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The Grand Alliance

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, wartime conferences focused on establishing a second front. During World War II, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin needed help from President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Despite Stalin's agreement with the German dictator Adolph Hitler, German forces were attacking the Soviet Union. On August 13, 1942, Stalin wrote a memorandum to Roosevelt and Churchill opposing their decision not to invade Western Europe at that time. Stalin wanted the Americans and British to distract the Germans in Russia by fighting them on another front, Western Europe. Just a few months after Stalin's letter, Great Britain and the United States (who were already fighting in the South Pacific) entered Africa to fight the Germans.

The Second World War highlights the difficulties of waging coalition warfare. Germany and Japan, known as the Axis powers, were nominally alliance partners. Although the Axis powers largely operated independently of each other, they achieved some notable successes during the war's initial campaigns. These successes enabled them to expand territorially outward until well into 1942. These early victories came close to gaining for Germany and Japan the dominance they sought in Europe and East Asia. Germany and Japan had an alliance in name only. The inability of the Axis powers to set common strategic priorities seriously hurt their chances of winning. By failing to devise an effective coalition strategy, however, Germany and Japan lost whatever chance they possessed to retain the strategic initiative and defeat their enemies.

To stop the aggression of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, the countries of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The members of this alliance possessed unlimited aims, entailing the overthrow of the regimes in Germany and Japan that had started the war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly called this "unconditional surrender." The Grand Alliance intended to carry out a military occupation of Germany and Japan, to punish German and Japanese leaders at war crimes trials, and to impose on them new governments that would no longer aim to overturn the international system. Only by fighting for such unlimited aims did the members of the Grand Alliance think that Germany and Japan could be prevented from starting future wars. Achieving these aims required that the members of the Grand Alliance totally mobilize their resources and harness their economies to the war effort.

The defeat of Germany and Japan critically depended on the ability of the Grand Alliance to hammer out a coordinated strategy. This task, however, was very difficult to do. The members of the Grand Alliance possessed ideological differences, divergent geopolitical aims, and dissimilar visions about the post-war international order. In addition, they were sharply divided about what strategy they should follow to defeat Germany and Japan.

The Soviet Union demanded an immediate attack across the English Channel by massed Anglo-American ground forces to defeat Germany. Britain's leadership, on the other hand, thought an early offensive across the Channel might prove disastrous. They advocated instead the strategic bombing of Germany, campaigns in secondary theaters to disperse German forces, and support for insurgencies in Nazi-occupied Europe. Meanwhile, American decision makers, although they favored a cross-Channel attack, faced a dangerous and determined enemy in Japan, which siphoned off resources from the goal of massing in Europe for a decision against Germany. Only by making important compromises did an effective coalition strategy emerge to defeat Germany.

Allied military efforts were accompanied by a series of important international meetings on the political objectives of the war. In January 1943 at Casablanca, Morocco, an Anglo-American conference decided that no peace would be concluded with the Axis and its Balkan satellites except on the basis of “unconditional surrender.” This term, insisted upon by Roosevelt, sought to assure the people of all the fighting nations that no separate peace negotiations would be carried on with representatives of Fascism and Nazism and there would be no compromise of the war’s idealistic objectives. Axis propagandists, of course, used it to assert that the Allies were engaged in a war of extermination.

In a November 1943 meeting at Cairo in Egypt with Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to a preeminent role for China in post-war Asia. They agreed on terms for Japan, including the relinquishment of gains from past aggression. The next major wartime conference included Roosevelt, Churchill, and the leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin. Meeting at Tehran following the Cairo Conference, the "Big Three" secured confirmation on the launching of the cross-channel invasion and a promise from Stalin that the Soviet Union would eventually enter the war against Japan. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin made basic agreements on the postwar occupation of Germany and the establishment of a new international organization, the United Nations.

In February 1945, the three Allied leaders met again at the former Russian czar's summer palace at Yalta (in the Crimea, in Ukraine), with victory seemingly secure. Yalta was the most important and by far the most controversial of the wartime meetings. Recognizing the strong position that the Soviet Army possessed on the ground, Churchill and an ailing Roosevelt agreed to a number of compromises with Stalin that allowed Soviet hegemony to remain in Poland and other Eastern European countries, granted territorial concessions to the Soviet Union, and outlined punitive measures against Germany, including an occupation and reparations in principle.

The Soviet Union secretly agreed to enter the war against Japan three months after the surrender of Germany, within 6 months. In return, the USSR would gain effective control of Manchuria and receive the Japanese Kurile Islands as well as the southern half of Sakhalin Island. The eastern boundary of Poland was set roughly at the Curzon line of 1919, thus giving the USSR half its prewar territory. Discussion of reparations to be collected from Germany — payment demanded by Stalin and opposed by Roosevelt and Churchill — was inconclusive. Specific arrangements were made concerning Allied occupation in Germany and the trial and punishment of war criminals. Also at Yalta it was agreed that the great powers in the Security Council of the proposed United Nations should have the right of veto in matters affecting their security.

Two months after his return from Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage while vacationing in Georgia. Few figures in U.S. history have been so deeply mourned, and for a time the American people suffered from a numbing sense of irreparable loss. Vice President Harry Truman, former senator from Missouri, succeeded him.

The last meeting of the "Big Three" occurred at Potsdam, a suburb outside Berlin, July 17 to August 2 1945, where the tension that would erupt into the Cold War was evident. The heads of the governments met to discuss operations against Japan, the peace settlement in Europe, and a policy for the future of Germany. Perhaps presaging the coming end of the alliance, they had no trouble on vague matters of principle or the practical issues of military occupation, but reached no agreement on many tangible issues, including reparations.

Despite the end of the war in Europe and the revelation of the existence of the atomic bomb to the Allies, neither President Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, nor Clement Atlee, who mid-way through the conference replaced Churchill, could come to agreement with Stalin on any but the most minor issues. The most significant agreement was the issuance of the Potsdam Declaration to Japan demanding an immediate and unconditional surrender and threatening Japan with destruction if they did not comply. With the Axis forces defeated, the wartime alliance soon devolved the suspicion and bitterness on both sides that had largely characterized their relations since the Bolshevik Revolution.

The day before the Potsdam Conference began, U.S. nuclear scientists engaged in the secret Manhattan Project exploded an atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The test was the culmination of three years of intensive research in laboratories across the United States. It lay behind the Potsdam Declaration, issued on July 26 by the United States and Britain, promising that Japan would neither be destroyed nor enslaved if it surrendered. If Japan continued the war, however, it would meet “prompt and utter destruction.” President Truman, calculating that an atomic bomb might be used to gain Japan’s surrender more quickly and with fewer casualties than an invasion of the mainland, ordered that the bomb be used if the Japanese did not surrender by August 3.

A committee of U.S. military and political officials and scientists had considered the question of targets for the new weapon. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson argued successfully that Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital and a repository of many national and religious treasures, be taken out of consideration. Hiroshima, a center of war industries and military operations, became the first objective.