A COLD WAR

Prof Michael Neiberg is Chair of War Studies and Professor of History, Department of National Security and Strategy, US Army War College. He has also written a number of excellent books on the First World War - as well as the book we are talking about today - Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe.

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After a string of fuckups, Truman starts listening to other people, like Joseph Davies, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1937-38, one of the guys he had ignored before his first meeting with Molotov. They decide a new meeting of the Big Three is needed - and start to plan the Potsdam Conference. Truman announced James Byrnes, the man who should be President, would be his new Secretary of State. And he finally learns the details of the S-1 project he had uncovered as a senator two years earlier - AKA the Manhattan Project.

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Truman listens to certain people who tell him he should get tough with the Russians. At his first meeting with Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister said “I have never been talked to like that in my life."

“Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,” Truman replied.

Then Truman decides to look tough by ending the Lend Lease shipments to the Soviets. Unfortunately nobody seems to have told him that the USA was still counting on Soviet support to end the Pacific War.

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Harry S. Truman. Farmer. Soldier. Failed businessman. Given his political career by a mobbed-up bootlegger. Became President through fate. Adopted John Wayne persona to try to look tough.

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Then, on April 12, 1945, FDR died, aged only 63.

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FDR sends one of his inner circle, Edward Flynn, a staunch Catholic, to meet the Pope to try to keep the peace between him and Stalin. Stalin meanwhile revived caesaropapism, the old tradition dating back to Constantine, making himself head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not a bad promotion for someone who once studied to become an Orthodox priest.

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Stalin crushes the Ukrainian Catholic Church, partly because socialists believe religion is the opium of the masses, and partly because the Pope, Pius XII, had done a deal with Hitler and was a virulent anti-Communist.

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March 8, 1945. Allen Dulles, the Bern station chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), met in secret with Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the former head of Heinrich Himmler’s secretariat, who in the last years of the war became the commander of SS forces in northern Italy, to discuss Germany's surrender. The Anglo-Americans neglected to tell the Soviets about the meeting - a breach of their agreements. The Americans called it "Operation Sunrise". Some historians call Operation Sunrise the first episode of Cold War.

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On February 13, 1945, U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius and his staff were invited to a reception hosted by Vyshinsky in the commissariat’s guesthouse in Moscow. Little did the Americans know that one member of their staff was a Soviet spy.

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What does Dracula have to do with the Cold War? The next issue to drive a wedge between the Big Three was the government of Romania.

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