of the war against Japan, it was apparent enough that the UK was not going to join the ranks of the superpowers, in which the USA was much stronger than the USSR.  

Stalin 

To turn to some observations about each of the members of the Big Three as individuals, there is widespread agreement that Stalin was a bad man. As a dictator he is generally believed to have wielded an unlimited amount of power, and, as Lord Acton had observed, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Consequently, in much literature on the Cold War period, especially what we might call ‘mainstream Western’, a simple account is given. Stalin, an evil dictator, pursued a foreign policy as expansionist as other powers would allow it to be, both ruthless and treacherous. All Soviet foreign policy became tarred with the same brush, to the extent that there was nothing good in it at all. Almost any interest in affairs beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union was condemned as evil and dictatorial. 

Thus, post-Soviet historians have a problem, although some insist that a distinction must be made between Stalin as dictator and Stalin as leader of the state. In this connection, Constantine Pleshakov’s observation is appropriate: ‘Of course, there is a huge difference between a personal dictatorship (Stalin’s) and the rule of oligarchy (under Khrushchev and Brezhnev), and in terms of the decision making process the contrast is striking indeed. But in the core ideas that went into decision making as a system, there was a very considerable continuity between 1945 and 1975, and perhaps even later.’ The question arises, could the same be said of the core ideas in US decision-making? 

Roosevelt and Truman

Beginning with Roosevelt, we might first observe that his death in April 1945 may well have been untimely from the point of view of winning the war but, on the other hand, it allowed his historical reputation to be a matter of unceasing speculation. As far as his foreign policy is concerned, Roosevelt was an internationalist in the wake of Woodrow Wilson. Much more apparent in 1945 than in 1919, the USA was taking an interest in every quarter of the globe, looking outward in a manner and to an extent that had previously been beyond the imagination. Thus, Roosevelt very much wanted the United Nations Organisation to succeed. However, we can only pose the question about how Roosevelt would have behaved once the USA acquired the atomic bomb. 

Soon after he became president with the death of Roosevelt on 12 April 1945, Truman became conscious that some of the foundations for his own reputation would soon be laid at the forthcoming conference at Potsdam. In his memoirs, he classified himself as ‘a Jefferson Democrat living in modern times’, but also said that he supported the programme, both international and domestic, of Franklin Roosevelt, whom he deemed ‘a man of vision and ideas’. Little did he realise as the Cold War began that, just a few years after his death, nearly every candidate for president, Republican as well as Democrat, would claim to be a follower of Truman. 

While a few critics have branded Truman a war criminal, most of the academic discussion has been within a more conventional framework. Those who condemn him refer in particular to his decision to drop the bomb. Without doubt, this set atomic power off in the wrong direction. It was never easy to beat swords into ploughshares. In 1945, a considerable number of those scientists in the know warned the president about the consequences of using the bomb, but neither he nor even they could have fully appreciated where the fateful decision was heading. In the circumstances of the time, when American lives were being lost every day in the Pacific War, Truman would have found it difficult indeed not to use what he himself called ‘the greatest thing in history’. The majority of those involved in the process of developing it agreed with him. The use of the A-bomb could also serve as a restraint on the Soviet Union as the Red Army swept down through Manchuria. 

Just as only a minority of informed scientists were against dropping the bomb on Japan, so there were few leading politicians advising the president to work with Stalin to control its use in the future. Under pressure from the Senate, Truman was soon reluctant to discuss the bomb even with the British.

Churchill and Attlee 

In July 1945, Winston Churchill lost the General Election in the UK, and some of his dream of empire went with him. Had he returned to power, he would probably have been forced to give up India, the jewel in the imperial crown, but he would almost certainly have struggled to keep it more vigorously than his successor. Moreover, he took a dim view of the prospects for a Labour Government under Attlee, soon writing to Alexander Cadogan: ‘A very formidable event has occurred in Britain, and I fear it will diminish our national stature at a time when we most need our strength.’

There is no doubt that Churchill cut a greater figure on the world stage than Clement Attlee. This was not just because the expansive figure with the big cigar had more charisma than the reticent pipe-smoker, but partly, even largely, due to the fact that when the Labour Prime Minister took up office, the USA was assuming world leadership both in actual power and further aspiration.

The USA’s superiority had a threefold basis: military, economic and ideological. Attlee said later that he did not lay the blame for Great Britain being cut out of the atomic programme on Truman, who had seen the need for co-operation, but on the Senate which ‘wanted to have everything for America’. By now, the manufacture of a British bomb was essential in his view, since the British could not allow themselves to be wholly in American hands. But the UK was to lag far behind the USA in the development of up-to-date weaponry.

A major reason for this was economic capability. At the end of the war and for some years afterwards, Great Britain could barely have survived without American loans. Three weeks after the end of the Potsdam Conference, the Lend-Lease programme was abruptly terminated. After difficult negotiations, further loans were agreed, but at a heavy price. For all the talk of the fundamental unity of the English-speaking peoples and the ‘special relationship’ of the UK with the USA, there could be no doubt of who was the senior partner, and by a long way. 

Moreover, by the end of the Second World War, the British world outlook appeared out of date because of the continuance of the British Empire, whose stoutest defender was Winston Churchill. Ernest Bevin struggled manfully to develop a ‘third force’ between the two superpowers with democratic socialism as the foundation of an updated Empire and Commonwealth, but with a limited degree of success. 

