With Poland's membership in NATO at issue, a question has arisen as to
whether America owes a debt to the Polish people for Franklin D.
Roosevelt's having "betrayed" the Polish nation to Joseph Stalin at
Yalta.
Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat has lately raised the issue
of a moral debt to Poland for the 1945 summit where FDR accepted
Stalin's assurances of free elections. Eizenstat was taken to task by
columnist Lars-Erik Nelson for repeating a "50-year-old right-wing
slander." Robert Novak defended the "betrayed" thesis.
Nelson's point: By 1945 Stalin had 12 million troops in Eastern
Europe, and Dwight Eisenhower only 4 million in the West.
Conservatives who condemn FDR for Poland's fate, says Nelson, are
joining the "Blame America First" crowd. We couldn't save Poland!
But, in truth, Yalta was only the final betrayal of Poland, and not
only FDR but Winston Churchill bears moral responsibility for a
half-century of communist enslavement of the Polish people.
The first betrayal came with the British guarantee to Poland, after
Neville Chamberlain was exposed as a dupe when Adolf Hitler tore up
his Munich pact and marched into Prague. As Hitler pressed Poland for
the return of Danzig, stripped from Germany after World War I, and
demanded rail and road transit to the city across a "Polish Corridor"
also taken from Germany, Warsaw, encouraged by British Foreign
Secretary Lord Halifax, refused even to negotiate. The Poles were
assured that if war came, Britain would be at their side.
But when Hitler invaded Poland from the west and Stalin invaded from
the east, Britain declared war on Germany alone. Then, the British
sat behind the Maginot Line while Poland was crucified. The British had
goaded the Poles into standing up to Hitler though they had no plans
to save or rescue Poland. Six million Poles would die as a result of
having trusted in a British alliance.
The second betrayal occurred at Teheran in 1943, when FDR moved into
the Soviet embassy compound and assured Stalin he would not object to
his keeping the half of Poland and the Baltic states Hitler had ceded
to Stalin in their infamous pact. As Robert Nisbet wrote in "Roosevelt
and Stalin: The Failed Courtship," FDR asked only that word of his
concession not leak out before the 1944 elections, so Polish Americans
would not react in rage. FDR told one visitor to Hyde Park he was
"sick and tired" of East Europeans and their constant clamoring about
boundaries and sovereignties.
The third betrayal occurred in the summer of '44. The Polish Home
Army in German-occupied Warsaw, heeding appeals from Radio Moscow,
rose up against the Nazis. As the Home Army was loyal to the free
Polish government in London, which was demanding an investigation of
Stalin's murder of Polish officers at Katyn, Stalin halted his own Red
Army outside Warsaw to give the Nazis a free hand in crushing the
Polish uprising.
British and Americans sought to aid the Poles with air drops of food
and munitions. But Stalin refused to let the allies use air fields
behind his lines to refuel for the return flight to England. Churchill
drafted a strong letter to Stalin, asking that the allies be allowed
to use the air fields assigned them, but to appease Stalin, FDR
cravenly refused to sign the letter. The Home Army was butchered.
By February 1945, Poland had been overrun by a Red Army that could
not be dislodged short of a new war. Yalta, writes Nisbet, "is not
the source of the Soviet possessions in Eastern Europe ... Teheran
is. But Yalta performed a service that was almost as important to
Stalin. ... This was the invaluable service of giving moral
legitimation to what Stalin had acquired by sheer force."
Britain had gone to war and lost 400,000 men and an empire for
Poland's independence. Yet, as Poland receded into the darkness, not
once did Churchill vent upon Stalin the oratory he used so often on
Hitler. The rape of Poland by Hitler and Stalin was the moral cause
that precipitated the war. Yet, Churchill and FDR, to appease Stalin,
meekly acquiesced in the betrayal of that moral cause.
"Of one thing I am sure," FDR said at Yalta, "Stalin is not an
imperialist." How explain his naivete about Stalin, to whom he gave
everything, including a third of the Italian fleet and recognition of
his puppet government in Poland? "Puerility," writes George F. Kennan.
FDR once told his friend, ambassador William Bullitt: "I think if I
give him (Stalin) everything I possibly can, and ask nothing from him
in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will
work with me for a world of peace and democracy."
And thus was Poland betrayed.
