So it was then that the American military instead of doing what would liberate as many people as possible as quickly as possible, and doing what would bring a quick and decisive end to the war, ended up simply sitting in selected locations when it could have easily gained more ground. This was in part the result of agreements made at the Tehran and Yalta conferences, and in part the result of ongoing diplomatic communications between and after those conferences. The Western Allies, in this case the United States and Great Britain, had agreed to slow down their advances in order to allow the Soviets to “liberate” and eventually colonize regions of Eastern Europe.
This led to situations which caused millions of people in Eastern Europe to be eventually placed under the rule of the Soviet Socialists and the various puppet governments which they instituted.
After the Yalta conference, during those last few months of the war, some of the Allied political leaders had misgivings about having arranged to give Eastern Europe to the Soviets. In April 1945, Anthony Eden, prompted by Churchill, wrote to the Americans, suggesting that the Allies, in particular the Americans, could and should liberate “western Czechoslovakia” and Prague, rather than leave that territory open for the Soviet Socialists to pillage. The western Allies faced this choice: abide by the previously-made agreement with the Soviets, or act humanely to rescue the Czechoslovakians from brutal Soviet troops.
The U.S. forces were acting according to plan: from the west, they advanced to Bavaria, and then split, part going northeast toward the Elbe, and part going southeast into Austria. Czechoslovakia formed a salient between the two, as historian Michael Korda writes:
By April 12 the U.S. Third Army was near the prewar Czechoslovakian border and the U.S. First Army was close to the Elbe. Ike drove forward to meet with George Patton (to whom Ike had given specific and repeated orders not to take Prague before the Russians did), and saw sporadic but stubborn fighting going on throughout the day.
The original agreement with the Soviets called for U.S. forces not to cross the border into Czechoslovakia at all. The British were proposing that this arrangement be abandoned. Madeleine Albright reports about the reception of Eden’s proposal:
The State Department was persuaded by the argument and recommended that the U.S. forces proceed to the Vltava Valley. However, Truman, just starting out his presidency, was loath to meddle in arrangements previously agreed to by Allied military leaders. The situation changed only slightly when General Patton’s Third Army, moving into Austria, required protection on its northern flank. The supreme allied commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, asked the Soviets for clearance to send troops into southern Bohemia. This was granted, and a new understanding was reached: U.S. forces could penetrate as far east as Plzen, some fifty miles from Prague. They did so without enemy opposition during the first week of May, setting off a wild celebration and causing impatience to build through the Czech lands.
Given Truman’s hesitation, the Americans didn’t do what Eden wanted, but they did a small part of it. Part of the U.S. Army was north of the Austrian border, in Czechoslovakian territory. By this point in the war, the German military was more interested in surrendering to the Americans than in fighting them. The Germans, finally freed from the Nazis who forced them to fight, sought to avoid being captured by the Soviets.
The Americans moved in and faced no real opposition. They were welcomed by the civilians. The situation raised hopes that the Czechs, or some of them, might not fall into the hands of the Soviets.
The Americans set up temporarily in Plzen. Given that the German military was offering little resistance, the Americans could have easily liberated Prague. The Czechs were eager to see U.S. soldiers in Prague, and worried that the Soviets would end up in Prague, as Madeleine Albright explains:
The Czechs broadcast repeated pleas for help. Churchill cabled Washington, urging that the Third Army move. Briefed by Lieutenant Fodor, Patton was eager to march into Wenceslas Square. Eisenhower informed the Soviet high command of his readiness to send his fighters east. The Russians replied: do not proceed beyond Plzen, lest a possible confusion of forces be created. At that decisive moment, the American general acquiesced, adding only that he presumed that “the Soviet forces [would] advance rapidly for the purpose of clearing up the situation in the center of the country.”
As the Germans held on to Prague, with the Soviet closing in, the Czechs had begun what became known as the ‘Prague Uprising’ in early May 1945. The Czechs hoped to free themselves from the Germans, be liberated by the Americans, and avoid a Soviet occupation: hence the ‘repeated pleas’ which the Czechs ‘broadcast’ to the Americans. The situation was one more tragic aspect to a sad situation.