When Churchill returned to power in 1951, he was reluctant to accept his country’s inferior position in the world as a whole. Indeed, by seeking an end to the Cold War, or at least a pause in it, he believed that he would not only advance the cause of world peace but also help the UK to restore its strength, and thus enhance its status as a great power. Despite his reputation as one of the instigators of the Cold War in his Fulton speech of 1946, Churchill was now attempting to gain a new reputation as a peacemaker. But he could no longer exert his personal influence. He had an enjoyable meeting with former President Truman, but could make little impression on the present President, Eisenhower. After the death of Stalin in March 1953, the successor Soviet leaders did not take him seriously. Then, with the worsening state of his own health, he was forced to resign in April 1955. The ‘grand old man’ lived for another ten years, but in decline until his death in January 1965. To use one of his own metaphors, he had been unable to turn back the tide of history. 

Such is the lot, perhaps, of all great men, a point eloquently put by the French historian Fernand Braudel in that same year, 1965. He wrote that he always tended to see the individual ‘imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before.’ Braudel added: ‘All efforts against the prevailing tide of history – which is not always obvious – are doomed to failure.’ 

The Big Three in Retrospect

When we turn again from such general considerations to the particular cases of the five individual members of the Big Three, a tentative conclusion could be that they all had their ‘great’ moments in the history of the Second World War. Churchill’s finest hour was in its earlier years when the UK stood alone. Bad man though he was, Stalin exercised determined leadership in what the Russians still call the Great Patriotic War. Roosevelt showed drive and vision from Pearl Harbor to his death. Truman and Attlee had greatness thrust upon them after their unexpected assumptions of power in 1945, the former taking the USA into Cold War superpowerdom, the latter reconciling Great Britain to the beginning of the process of decolonisation while leading a domestic social revolution. 

However, the five individuals appear to have thought that they had a greater influence over the course of events than seems to be the case in retrospect. We may approach this observation counterfactually. Had the Channel not existed, Churchill could not have been an outstanding war leader; nor could Stalin had there been no vast Russian plain. Without the USA’s long preparation for superpowerdom in the secure Western hemisphere, Roosevelt could not have stood out as he did. Truman would not have been so assertive with no atom bomb, nor Attlee had the end of empire and popular expectations of change not pressed so heavily upon him. 

To pursue counterfactuality further would be dangerous. To take just one example, what if Stalin had died instead of Roosevelt in April 1945? Subsequent events might have turned out better with the departure of a dictator, but they could have been worse in the panic that would have ensued in the struggle for the succession. 

To revert to the individuals constituting the Big Three as they were rather than as they might have been, let us recall that they were all creatures of the nineteenth century, imbued – albeit in different ways – with the idea of progress and the concept of the ‘great man’. (As in so many other respects, Stalin was an exception, but his avowed creed, Marxism, shared the basic supposition of progress, while in his official view there was no greater hero than Lenin.) No doubt, their strong will was a consequence of the common beliefs of their time, sustaining them all through severe illness (with the exception of Truman who appears to have enjoyed good health). No doubt, too, they were sustained by the high degree of public confidence that they enjoyed during the Second World War and just after. Had they been in office at a less critical time, had they been more exposed to the media, their popularity might not have been so great. But again, we must resist the temptation to embrace counterfactuality.

A final question needs to be posed. Were the various members of the Big Three indeed ‘great men’? Some would say ‘yes’ unconditionally about at least some of the five statesmen whose words and deeds we have been examining. Others would want to agree with Braudel that the truly great men are those who direct the tide a little as they swim with it. In this sense, the individuals who believed that they were in a position to solve the world’s problems in 1945 all deserve inclusion in the top rank. Undoubtedly, as their discussions at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam demonstrated, together they helped to win the Second World War even if their disagreements pointed towards an uneasy peace. 

Lord Acton had written that ‘Great men are almost always bad men’. Were the individual members of the Big Three bad men? Certainly, some of the moral choices that they made were difficult. To consign hundreds of thousands of their fellow human beings, even millions of them, to their deaths is a prima facie infringement of the biblical commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ shared by Christians and Jews, not to mention the injunctions of other faiths, both religious and humanist. While those not faced with the necessity of such choices do not necessarily have the right to pass judgement, for most people in the West, nevertheless, demarcation has been easy: of the individuals mentioned above, Stalin – bad; the others – all good. Is the contrast indeed so stark? And is it evading the question to assert that, whatever Acton wrote, it is not for historians to make such demarcations? 

Continuing the scriptural allusions with a final quotation from the materialist Plekhanov, many of us would agree that it is ‘not only for “great” men that a broad field of activity is open. It is open for all those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and hearts to love their neighbours. The concept great is a relative concept. In the ethical sense every man is great who, to use the Biblical phrase, “lays down his life for his friend.”’ In this sense, there were millions of great men and women during the years of the rise and fall of the Big Three, all making their individual contributions to a common cause. 

Issues to Debate

• Does the Yalta conference deserve its reputation as ‘the great giveaway’?
• Why was Potsdam so much more acrimonious than Yalta?
• Do the individual members of the Big Three deserve to be called 'great men'? 

 Further Reading

• D. Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester UP, 1999)
• Robin Edmonds, The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in Peace and War (Penguin, 1992)
• Warren Kimball, Forged in War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the Second World War (HarperCollins, 1997)
• Charles L. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam (M. Evans and Co., New York, 1975)
• David Williamson, Europe and the Cold War (Hodder, 2001)

Paul Dukes is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen.