Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

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 Secretar...

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...

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.  

Then, on April 12, 1945, FDR died, aged only 63.   https://traffic.megaphone.fm/WCATR4967146762.mp3?updated=1660203086

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.  

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.  

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...

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.  

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.  

Our first post-Yalta episode! Churchill and Roosevelt go home and give big speeches about how well Yalta went and how the Big Three really get each other. And then it all fell apart.  

The last day of Yalta! We’re out, baby! Churchill fell asleep in the middle of an important debate and then woke up ranting about the wrong things. Iran wants everyone to leave their oil alone but no-one cares. Stalin wanted access to the Black Sea Straits. And Frank does the last big deal of his life – getting Joe’s agreement in writing to join the fight against Japan.  

Just when I thought I was out… they pulled me back in! To Yalta! Before the Big Three left Yalta, they signed a document that promised to allow the people of Europe “to create democratic institutions of their own choice”. Of course, at the time, the British were waging a war in Greece to prevent the people creating a government of their own choice… but let’s not worry...

As the Yalta conference comes to a close, the question of German reparations is settled on, but it’s obvious that Stalin still doesn’t trust the other two. And the feeling is mutual.  

Stalin goes hard on the issue of German reparations but meets with pushback from Churchill, while Roosevelt can’t seem to make up his mind.  

So after they agreed on Poland, the rest of the February 9 plenary session is spent talking about Germany.  Specifically – what to do with the Nazi big dogs.  Previously secret British War Cabinet papers released on 1 January 2006 have shown that Churchill had been advocating since 1942 for a policy of summary execution for the top Nazis. But Stalin suggested, you know, maybe they should be...

We have a very special guest. Professor Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute. He’s the author of quite a few award-winning books including “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine”, which in 2015 won the world’s most important award for non-fiction...

Day 9 at Yalta! The official, famous photographs are taken, and someone worries that he’s going to be sent to the Gulag as a result. And the Polish question is finally settled to everyone’s relief. They can almost go home. Oh and there was no raping.  

At the end of a long day full of hard bargaining, The Big Three could still relax in one another’s company. In this episode we discuss the most important dinner of the conference.  

A deal was struck between FDR and Stalin: the Soviets will join the war with Japan in exchange for territorial acquisitions at Japan’s expense and the creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in northeastern China.  

The city of Dresden was the primary victim of the “zone of limitation” agreement reached at Yalta—one of the few direct outcomes of the military consultations held there. In early 1945 Dresden was one of the few major German centers to have escaped systematic Allied bombing. On the night of February 13 – only two days after the end of the Yalta conference – the Royal Air Force Bomber C...

On Feb 7, the British Chiefs of Staff decided to take the day off to visit the site of the Battle of Balaclava, infamous for the “Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1854. Meanwhile, the Americans and the Soviet military commanders took the opportunity to talk about Russia’s entry into the Pacific War against Japan.    

  Conversation at Yalta turns to Poland’s borders. Stalin had a new proposal that would mean moving the southern part of the Polish-German border 200 kilometers west – into Germany, right up to the Oder & Neisse rivers. Which was actually giving Poland more of Germany than the U.S. and UK were happy with. They believed it would create 8 or 9 million German refugees.      

On Feb 8, when Stalin arrived for his lunch date with Roosevelt, FDR told him that the Foreign Ministers had met that morning and agreed to accept the two extra countries for the Soviet’s in the UN General Assembly. It was good timing for FDR, because that day they were going to be talking about getting Russia involved in the war with Japan, and he wanted him on side. THE ONLY SMALL PROBLEM &#8211...

At Yalta, Feb 7 and 8 – days 4 and 5 – are going to be about trying to get agreement on the Polish issues and the issue of the Soviets entering the war with Japan. Winnie The Pooh is getting played by Uncle Joe, who senses that the US/UK love fest is struggling.