There would have been behind-the-scenes pressure from the Truman administration on Ike to let the Soviets take Prague, and eventually all of Czechoslovakia. This was a tragedy in the making: The Soviets would enslave not only Czechoslovakia, but other eastern European countries as well.
This happened because the civilian governments of the western Allies, unlike the military leaders, were afraid to be decisive. Eisenhower was diplomatic, and kept his misgivings to himself about surrendering Czechoslovakia. Patton was more explicit, allegedly saying:
We promised the Europeans freedom. It would be worse than dishonorable not to see that they have it. This might mean war with the Russians, but what of it? They have no air force, and their gasoline and ammunition supplies are low. I’ve seen their miserable supply trains; mostly wagons drawn by beaten up old horses or oxen.
The sad phenomena which raised false hopes continued. The western Allies had no intention of liberating the Czech area (Slovakia was already largely under Soviet occupation), but unintentionally misleading actions caused the Czechs to hope otherwise, as Madeleine Albright narrates:
Four U.S. tanks entered Prague on May 7, but this was to convey news of the German surrender in Berlin to local Nazi officials. The Americans said that U.S. troops would not be liberating the capital. That disappointed the Germans (who were terrified of the Soviets) as much as it did the Czechs.
The knowledge that U.S. soldiers stood on Wenceslas Square in May 1945 would haunt both military and civilian leaders for the next forty-five years. The brutality of the Soviet Socialist dictatorship caused the deaths of thousands of Czechoslovaks. They died in prison camps, in mass executions, while trying to leave the country, and when the Soviet army put down the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’ reform movement. The Soviet dictatorship was neither inevitable or necessary.
It is tempting to blame the enslavement of eastern Europe on the faint-heartedness of the western Allied civilian governments. But they were only one part of the problem. A small but effective group of pro-Soviet communists within Czechoslovakia played a significant role as well. Edvard Benes was a leader in the civilian government of Czechoslovakia, yet had dined with Stalin in Moscow.
Benes and his network betrayed their own country, failed to press for American troops to liberate Czechoslovakia, and welcomed Stalin’s armies. Benes and Stalin, and their networks, were in turn connected to a network of Soviet espionage agents inside the United States government: individuals like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Theodore Hall, Nathan Silvermaster, William Ullmann, Duncan Lee, and Laurence Duggan.
Eastern Europe handed over to the Soviet Socialist dictatorship not only because of some timid western diplomats, but also because of a well-organized international Soviet network of espionage agents, as Madeleine Albright notes:
In later years, many writers, including my father, cited Eisenhower’s failure to send U.S. troops into Prague as a sign of the Western indifference. This is not entirely fair. Benes had never advocated liberation by the Americans and, on the contrary, had made clear his warm relationship with Stalin. Further, the Allies had no role in planning or encouraging the last-minute outbreak of violence. Eisenhower was in the middle of orchestrating the surrender of Germany — this to relieve everyone’s suffering, including Prague’s. Victory was imminent only because the Soviet army, which had two million men committed to the battle, had prevented Hitler from sending more of his troops to fight in the West. The Allied effort had proceeded smoothly, moreover, because all the participants, including the USSR, had abided by their agreements. With the war in the Pacific still undecided, a decision to break faith with the Kremlin at that critical juncture would have carried extraordinary risks.
The military leaders — in this case, Eisenhower and Patton — were on the ground and understood the situation all too well. The Soviet troops rampaged through Slovakia into the Czech lands. They brutally raped any woman or girl they found, stole and looted from the civilian inhabitants, occupied houses, and left the local populations homeless. The anticipations of the Czechoslovakians were confirmed: life under the occupational troops of the USSR was in many cases worse than the German occupation had been.
Ike and Patton had seen that there was a chance to save the Czechoslovakians from the Soviet Socialists, and they watched as that chance was wasted. Madeleine Albright writes:
In any case, the responsibility for making policy was not Eisenhower’s. The general had been ordered to destroy the German military and bring the war to an early and victorious end, not to concern himself with the postwar political balance. Still, the record is clear that Ike was prepared to unleash Patton and would have done so had the Soviets not objected. The blame for what happened in Prague rests properly with Moscow.
