The Story of America’s Uneasy Alliance With The Soviets—And How It Brought About The Downfall of Nazi Germany (w/ Stephen Ambrose)

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love hearing stories from you, our listeners. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. Stephen Ambrose was one of America’s leading biographers and historians. At the core of Ambrose’s phenomenal success is his simple and straightforward belief that history is biography; history is about people, he would always say. Ambrose passed in 2002, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here at Our American Stories, thanks to those who run as his state. Today we’ll be hearing the story from early 1943 during World War II. Let’s jump right in with the so victory over the Nazis at the Battle of Stalingrad.

1943 got off to a great start for the Allied cause because at the end of January, General von Pavas surrendered at Stalingrad. The Red Army took a bag of 250,000 prisoners, had probably killed a killed and wounded another half million German soldiers in this titanic struggle at Stalingrad and had lost themselves, the Red Army, a million men. But, of course, the Red Army could make up those manpower losses in a way that the Germans could not. So, Stalingrad was the pivot point of the war. After Stalingrad, there really was not much, if any, question as to who was going to win this war. The questions now were how long is it going to take, what price is.

Gonna have to be paid?

And increasingly, among the Allies, Britain, in the United States and the Soviet Union in this very strange alliance, who’s gonna get what at the end of the war? But Stalingrad, for they from the military side in the secraral war, was the great battle and the decisive battle. After Stalingrad, the Germans never again took the offense of the Eastern Front. Having said all that, and adding to that, the Americans need to remember always that eight out of every ten Wehrmacht soldiers killed in the Second World War were killed.

by the Red Army.

That doesn’t mean, by any stretch, that the Red Army won the war by itself, but it does mean that they made a contribution without which Britain and America could never have won the war. Indeed, the truth of the Second World War is that no two of the three great Allies were sufficiently strong to defeat Germany. Britain and the Soviet Union together couldn’t have done it. The United States and the Soviet Union without.

Britain couldn’t have done it. It took all three.

January 1943 also saw the Great Wartime Conference, the second of them. The first had been the Arcadia Conference at the end of 1941. At the beginning of 1943, the second great conference between the Western Allies took place at Casablanca in Morocco. Roosevelt and his staff met with Churchill and his staff to plan operations for 1943. At these meetings, the first thing the Americans said to the British was, ‘Well, of course, you understand that, having mounted Torch and put all of this strength that we have into North Africa, the 1943 invasion of France is definitely off.’ ‘We don’t have the resources to do that.’ Churchill was astonished, or said he was, to hear this, and whether he was telling the truth or not, can’t be said. The announcement to Stale that there was not going to be a second front in 1943 left the Soviet dictator shaking with rage. He had been demanding a second front ever since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Now, and you meet Russians today, and who will talk about why was there this terrible long delay before the Second Front was mounted? And, of course, ‘we won the war,’ the Russians will tell you, ‘and more or less by ourselves.’ ‘And you guys didn’t even dare come in until we had utterly defeated the Verrmacht, and there was just a shell of the force that Hitler bragged was an army sections of the world was never seen by the time you guys came into the real war in 1944.’ But here I can’t forbear saying that it really came hard to hear Stalin begging for a second front 1942, in 1943. And, you know, the French could have said, ‘Well, where the hell was the second front in 1940, when Hitler was overrunning France? What were you guys doing?’ ‘That’s when the Second Front should have been launched.’ ‘You should have been attacking the Germans instead of cooperating with him, instead of entering into an alliance with him.’ Well, leaving that aside, Stalin, obviously, he wasn’t going to be embarrassed by his past action. Stalin was in a desperate situation. The Soviet Union was taking horrendous casualties; the Germans that occupied very large parts of the Soviet Empire, and Stalin desperately needed to have the pressure taken off him. He was fighting up to 200 German and Allied divisions on the Eastern Front, and so, naturally, he demanded the opening of the Second Front.

Churchill had tried.

to persuade Stalin that the campaign in North Africa was a genuine opening of the Second Front, uh but to Stalin,

that it was utterly unacceptable.

The Germans never had more than three divisions in North Africa.

North Africa was…

clearly not going to be a decisive theater in this war. Russia very much still had her back against the wall. Even after the victory at Stalingrad, the Soviet Union was not i and and no longer on its last legs. But the price of taking on the Verrmacht by themselves was gonna be very high, and he was desperate to get a Stalin, was to get a Second Front opened in France to force the Germans to transfer divisions from their Eastern Front order to France to take the pressure off the Rusters.

And you’re listening to Stephen Ambrose tell the story of a year, 1943, a critical year in World War II. When we come back, more of Stephen Ambrose here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts. Any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily. Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming. And we continue with Our American Stories. And we last left off with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill meeting for a second time during the war in January of 1943 in Casablanca in Morocco to plan operations for that year. Let’s pick up where we last left off with Stephen Ambrose.

Now a combination of things came together here at this Cox Black meeting. First of all, the decision we’re not going to have a Second Front 1943, and somebody’s got to explain this to Stalin. And I pause there to make this point. What I say, ‘had to explain it to Stalin,’ what I mean is the great there on the part of the Western Allies in World War II was always that Stalin would make a separate peace, and you would go back to the situation that prevailed before June of 1941.

That is, I, I, in to…

all practical purposes, Germany and the Soviet Union would be allies.

If that happened,

There wasn’t a chance in the world that the United States and Britain could invade France against.

all of Hitler’s strength.

And there, and there were some uh fears came out from Berlin in the fall of 1942 as the Stalingrad Battle was beginning, and they continued through the winner of 1942, 1943 of the Germans wondering if Stalin would be interested in a separate peace and it had a certain appeal to Stalin, especially if he felt, as he was beginning to feel, or increasingly was feeling, that the Western Allies were willing to sell the Soviet Union down the river, or more precisely, if the Western Allies were perfectly happy to watch Nazis killing Communists and Communists killing Nazis. And he was right to feel that way, because an awful lot of people in the Western world did think exactly that.

Not, however, the leaders.

Either, especially not the military leaders, all of whom realized that if you tried to play that game, the Nazis would very likely win the war, and if they did, they would then take over the world. And if they didn’t, the Communists were going to win the war, and they would end up with all the resources, especially the human resources, of Western Europe under their control.

And that wouldn’t be a world that we would want to live in either.

But as between the two dangers, a Nazi dominated Europe or a Communist dominated Europe, Roosevelt and Churchill and Marshall and Allen Brook and Eisenhower and all of the leaders of the, of the Great Alliance of Britain in the United States, we’re in agreement that the…

Nazi victory would be worse.

I think in retrospect the time has proven them right. We now reached the point in world history where both of those isms are in the act can of history. Nazism has been gone since 1945, and now Communism is gone. If World War II had turned out the other way with the Nazis victorious in Europe, I don’t know how we ever gotten rid of the Nazis. I don’t think that they would have withered on the vine in the way that the Communists did, or that they would have their own people would have turned against him.

Well, that’s a lot of speculation, anyway.

Stalin in 1943 one or a Second Front, and he wasn’t going to get one. And this was a tough one to explain to him. And that fear that he would make a separate peace was very real. Oh, and I should add that Stalin also had complaints about the Darlaon deal. His attitude was the first time the Americans go to the offensive in this war. Within a day of the attack, they’ve cut a deal with a fascist general or in this case admiral. Admiral Darlat, and Stalin wondered aloud to the American ambassador, ‘what does this mean that when you get into Germany you’re going to cut a deal with the German Germany’s generals?’ ‘I don’t like the smell of this at all.’ To reassure Stalin both as to America’s determination to stay in this war to the end, an America’s commitment to the Soviet Union as an ally, and more specifically, to guarantee to Stalin that there would be no more Darlon deals, that we would not get into a cooperative mode with the German generals. Orge them to overthrow Hitler, and then we’ll deal with you. Roosevelt came up with a wholly new concept in war. That decision, and that concept also came from it; it had many, many parents that also came out of avoiding the mistake the Allies, and particularly Woodrow Wilson, made in 1918. Roosevelt wanted to make certain that the Germans would never again be able to claim that they were stabbed in the back. He wanted the Germans to understand that they had been beaten, and he came up with the formula called unconditional surrender. From Casablaca, he issued a pronouncement seconded.

by Churchill, calling on…

Or setting as the objective for the Allies and the Second World War: the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, Germany and Japan. Now, what this meant, nobody knew. Nobody’d ever asked for an unconditional surrender before. It raised a lot of questions: Who’s going to be running Germany after she surrenders? Where’s the government going to come from? What kind of a system do you intend to impose on her? And, of course, the strange alliance. It could be that the Russians would get a part of Germany with me, and the Russians could impose on the Germans or at least that part of Germany if they occupied their system. Presumably the Americans, of the British, would impose their system on the other part of Germany. How could that whatever work out well? Nobody had an answer to that at the time. Unconditional surrender has received a lot of criticism because of its vagueness and because of the argument that it forced the Germans and the Japanese to fight on when the fight was hopeless. So that it cost a lot of American and British lives, that it… Had a formula for a surrender been worked out, you could have had a much earlier surrender and saved a great deal of the destruction of the Second World War. The problem with that argument is, how can anyone imagine a scenario in which the German generals managed to get rid of Hitler. So long as Hilary was around, there was no possibility of dealing with him. And in fact, Roosevelt, in the unconditional surrender announcement, made it clear that he — and there’s something else that Wilson hadn’t done — that we were going to put war criminals on trial. There was going to be punishment for the guilty Nazis. Now, that, of course, made the guilty Nazis fight all that much harder, and it made all Germans fight that much harder because unconditional surrender gave to Garbles, the propaganda minister, an ideal…

tool with which to whip up…

sentiment within German to get the old men to tuck their beards into their shirts and pick up a rifle and go out and fight, and to get the young boys to do the same because there was a lot of loose talk in the United States. There were a couple of sentators who were talking about we got to castrate all German males, and Gables was able to pick up on that and tell the German people, ‘That’s what unconditional surrender is going to mean.’ Well, it sure makes a man fight when you hear something like that. The other side of it, though, is unconditional surrender had a clearness to it, a wiping the slate clean, so that when it was all over, you could start to rebuild a new Germany, whether in the Russian, on the Russian model or on the American model, you could start to build a new Germany. And it also had a positive effect on morale within the United States. But most of all, the audience for unconditional surrender wasn’t the American people, and it wasn’t even so much policy towards the German people, as it was a reassurance to Stalin: ‘We’re not going to deal with any more fascist, and we’re in this to the bitter end.’

And a great job editing that piece by Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to the Ambrose Estate for allowing us to use the audio of their father, and he died in 2002, but we had Our American Stories want to keep his voice alive. It is such an important voice. By the way, the World War II Museum Stephen Ambrose helped start that. It’s in New Orleans. Pay a visit, go online, listen to the stories. It is hands down the best museum in this country. Stephen Ambrose, the story of 1943 and unconditional surrender terms fashioned by Roosevelt. The pros and the cons here on Our American Stories.