The Yalta Story: The Far East

Churchill did not take part in Yalta's Far Eastern discussions. His memoirs for late 1944 show his curt dismissal of the importance of China. "This American obsession," he wrote. "That China is one of the world's four great powers is an absolute farce." At Yalta Churchill was content to let Roosevelt and Stalin play out the farce by themselves.

The Background. Their private conferences at Yalta had a background that revealed Roosevelt's willingness to expand the Russian position in the Far East, where the defeat of Japan and the civil war in China were to create a power vacuum.

¶ As early as October 1943, during a visit to Moscow, Secretary Hull reported Stalin's promise, without being asked and without attaching strings, that Russia would fight Japan after finishing up in Europe.

¶ At Teheran, five weeks later, Stalin repeated the pledge. He also let it be known that he would like a warm-water port in the Far East. Churchill remarked that Russia already had Vladivostok. Stalin replied it wasn't always ice-free. Roosevelt suggested the Russians might have access to Dairen, in Manchuria.

¶ All through 1944 the U.S., through diplomatic channels in Moscow, sought to translate Stalin's pledge to fight Japan into a military plan. The Russians stalled. It now seems clear that Stalin passed down a nyet until he had made sure of his territorial ambitions in the Far East. These were finally laid out in full detail and traced on a map by Stalin in a conversation with Ambassador Harriman on Dec. 14, 1944. Items on the Kremlin's demand list: "return" to Russia of Japan's Kurils and southern Sakhalin; leases on Manchuria's Port Arthur and Dairen, plus operating rights on the Manchurian railways; China's surrender of its claims to Sovietized Outer Mongolia.

¶ U.S. State Department experts looked askance on some of Stalin's claims. They recommended that 1) southern Sakhalin and the northern Kurils should not be annexed by Russia, but should be assigned as trusteeships; and 2) the southern Kurils should be kept for Japan.

¶ At Malta, four days before Yalta, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told Stettinius that the U.S. need not grant such concessions to Russia. "In his view," report the State Department's minutes of the Malta Conference, "if the Russians decided to enter the war against Japan, they would take the decision because they considered it in their interests that the Japanese war should not be successfully finished by the U.S. and Great Britain alone. There was therefore no need for us to offer a high price for their participation."

Foreground. Whether or not this clear-eyed British counsel reached his ears or understanding, Roosevelt ignored it. Bohlen's minutes show the President ready to give Stalin just what he wanted.

Exchanges from the Yalta record:

Stalin vaguely agrees he will order his military planners to sit down with their U.S. counterparts to work out a common war against Japan. But he is eager to get to the "political conditions."

Roosevelt quickly replies there is "no difficulty whatsoever" over the Kurils and southern Sakhalin. As to Dairen, it ought to be a free port.