While Eisenhower and Patton were the ones who clearly saw the suffering which was descending on Czechoslovakia, and the ones who wanted to stop it and could have stopped it, they became — ironically and unfairly — the symbols of the Allies who let it happen. In the Czechoslovakian folk narratives, Ike and Patton were guilty and lazy, having taken a vacation in Plzen while the Soviet soldiers molested the civilian population.
In point of fact, Patton’s troops stayed in the small area which the Americans had liberated — Plzen and its environs — longer than expected, until late November 1945. When the civilian political leaders eventually forced the U.S. troops to leave Czechoslovakia entirely, the native population justifiably felt abandoned to a grim fate. The American soldiers, not the fickle diplomats, became the symbol of this betrayal, as Madeleine Albright explains:
There is, however, little fair about the creation of national myths. Symbols matter, and some quests — however quixotic — cannot be ignored without paying a price. The Prague uprising made little sense tactically but possessed its own rationale as an expression of bottled rage, coming as it did from a people denied earlier opportunities to fight. The rebellion was not about logic but about courage and honor, or what my father referred to in the context of Munich as “national ethos.” So the legend was born that the United States had turned away from the Czechs at their moment of greatest need. For years to come, Communists would exploit the perception that Americans had “sat in Plzen drinking Pilsener” while the people’s quest for freedom was drowned in blood.
The chaos in the immediate days and weeks after the end of the war were filled with as much confusion and disorder as during the actual war. Conflicting and competing narratives circulated wildly and changed daily. Rumors and legends eventually solidify when the chaos subsides, but those tales are the products of swirling rumor, not of verified reports, as Albright recalls:
That perception lingers. When anniversaries of the uprising are marked, politicians still refer to Eisenhower’s failure. This is true even in Plzen, where, as I can bear witness, the local population has preserved many of the U.S. jeeps and trucks that Patton’s men left behind. In 2010, Vaclav Havel told me that an American liberation of Prague would have made “all the difference.” Havel, whose family spent the war in the countryside, remembered the end of the conflict as a time of uncertainty. The Germans were being driven out; Soviet troops were running around with half a dozen stolen watches on each forearm; and people were popping out of the forest claiming to be resistance fighters when, in some cases, they were brigands. A Czech pilot returning from England landed his plane in a meadow not far from Havel’s house. The whole town threw him a celebration; they had deviled eggs with ketchup and salad.
Albright’s father, Josef Korbel, was a civil servant and diplomat who circulated in high circles. He worked with Vladimír Clementis, who was named State Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the hastily-formed postwar government of Czechoslovakia. This government was so quickly created that the Soviets and the Germans were still battling each other in the country when it came into being. Vladimír Clementis had been a dedicated communist from 1925 onwards, but that was not enough to save him from the Soviets, who eventually executed him in 1950.
Josef Korbel also worked with Jan Masaryk, who was the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia. He had obtained that office as part of the government-in-exile formed in England in 1940, and that government was mostly relocated to Czechoslovakia in early 1945. Masaryk and Benes met with Stalin, who promised them that Czechoslovakia would retain its independence and democracy under a Soviet military occupation. Masaryk was not a communist, and his situation became ever more precarious as a growing number of leaders Czechoslovakian government either became communists or were replaced by communists. The danger for Masaryk also increased as it became clear that Stalin had no intention of granting either independence or democracy to Czechoslovakia. Eventually, Masaryk was found dead in 1948 under mysterious circumstances.
The events of Masaryk and Clementis reveal that nobody was safe in a country controlled by the Soviet Socialists. Communists and non-communists alike were killed as soon as there was the slightest suspicion about their loyalty to the USSR. Josef Korbal may have found some safety in being one level lower in the bureaucracy than Masaryk and Clementis. The more prominent a leader was, the more attention he got from the Soviet political organization, and attention from that organization was never a good thing. Albright recalls the start of her father’s postwar career:
My father’s duties included the organization of what would become a rapidly growing Foreign Ministry and the oversight of day-to-day political activities, a heavy burden given that Masaryk spent much of his time abroad. Dealing with important visitors also consumed considerable energy; among the guests that busy summer were the two military icons of the West: General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. My father was entrusted with these responsibilities in part because he was one of the few who enjoyed a good relationship with both Masaryk and Clementis. The two diplomats, though thrust together professionally, were barely of the same species. Unlike the informal Masaryk, Clementis was habitually serious and businesslike, with an intellectual and ideological commitment to communism. Masaryk disliked ideology of all kinds, thinking that it made people forget their humanity in the vain pursuit of foolish goals. As a child, I knew both of them: Masaryk with his round face, big belly, and joking manner, Clementis with his stern eyes and deep voice.
Korbel was soon sent to Yugoslavia to represent Czechoslovakia there. After serving in this role, he also worked for a United Nations committee, and then eventually brought his family to the United States, where he was granted political asylum in 1949. He likely would have been killed had he returned to Czechoslovakia.
By mid-1945, the fighting was over, and both the society and the government were trying to work their ways toward some kind of stability. In July, Laurence Steinhardt became the U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
It was an open secret that the USSR funded and controlled the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but for the sake of appearances, the fiction was maintained that it was an independent political party, created and operated by the Czechoslovakians. For some time after the war, the party participated alongside other parties in elections. The Soviets hoped that they could take power in a way which preserved the illusion of democracy: if the Communist Party won an election, it could be claimed that the people wanted Soviet control. But because it was clear that the party was a Soviet puppet, and because of its thuggish behavior, it became clear that it would not win an election, and that it would be humiliated in the May 1948 elections.
Although they did not control the government, Communist Party had enough elected and appointed officials to cause trouble. The Czechoslovakian delegation to the United Nations consistently voted against the United States, and under pressure from Stalin, Czechoslovakia was not inclined to accept the aid offered by the Marshall Plan.
Critics of Ambassador Steinhardt, like Madeleine Albright, argue that he responded suboptimally to the situation. She writes that he did little in the way of “aid, cultural exchanges, and propaganda to compete with the Soviets for popular affections.” On the contrary, Steinhardt was “primarily concerned with curbing anti-American press coverage and securing compensation for U.S. investors who had a financial stake in nationalized properties. The ambassador opposed economic assistance.”
Steinhardt acknowledged Czechoslovakia’s vulnerability to a long list of Soviet pressure points, including control of strategic ports, media dominance, influence within the trade unions, and the fact that the country was almost surrounded by Communist regimes. But instead of developing a plan to bolster the moderates, the embassy was content to sit on the sidelines and snipe.
The ‘moderates’ were afraid of the USSR and disappointed with the United States. Czechoslovakia was in serious danger, but the U.S. was underresponding, doing too little and doing it too slowly, as Albright explains:
This lack of initiative was doubly regrettable because Steinhardt had considerable clout in Washington. Once a successful Wall Street lawyer, his generous financial contributions had paved the way to a second career as a diplomat, where he had acquired a reputation as a hard-driving troubleshooter. His attitude toward the Czechoslovaks, however, was condescending; he described them as “little people, inclined to double-talk [and] more adept in opposition than when … in charge.” To his credit, he made two useful suggestions: that the United States — like the USSR — establish a consulate in Bratislava; and that it publish the messages between Eisenhower and Soviet military leaders prior to Prague’s liberation, thus showing that it was at Russian insistence that U.S. troops remained in Plzen. The Truman administration responded to these ideas with inexcusable tardiness. The Bratislava consulate did not begin operating until March 1948, after the Communist coup. The exculpatory military documents released in May 1949 — far too late to make a difference.
In February 1948, the Soviets orchestrated a coup, and over the next few months assembled a communist government. By the time the elections occurred in May, the voters had no meaningful choices: only communist candidates were on the ballot.
By mid-1949, Czechoslovakia was solidly in the grip of the Soviet Socialists, and would remain imprisoned for another forty years.
The western Allies had failed repeatedly to take advantage of opportunities to help the Czechoslovakians remain free. Eisenhower and Patton were not to blame; they had seen the danger clearly, knew how to respond, and were prevented from responding. Perhaps it is no mere coincidence that it was also in 1949 that China permanently lost its freedom to communism. There was plenty of blame to go around: both the diplomats and the politicians in the civilian government of the U.S., but also spinelessness of the United Nations, and the ubiquitous network of Soviet espionage agents in various nations.
